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chuckling-chemist · 4 years ago

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No One Understands Kingdom Hearts

Okay, I know I make the joke of saying “the stupidest thing I’ve ever written” before I write the second stupidest thing I’ve ever written, but this time I seriously, actually mean it this time. I am not sure we’re going to top this one, lads.

There’s no warnings, but heads up this thing is incredibly rough and is unedited/beta-ed. I just had to write it out after a series of snapchats between @commentisunrelated and myself. About you know. Xehanort. And hearts.

It felt like they’d been running for hours. Hours of white walls and white ceilings, ambushing faceless shadows dressed in black cloaks long before they had the chance to strike. Ren didn’t remember the last time they encountered a safe room. If it hadn’t been for his cooking, the Phantom Thieves’ stamina would’ve been wiped out far too long ago, and they’d be stuck traversing through this nightmare of a Palace another day under potentially different circumstances.

He was fast to jump on the first door that looked different – heart shaped, its pink color almost pulsing against the white. Locked, but not a problem. Ren picked locks for so long in his life he was practically a master at it now, Metaverse abilities or not.

“Readings say it’s pretty important,” Futaba said. “Might have a boss inside.”

“What about a map?” Makoto asked.

Futaba shrugged helplessly. “If he’s got a map, then yeah. Otherwise? We’re on our own still.”

Ryuji groaned. “Goddamn it. I hate this place. This…this effing--”

Ren heard a few taps on something behind him, followed by Futaba saying, “Xehanort’s Kingdom of Hearts. That was the key phrase. Don’t ask me why.”

The hefty, heart shaped lock clicked open, dropping to the ground with a resounding thud. Ren turned back to the rest of the group with a grin. “Showtime.”

Unsurprisingly, the room was painfully white. It was also wide open, with absolutely no cover from the singular shadow standing beyond them – human looking, with gold eyes and long silver hair that stood out against the man’s long black and white coat. He watched, motionless, as the group walked in. Just like Futaba predicted. On the corner of his vision, he saw the fuzzy outlines of what looked to be a safe room. This man, clearly waiting for them, was the only barrier between their goal.

“Welcome, thieves,” he said. If he noticed Ren immediately grabbing for his baselard, he didn’t say anything, opting instead to continue standing there with his arms crossed. “I see you’re after Kingdom Hearts.”

“Are we?” Ann blinked owlishly. “Wait, did this shadow name the Treasure?”

“Oh no. Kingdom Hearts is one thing: Kingdom Hearts is darkness.”

Ryuji scowled. “Wait what? I thought Kingdom Hearts was—”

“Kingdom Hearts!” the man shouted, as if Ryuji said nothing, “fill me with the power of darkness!!”

The shadow transformed, morphing into a black beast not unlike the ones they’d seen at other points in the Palace. Darkness in the form of inky black smoke pooled around them, cutting off their vision as smaller shadows bombarded them. It was only thanks to Captain Kidd’s lightning and the light from Power’s hama the Phantom Thieves saw anything during the fight. By the end, the shadow disappeared into nothingness, leaving the rest of them exhausted.

“That’s a safe room up there. Let’s pack it up for now and return in a couple days when we have our strength back,” Ren said. He wasn’t ready to process the shadow ate up that much of their energy and didn’t even have the decency to drop a map. That was, apparently, asking for too much.

No one argued with him. They were all too tired.

When they went at it a second time, it was the same thing all over again. White rooms. White halls. Black shadows. Pink hearts. Hoping they made progress.

The answer to their question came at the appearance of another Shadow. Like the previous one, he was tall with long white hair. Unlike the previous one, he dressed himself in what Ren swore was a zebra-fur coat, though simultaneously knew it couldn’t be possible since the man in question didn’t technically come from a place where zebras existed.

“Who’re you?” Ren demanded.

“I am Xemnas. I seek to bring Kingdom Hearts,” he said. His voice rattled just as deeply as the previous Shadow, though different. Hollow.

“Oh…kay,” Futaba said. “And what exactly is Kingdom Hearts?”

Xemnas smirked. With a snap of his fingers, white walls gave way to reveal a monstrous, actual heart-shaped thing in the sky past the windows. “Kingdom Hearts,” he said slowly, almost in a drawl, “is how us Nobodies will feel again. It is a heart for all Nobodies!”

“And what does that have to do with it being darkness?” Morgana asked.

“Yeah, the last guy told us Kingdom Hearts was darkness!” Ryuji shouted.

