Blind Spies

The October 7 Hamas massacre was Israel’s biggest intelligence failure since the Yom Kippur War, which started almost exactly 50 years prior.

“It is almost inconceivable how they missed this,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who spent 26 years doing counterterrorism with the Central Intelligence Agency.

David Friedman, President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Israel, said, “In the 40 or more years that I’ve been following Israel one way or another, I’ve never seen this happen. I’ve never seen the border breached in this manner. Usually, even one person from Gaza gets close to the border, they’re intercepted and neutralized long before they can do anything. This is just something I’ve never seen before.”

America too, was caught completely off guard. “We were not tracking this,” a senior United States military official said, according to nbc. It is the largest-known U.S. intelligence failure since 9/11.

Experts will probably spend years trying to understand what went wrong. But here’s one probable factor: In both Israel and the U.S., intelligence services are more focused on liberal ideologies and attacking political enemies than they are on keeping the country safe.

Divided We Fall

Hundreds of Israel Defense Forces (idf) reservists not only opposed certain reforms by the prime minister but in protest they refused to report for duty. Pilots refused to fly, reservists refused to serve beyond their mandatory minimum, and even intelligence personnel were caught up in the protests. Officers scrambled to try to fill the gaps. It looks like they may not have all been filled.

“Israel’s enemies were waiting for Israel to weaken itself,” wrote Israel Hayom, “and while the Army leadership dealt with the internal discord that penetrated the idf ranks, they dealt with exploiting the situation and preparing for the next war” (October 9).

“They were not focused on how to address the Hamas threat and Iran,” former Israeli Deputy National Security Advisor Chuck Freilich told cbs News on October 12.

Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency has also staked out an anti-Netanyahu position and devoted resources to protesting and undermining his policies. Israeli media reported in February that Mossad was allowing its members to take part in protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms. In April, the Washington Post reported on leaked documents showing top Mossad leaders went even further, encouraging their agents to attend. The Post wrote that “the direct intervention into Israeli politics by Mossad, an external spy service forbidden from wading into domestic matters, would be a significant revelation.”

“A few officials taking to the streets of Tel Aviv chanting slogans is innocuous enough. But that’s not the main concern here,” we wrote at the time. “Mossad has a well-deserved reputation of both secrecy and operational success. If its leaders want their men to oppose the government, who is to say Mossad’s only involvement is letting its people protest?”

Ex-Mossad Director Tamir Pardo said Netanyahu’s coalition government was made up of “horrible racist parties.” He has attacked the judicial reforms, accused the prime minister of engaging in a coup, and characterized the government as overseeing an apartheid state. Pardo said that “the greatest threat to the State of Israel is internal.” Were his former colleagues looking in the wrong direction?

What was Mossad’s attitude and effectiveness toward enemies like Hamas under Pardo? What was it like up to October 7? How staunch are Mossad leaders in restraining themselves from using their powers of surveillance, intelligence, portrayal and deceit to harm their political enemies?

And what were they doing when they were supposed to be watching Be’eri, Kibbutz Re’im, Kfar Aza and Sderot?

The same pattern is certainly playing out in the United States.

A 2021 Director of National Terrorism report labeled racially motivated extremists as America’s most lethal domestic terrorist threat. The “racists” that it warned about were not Muslims trying to kill Jews. Instead, the biggest threat came from those angered by “perceived government overreach,” “narratives of fraud in the recent general election,” or “conditions related to the covid-19 pandemic.” It warned that these “extremists” were more dangerous than potential terrorists from abroad. Attorney General Merrick Garland called it “the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today.” America’s entire intelligence apparatus has been reconfigured to target these “extremists,” people who merely oppose radical leftism.

That wasn’t a big change. In 2016 the Obama administration was already using the cia to target President Trump. Internal government documents show that cia Director John Brennan knew accusations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia were false. But he used his agency to push them anyway.

The cia went on to work with Twitter to censor rhetoric it didn’t like. cia officials lied to try to prevent the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop coming out before the 2020 election.

The radical elites in the U.S. are now consistently targeting their political opponents—tens of millions of everyday people—more than they are targeting national security threats. Take the southern border. The Department of Homeland Security reported this summer that it has lost track of 177,000 illegal aliens. It also said that 160 people on their terrorism watch list were apprehended crossing the border. Of course, they have no idea how many slipped by without being caught.

This border chaos is a threat in so many ways. Perhaps colleagues of those who decapitated Jewish babies on October 7 are already inside the U.S. Yet the Biden regime, controlled by Barack Obama, is slow to do anything. Why? Because Latin American immigrants and their descendants tend to vote Democrat. Winning elections is more important than defending the country.

Settling Into Unreality

Hamas’s invasion exposed the dangerous complacency Israel was living in. The nation was divided, and leftists focused their power on overthrowing a leader they didn’t like. All the while evil forces were waiting for an opportunity. The warning signs were there.

Then it was too late.

The United States faces exactly the same danger. “We in America have been protected for a couple hundred years because we are recipients of the blessings God promised to faithful Abraham,” writes Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry. “We have not experienced the turmoil that many other nations have. We were involved in a civil war and two world wars, but compared to most other countries and other eras, God has given us victories and a lot of peace. As a result, our people have settled into an unreality about what is happening around us. They don’t understand how deadly dangerous it is!

“This is not God’s world. It is a world plagued by great evil. It is full of tigers waiting to tear people apart. As Winston Churchill said, the history of man is the history of war. Yet somehow we can’t come to grips with that today. It is so much easier to ignore it” (America Under Attack).

As the Black Lives Matter riots consumed America, Mr. Flurry wrote: “America doesn’t just have divisions within, it also has powerful enemies without! Vicious nations have been waiting for decades and decades for something like this to happen to America! They want to destroy—not just windows and monuments, but this entire nation!” (Trumpet, August 2020).

Israel was divided and let down its guard—and Hamas commenced the massacre. Hamas could take advantage of American divisions to strike at the U.S., but the U.S. has much worse enemies: entire nations, armed with nuclear bombs.

A nation unleashing massive massacres on a divided America is unreal to most people. But on October 6, many would have thought that death squads hunting down Jewish families and murdering babies was an artifact of World War ii-era Germany.

Don’t be deceived about the world we live in. Barack Obama and his supporters are still trying to “fundamentally transform” the United States. By sowing the seeds of division and even civil war, they are opening the nation up not only to transformation within but attack from without.

The Bible warns us: “Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober” (1 Thessalonians 5:6). God wants Christians to watch world news and have a sober view of this world. “[B]e sober,” writes Paul two verses later, “putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation.”

We need to wake up to the danger out there. But that danger should not cause us to fear. Instead, it should prompt us to draw closer to God—the only sure protection for both nations and individuals.