Xemnas didn’t answer. Rather, the instrument of apparent darkness used to make Nobodies (whatever those were) to feel again shot a beam of light through the room.

The fight afterward was grueling. Physical attacks did almost nothing to him, resulting in Ryuji and Yusuke taking a backseat as the heavier magic-aligned Persona users blasted him. Kingdom Hearts – at least, what Xemnas claimed was Kingdom Hearts – proved to be its own problem as well. While Xemnas attacked them with his own laser beams, “Kingdom Hearts” shot at them from afar. It managed to catch Ren’s coat more than a few times, singeing the tail.

Still, they managed to end the fight. Xemnas faded away into darkness, and Kingdom Hearts disappeared from the window along with him. Where Xemnas once stood, a map lay crumpled on the floor in his place.

“Oh thank goodness,” Haru said.

“I was beginning to get worried we’d never find it,” Makoto said.

Ren nodded wordlessly in agreement. He picked it up, scanning it for any relevant details.

“I have good news.”

“Oh?” Yusuke asked.

“One more push and we’re at the Treasure. Looks like Xemnas even had the thought to tell us what it’s called.”

“Really?” Morgana’s eyes shone brightly. He hopped up onto Ren’s shoulder, and Ren swore he felt every excited vibration running through the cat as he scanned the map up and down. “Wait, that’s not the Treasure name! That just says Kingdom Hearts!”

Ren used his free hand to point at the arrow pointed neatly to the big red spot marked in a suspiciously large chamber toward the center of the castle. Above the arrow was the name Kingdom Hearts scrawled in dark ink. “You sure? Looks like it’s pointing to a treasure to me.”

“But he said Kingdom Hearts was a heart for all Nobodies,” Ann said.

Haru frowned. “The man before said Kingdom Hearts was darkness,” she said.

“Perhaps it is both?” Yusuke closed his eyes as if in contemplation. “Maybe all so-called Nobodies have hearts filled completely in darkness, and Kingdom Hearts is a collection of all of those.”

“If that’s the case, all the better we’re changing his heart,” Morgana said.

“But wait.” Makoto shook her head. “Earlier in the Palace, we came across books calling Kingdom Hearts all sorts of different things. Some called it light, others called it a portal, others said it was used to make a sword. How can it be all of those things and also a heart for Nobodies and a representation of darkness?”

“Maybe it’s whatever the summoner of Kingdom Hearts desires?” Haru said.

“Whatever it is, it can wait until after the Palace is completed. Come on, we’ve almost secured a route.”

After the fight with Xemnas, the rest of the Palace was a breeze. Ren tried not to focus on the noticeable physical similarities the grunt shadows shared with Xemnas and the other shadow from earlier, but as their difficulty seemed to melt away, it proved more and more difficult. By the time they reached the Treasure and secured a route, Ren was absolutely certain every single shadow was merely a stand-in for the Palace owner himself.

The following days started as normal: send the calling card (an unusual circumstance, but Futaba made it work), infiltrate the Palace and steal the treasure. Ren sold some of their treasure (hearts, they were all somehow related to hearts) off at Iwai for some extra cash that he immediately traded off for medicine at Takemi’s clinic. He didn’t know what to expect, and after months of doing this he learned to prepare for the worst.

And by worst, Ren meant fighting the Palace ruler.

Needless to say, shortly after they took the Treasure – which had taken the form of, what else but a silver gray heart – ahead of them stood the palace ruler, Xehanort. An old man, balding with a long gray beard and a notably similar outfit to the first man they found.

“You really think you can just come here and take Kingdom Hearts? After all the work I’ve done to bring it about?”

“What?!” Ryuji shouted. Thank God it was Morgana who held the Treasure, otherwise Ryuji would’ve dropped it right there. He marched straight up to the old man, grabbing him by the lapel of his coat. It was almost like their previous conversation about the nature of Kingdom Hearts never happened. “What do you mean this is effing Kingdom Hearts?”

“Skull! Get back here!” Ann shouted.

The man’s lips curled into a smirk. “Yes Skull, return to your friends.” He pushed Skull away with a shocking amount of strength for an old man. With the flick of his wrist, the Treasure morphed from a heart into the strangest, key-shaped weapon any of them had ever seen in their life. Another wrist flick, and the blade disappeared out of Morgana’s paws, moving straight into Xehanort’s hands. “And yield, Phantom Thieves to the true power of Kingdom Hearts!”

As Xehanort’s hands touched the Treasure, darkness surrounded his form. It twisted and shifted around him, the influence of the Metaverse taking over to turn the Shadow into his true form. The first time it happened, back with Kamoshida, Ren had to admit it frightened him. Now? Ren was numb to the change.

At least, he would be, except Xehanort’s form shifted into something quickly becoming painfully familiar to the Phantom Thieves: a twisted, dark shadow in the shape of some sort of malformed heart with eyes and a mouth. Spindly, monochromatic limbs popped out of either side to give it some semblance of arms and legs. It clung onto the key-like blade of a Treasure for dear life. A horrific monstrosity, truly, but not in the way Ren ever expected.

“Kingdom Hearts! Come, consume me with your power!!”

Ryuji sighed. “So what, now he’s Kingdom Hearts?!”

“Perhaps the nature of Kingdom Hearts isn’t important, only what it means to the self,” Yusuke said.

“Yeah right! If it didn’t mean shit this whole place wouldn’t be Kingdom Hearts.” Ryuji grabbed his pipe and pointed it at the giant heart, ready to charge. “I’m starting to think this yahoo doesn’t even know what Kingdom Hearts is!”

And with that, Ryuji bolted forward toward the shadow.

“Skull wait!” Morgana exclaimed.

It was too late. They were left charging in after Ryuji for a fight unlike any they’ve had before.

#my writing #shitpost writing #this is not getting tagged with any fandoms #they dont' need to know about this #hopefully its cursed enough #i have actual stuff i should be working on and i chose this instead

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creepingsharia · 4 years ago

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Joe Biden to speak to the nation’s largest Muslim [Brotherhood] American PAC

We told you that when Bernie Sanders dropped out, his organizational structure would be hijacked by sharia supremacists that had already infiltrated his campaign. They will, and are, using Sanders’ infrastructure and network to get sharia-compliant Muslims into elected office.

They are also using Bernie Sanders’ street soldiers to wreak as much havoc and violence as possible through the upcoming elections.

To wit, Muslims have been front and center at antifa and blm riots for nearly two months, with terror-linked CAIR admitting they are “regulating” the violent rioters in at least one city.

Muslims have now set their sights on the White House via Joe Biden - who recently hired a sharia supremacist from one of the key groups mentioned in the WAPO article below, and they are targeting anyone in or near the Trump campaign that violates the sharia.

Some interesting facts that WAPO fails (intentionally?) to tell its readers:

Muslim Group, Emgage, Hosts Homophobic Imams and Terrorist Defenders Endorses Joe Biden

Emgage also recently parted ways with one of its leaders who joked about blowing up a school that contained “white people.”

Emgage founder and board member is a lawyer for some of the world’s most notorious Muslim terrorists, via More on Emgage:

Emgage was founded in 2006 by Khurrum Wahid, a defense attorney for many of the world’s most notorious terrorists and former lawyer for the Hamas-related Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). According to the Miami New Times, Wahid, himself, was placed on a federal terrorist watch list, in 2011. Both CAIR and Islamic Relief, a group that has been banned in a number of countries, are listed as ‘Partners’ on Emgage’s most recent annual report. Emgage is a member organization of the South Florida Muslim Federation (SoFlo Muslims), a terrorist umbrella group for South Florida’s various radical Muslim outfits, and Emgage holds events at terror-related mosques.

For more background on Emgage and other terror-linked Islamic groups around Biden, read Biden ‘Honored’ to Be Endorsed by Radical Groups

h/t @Ravagiing

Joe Biden to speak to Emgage Action the nation’s largest Muslim American PAC

Joe Biden will address the nation’s largest Muslim American PAC on Monday, as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee continues to reach out to groups he didn’t court during the primary.

Emgage Action, the political arm of a 14-year-old Muslim outreach organization, will host Biden at its Million Muslim Votes Summit, held online. The conference comes 11 months after just two then-Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former HUD secretary Julián Castro, attended the Islamic Society of North America’s convention. Emgage had criticized the two dozen Democrats, like Biden, who found somewhere else to be.

“Muslim American communities are organizing like never before to maximize our voter turnout, and to ensure that our voices are represented,” Wa’el Alzayat, the chief executive of Emgage Action, said in a statement. “The Million Muslim Votes Summit is the culmination of this work, and it is with great honor that Vice President Joe Biden is partnering with Emgage Action to engage with Muslim American communities and help galvanize us towards the polls this upcoming November.”

Biden would be the first Democratic nominee to address the group, which has active chapters in the swing states of Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He was criticized for skipping last year’s Islamic conference, and Emgage would go on to endorse Sanders for president. It backed Biden only after Sanders ended his campaign three months ago, saying it could “envision our voices being represented through his presidency.”

“Muslims have been demonized and terrorized by Trump, so I can’t imagine too many voting for him,” said Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, the first Muslim to hold that role for a presidential candidate. “But to win their votes, you do need to put in effort. Biden is smart to actively appeal to this constituency, as they could be difference makers in battleground states.” There are hundreds of thousands of Muslims eligible to vote in Emgage’s targeted swing states, as well as California, Illinois and Virginia.

While Emgage was founded before the 2008 election — it was initially called Emerge, a name later taken by a group that trains female Democratic candidates — it has only recently held large conferences. Hillary Clinton did not appear at any Emgage evens in 2016, and Barack Obama was often cautious about outreach to Muslim voters, as conspiracy theories about his own faith swirled through the electorate.

Biden has dealt more confidently with Muslim voters, condemning Trump USAID official Mark Kevin Lloyd as “Islamophobic” after some of his anti-Islam online messages were uncovered and pledging to end the Trump administration’s ban on travel to the United States from some majority-Muslim countries “on day one.”

“Joe Biden is proud to stand with Emgage during one of the most challenging moments for Muslim Americans in recent history under Donald Trump’s presidency,” said Farooq Mitha, Biden’s senior adviser on Muslim American engagement. “Now is the time for us to come together to fight for our Constitution, civil rights, a just immigration system, and a better future for all of us.”

#Islam #Muslim #Jihad #Sharia #Biden #Politics #Media #News #Immigration #Legal

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 6 years ago

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Reframing the Middle East narrative: my ten-point guide

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that those trying to defend Israel in the court of public opinion needed a strategic rethink.

Defending Israel against the calumnies being thrown at it is to concede defeat from the start by engaging upon ground defined by its enemies. Instead, Israel’s defenders need to go onto the front foot. They need to do to its enemies what is done to Israel: to paint them as extreme, unconscionable and a mortal threat to life and liberty. But with one key difference: that whereas Israel’s enemies do this through lies, bigotry and irrationality, its defenders should do it through truth, morality and reason.

They should do it by repeated use of high-level speeches, press conferences, videos and other platforms to take the attack to the enemy: proactively and aggressively to destroy the premises on which they base their attacks by redefining who is truly victim and victimiser in the Middle East; reclaiming the language from those who have hijacked it and inverted its meaning in order to twist the western mind; and proactively and aggressively to attack named governments and politicians, media, intellectuals and others for supporting the “Palestinians”’ unconscionable agenda, using their own values to hold their feet to the fire.

Here’s my handy, cut-out-and-keep ten-point guide to the essential messages that need to be got across by proactive, aggressive and repeatedly reinforced initiatives in order to reframe the narrative.

Support indigenous people. The Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. While many others have lived there over the centuries, the Jews are the only people – as a people – for whom it was ever their national kingdom, and the only people still around today who had their homeland there taken away from them by force.

Stop Arab colonialism. Historically, Arabs and Muslims were colonial invaders who occupied the land of Israel by force. The “Palestinians” are Arab colonialists who aim once again to occupy the land and wipe out the indigenous inhabitants, the Jewish people, from their own homeland.

End the lie of Palestinian identity. There never was a Palestinian people. Palestine was the insulting name given to Judea by the Romans. The Arabs living there at the time of the Balfour Declaration identified themselves mainly as southern Syrians or else just as Arabs. Palestinian identity was invented solely to rewrite history and destroy the Jewish claim to the land of Israel. Anyone who supports the Palestinian cause is therefore an accessory to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish right of national self-determination.

Denounce anti-Zionism as anti-Judaism. The Jews are a nation. Many fail to realise that because they think Judaism is merely a religion. The essence of Judaism, however, is the religious obligations of the Jewish nation within the land of Israel which is sanctified to that purpose. Denying the Jewish nation its own land is therefore a direct assault on Judaism itself.

No platform for racist ethnic cleansing. The “Palestinians” repeatedly declare that not one Jew will be allowed to live in a state of Palestine. Around 20 per cent of Israel’s population consists of Israeli Arabs with full civil rights. Why can’t a future state of Palestine be 20 per cent Jewish? All who promote the Palestinian agenda, and all who say a Palestine state cannot happen while the Israeli “settlers” live in that territory, therefore endorse racist ethnic cleansing.

No platform for national extermination. The Palestinian agenda is not for a state of Palestine to exist alongside the state of Israel. It is instead to destroy Israel. This is demonstrated continuously by the repeated rejection of the offer of a Palestine state in favour of mass murder campaigns and war; by the “Palestinians”’ maps and insignia showing Palestine replacing Israel; by their teaching their children to hate and murder Jews and steal their land. All in the west who support this agenda should therefore be called out for supporting, at least implicitly, the attempted extermination of a country.

Defend Temple Mount against Islamist cultural cleansing. The site of the ancient Jewish Temple is the holiest place in Judaism. The “Palestinians” have repeatedly tried to erase the proof of its centrality to Judaism by vandalising the site and destroying the archeological evidence. They have also turned it into a military arsenal from where they repeatedly try to murder Jewish worshippers while inciting Islamic holy war. This should be called out for what it is: jihadi incitement, and attempted Islamist cultural cleansing akin to the destruction by Isis of ancient religious shrines in Iraq.

Uphold justice and international law. Israel is the only Middle East country which adheres to democracy and the rule of law and upholds human rights. Israel’s actions are lawful and principled. It should prove it by laying out the historical and legal evidence of international treaties and other relevant legal instruments, and show that it is the despotic and tyrannical enemies of Israel who repudiate law and human rights. Anyone who wants to promote the rule of law and human rights in the Middle East must support Israel against those who so cynically turn law and justice inside out.

Bring war criminals to justice. All decent people should call for Hamas to be held responsible for war crimes, both in launching murderous attacks against Israeli civilians and for using the people of Gaza as cannon fodder and human shields.

Stand against genocidal Muslim antisemitism. The most vile and crude antisemitism, much of it using Nazi tropes and images and exhibiting paranoid fantasies depicting the Jews as a cosmic conspiracy to harm the world in their own interests, pours out of the Muslim world, including the “moderate” Palestinian Authority, in an unstoppable torrent. Yet astoundingly, this receives virtually no attention whatsoever in the west. So there should be a campaign to bring these images and diatribes to public attention and thus demonstrate two crucial points: that the Muslim world doesn’t hate the Jews because it hates Israel but rather it hates Israel because it hates the Jews; and second, that this Muslim antisemitism is a major driver of the jihad against the west.

Stop media collusion with mass murder. The strategy of Hamas is to engender the deaths of as many as possible whom it can pass off as Palestinian innocents, in order to produce media coverage which induces revulsion and condemnation of Israel in the west. Those many media outlets and journalists that do Hamas’s bidding to the letter, failing to report the full context of these deaths or the way these spectacles are cynically staged and presenting the Hamas narrative as factually true without question, should be called out by name as accomplices to mass murder.

If these messages were proactively introduced into public debate at a high enough level to ensure they were reported and repeated, and if individuals and government and media outfits supporting and promoting this unconscionable anti-Jewish agenda were named and shamed for doing so, the climate of opinion over Israel would change for the better very quickly.

What’s everyone waiting for?

#ten-point guide #melanie phillips #middle east #israel #palestinians #antisemitism

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zhangsan111111 · 5 years ago

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bamboomarket72-blog · 5 years ago

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“We Try to Learn Every Terrorist Attack”: Inside the Top-Secret Israeli Anti-Terrorism Operation That’s Changing the Game

I pursued my enemies and overtook them; I did not turn back until they were destroyed. —Psalm 18:37 (motto of Israel’s clandestine counterterror squad)

On a spring evening in late April, I traveled to a fortified compound in the Ayalon Valley between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The location is not identified on Waze, the Israeli-built navigation tool, and so, as far as my app-addled cabdriver was concerned, it does not exist. Then again, the same could be said for its inhabitants: YAMAM, a band of counterterror operatives whose work over the last four decades has been shrouded in secrecy.

Upon arrival at the group’s headquarters, which has all the architectural warmth of a supermax, I made my way past a phalanx of Israeli border police in dark-green battle-dress uniforms and into a blastproof holding pen where my credentials were scanned, my electronic devices were locked away, and I received a lecture from a counter-intelligence officer who was nonplussed that I was being granted entrée to the premises. “Do not reveal our location,” he said. “Do not show our faces. And do not use our names.” Then he added, grimly, and without a hint of irony, “Try to forget what you see.”

YAMAM is the world’s most elite—and busiest—force of its kind, and its expertise is in high demand in an era when ISIS veterans strike outside their remaining Middle East strongholds and self-radicalized lone wolves emerge to attack Western targets. “Today, after Barcelona,” says Gilad Erdan, who for the past three years has been Israel’s minister for public security, “after Madrid, after Manchester, after San Bernardino—everyone needs a unit like YAMAM.” More and more, the world’s top intelligence and police chiefs are calling on YAMAM (a Hebrew acronym that means “special police unit”). During his first month on the job, recalls Erdan, “I got requests from 10 countries to train together.”

I made my way to the office of YAMAM’s 44-year-old commander, whose name is classified. I am therefore obliged to refer to him by an initial, “N,” as if he were a Bond character. N’s eyes are different colors (the result of damage sustained during a grenade blast). His shaved head and hulking frame give him the vibe of a Jewish Vin Diesel. At his side, he keeps an unmuzzled, unbelievably vicious Belgian shepherd named Django.

Near Tel Aviv, Israel. March 1978. The aftermath of a bus assault by P.L.O. guerrillas, which claimed the lives of 37 Israelis and wounded 71.

Photograph by Shmuel Rachmani/AP Images.

Last fall, Israeli officials agreed to provide Vanity Fair unprecedented access to some of YAMAM’s activities, facilities, and undercover commandos. When I asked N why his superiors had chosen to break with their predecessors’ decades of silence, he gave an uncharacteristically sentimental response: “It’s important for operators’ families to hear about our successes.” (Field “operators,” as they are called, are exclusively male; women sometimes serve in intelligence roles.) N does not discount less magnanimous reasons for cooperating, however.

First, YAMAM has devised new methodologies for responding to terrorist incidents and mass shootings, which it is sharing with its counterparts across the globe. (More on this shortly.) Second, Israel, as an occupying power, faces international condemnation for its heavy-handed approach toward the Palestinians; as a result, some top officials evidently felt it was time to reveal the fact that governments—including a few of Israel’s more vocal critics on the world stage—often turn to them, sotto voce, for help with their most intractable security problems. And last come the bragging rights—perhaps the unit’s most meaningful rationale.

YAMAM, it so happens, recently won a bitter, 40-year bureaucratic battle with Sayeret Matkal, a secretive special-forces squad within the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.). Sayeret Matkal was formerly the ne plus ultra in this realm; indeed, Vanity Fair, in an article published right after the 9/11 attacks, called the group “the most effective counterterrorism force in the world.” It counts among its alumni political leaders, military generals, and key figures in Israel’s security establishment. And yet, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Sayeret Matkal veteran, had to quietly designate one unit to be the national counterterror A-team, he chose YAMAM over his old contingent, which specializes in long-distance reconnaissance and complex overseas missions.

Netanyahu’s decision, supported by some of the prime minister’s fiercest foes, had all the sting of President Barack Obama’s selection of the navy’s SEAL Team Six (over the army’s Delta Force) to conduct the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. YAMAM is part of the national police force—not the military or the Mossad, which is Israel’s C.I.A., or the Shin Bet, the country’s domestic-security service, which is more akin to Britain’s M.I.5. And yet, in recent months, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has blurred some of the lines between these agencies’ duties. YAMAM’s primary focus involves foiling terror plots, engaging militants during attacks, combating crime syndicates, and blunting border incursions. In contrast, the military, in addition to protecting Israel’s security, is often called upon to respond to West Bank demonstrations, using what human-rights activists often consider excessive force. But as Hamas has continued to organize protests along the fence that separates Israel and Gaza, I.D.F. snipers have been killing Palestinians, who tend to be unarmed. What’s more, Hamas has sent weaponized kites and balloons into Israel, along with mortar and rocket barrages, prompting devastating I.D.F. air strikes. While members of the YAMAM have participated in these missions as well, they have largely played a secondary role.

Off and on for a year, I followed N and his team as they traveled, trained, and exchanged tactics with their American, French, and German counterparts on everything from retaking passenger trains to thwarting complex attacks from cadres of suicide bombers and gunmen firing rocket-propelled grenades. YAMAM’s technology, including robots and Throwbots (cameras housed in round casings that upright themselves upon landing), is dazzling to the uninitiated. But so are the stats: YAMAM averages some 300 missions a year. According to N, his commandos have stopped at least 50 “ticking time bombs” (suicide bombers en route to their targets) and hundreds of attacks at earlier stages.

“I’ve been out with the YAMAM on operations,” John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, told me in his office, a few blocks from the World Trade Center. “There are a lot of outfits that have a lot of knowledge and do a lot of training, but that’s different from a lot of experience.” He pointed out that for every terrorist attack in Israel that makes the news, there are 10 that are prevented by YAMAM acting on perishable intelligence provided by Shin Bet.

Avi Dichter agrees wholeheartedly. After serving in Sayeret Matkal, he joined the Shin Bet and in 2000 rose to become its director. He now chairs the Committee on Defense and Foreign Affairs in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. For years, he admitted, counterterrorism officials shared only a portion of their most sensitive intelligence with covert operatives, out of fear of its being compromised. Now, Dichter says, YAMAM representatives sit in Shin Bet’s war room to ensure they have the full picture. “It took us a long time to understand that you can’t keep information from the unit you’re asking to perform a mission, because what they don’t know may undermine the entire operation.” When I asked him how he would describe the unit to outsiders, he said, “YAMAM is a special-operations force that has the powers of the police, the capabilities of the military, and the brains of Shin Bet.” They are, in effect, the spy agency’s soldiers.

Nowadays, some terrorists aren’t interested in negotiations or even survival.

The N.Y.P.D.’s Miller, for his part, claimed U.S. law-enforcement agencies benefit from YAMAM’s successes. A former journalist, who once interviewed bin Laden, Miller maintained, “You can learn a lot from the YAMAM about tactics, techniques, and procedures that, when adapted, can work in any environment, including New York. It’s why we go to Israel once or twice a year—not just to see what we’ve seen before but to see what we’ve seen before that they’re doing differently. Because terrorism, like technology—and sometimes because of technology—is constantly evolving. If you’re working on the techniques you developed two years ago, you’re way out of date.”

Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, concurs: “We have a lot to learn from [Israel—YAMAM in particular] in terms of how they use technology as a force multiplier to combat an array of threats. Over the last 15 years, we at D.H.S. have partnered with them on almost every threat.”

A NEW PARADIGM

“I saw a few Hollywood movies about fighting terrorism and terrorists,” N said. “But the reality is beyond anything you can imagine.” Back in the States, I trailed him and his entourage, who met with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Special Enforcement Bureau, as well as New York City’s Emergency Service Unit, which falls under Miller. “Terror organizations used to take hostages because they wanted to achieve a prisoner exchange; now they’re trying to do something different,” N observed, remembering a bygone era when terrorism was a violent means of achieving more concrete political ends.

The conventional wisdom for how to deal with fast-moving terrorist incidents has evolved over time, most notably in hostage situations. Since the 1960s and 70s, first responders have sought to establish a physical boundary to “contain” an event, engage the perpetrators in dialogue, draw out negotiations while formulating a rescue plan, then move in with a full team. Similar principles were adapted for reacting to kidnappers, emotionally disturbed individuals, and mass-casualty incidents.

But over the last 20 years—a period that dovetails with N’s rise from recruit to commander—he and his colleagues have come to treat terror attacks the way doctors treat heart attacks and strokes. There is a golden window in which to intervene and throw all their energy and resources at the problem. While units in the U.S. have tended to arrive on the scene, gauge the situation, secure a perimeter, and then call in specialists or reinforcements, YAMAM goes in heavy, dispatching self-contained squadrons of breachers, snipers, rappellers, bomb techs, dog handlers, and hostage negotiators. Metaphorically speaking, they don’t send an ambulance to stabilize a patient for transport. They send a hospital to ensure survival on scene. Moreover, they establish mobile units with clear lines of authority, not an array of groups with competing objectives. These teams can rove and respond, and are not unduly tethered to a central command base.

“The active shooter changed everything,” John Miller elaborated. Nowadays, the terrorist or mass murderer isn’t interested in negotiations or even survival. “He is looking for maximum lethality and to achieve martyrdom in many cases.” Because of this, the response teams’ priorities have shifted. The primary objective, said Miller, echoing YAMAM’s strategy, “is to stop the killing. That means to use the first officers on the scene whether they’re specialized or not. The other part is to stop the dying. How do you then set parameters inside as the people are chasing the threat, going after the sound of gunfire, engaging the gunman? How do you get to those people who are wounded, who are still viable, who could survive? American law enforcement has struggled with [this] since the Columbine case”—when responders waited too long to storm in. “We’ve got to get inside within 20 minutes. It can’t be within the golden two hours—or it’s not golden.”

Major O, the 37-year-old who commands YAMAM’s sniper team, explained that one of the unit’s signature skills is getting into the assailant’s mind-set. “We try to learn every terrorist attack everywhere in the world to find out how we can do it better,” he noted. “Our enemies are very professional, too, and in the end they are learning. They try to be better than us.”

To maintain its edge, YAMAM, after analyzing far-flung incidents, fashions its training to address possible future attacks. In the time that I spent with the operators, they rappelled down a Tel Aviv skyscraper and swooped into an office dozens of floors below, testing alternative ways that responders might have confronted last year’s Las Vegas attack in which a lone gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel fired more than a thousand rounds at concertgoers, killing 58. A YAMAM squad also spent hours on a dimly lit platform taking over a stationary Israeli passenger train—alongside members of France’s elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale. (The French had come to Israel, in part, to practice such maneuvers, evidently mindful of 2015’s Thalys rail attack, which recently found its way to the big screen in Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris). And at a telecommunications facility north of Tel Aviv, Israeli operatives simulated a nighttime mission with Germany’s vaunted Grenzschutzgruppe 9, facing multiple gunmen and explosions in all directions. Taking it all in, I felt like I had unwittingly been cast as an extra in a Michael Bay movie.

As they briefed their European guests, the YAMAM team preached its gospel of never allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. “To be relevant and to win this battle, sometimes you must go with 50 percent or 70 percent knowledge and intelligence,” N said. As he considered what his counterparts faced at places such as Orlando’s Pulse nightclub or the Bataclan concert hall, in Paris, N asserted that in today’s scenarios, unlike those in the 20th century, “we don’t have the privilege of time. You must come inside very fast because there are terrorists that are killing hostages every minute.”

Dimona, Israel. March 1988. The so-called Mothers’ Bus attack, in which three nuclear-research workers were executed by P.L.O. terrorists.

From Polaris.

THE SECOND DIRECTIVE

The inside story of YAMAM’s genesis has not been told by its leaders, until now.

In 1972, during the Summer Olympics in Munich, members of the Palestinian group Black September kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli teammates. The cold-blooded attack—and Germany’s botched response—prompted Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir to initiate Operation Wrath of God, sending hit squads to track down and kill the group’s organizers and others (later depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Munich). And though it may have escaped public attention, a secret second directive would go forth as well, which ordered the establishment of a permanent strike force to deter or defeat future attacks.

This mandate would not be realized until two years later, after terrorists sneaked across the border from Lebanon, killed a family of three, and took over an elementary school in Ma’alot with 105 students and 10 teachers inside—hoping to negotiate for the release of their brethren held in Israeli prisons. Sayeret Matkal raced to the scene and mounted a disastrous rescue attempt. Twenty-one students perished. Addressing the Knesset, Meir exclaimed, “The blood of our children, the martyrs of Ma’alot, cries out to us, exhorting us to intensify our war against terrorism, to perfect our methods.”

Following the attack, counterterrorism responsibilities—especially the delicate art of hostage rescue—shifted from the I.D.F. to a new police unit, initially dubbed the “Fist Brigade” and, later, YAMAM. Chronically underfunded, ostracized by the military, and deemed an unknown quantity by the intelligence services, the unit was a backwater. That is, until Assaf Hefetz was put in charge. He was a well-regarded I.D.F. paratrooper with important friends, among them future prime minister Ehud Barak. Hefetz had supported the April 1973 operation in which Barak—famously disguised as a woman—infiltrated Beirut and killed several Palestine Liberation Organization leaders as part of Israel’s ongoing retaliation for Munich. Hefetz professionalized YAMAM, persuading skilled soldiers to join his new police commando unit—whose work was a secret to all but a handful of Israelis.

In May, I visited Hefetz, aged 74, in the seaside hamlet of Caesarea and found a man with the body of a 24-year-old and the hearing of a 104-year-old. Like many of his generation of Israelis, he speaks his mind without regard for how his words may land. “After 18 months, I had recruited and trained three platoons, and I knew that my unit was much better than the army,” he insisted. “But I was the only person in the country who thought so.” In due course, he found an eager partner in the spymasters of Shin Bet, who agreed to let YAMAM try its hand at the treacherous work of neutralizing suspected terrorists.

Still, it was Hefetz, personally, who first put YAMAM on the map. On the morning of March 11, 1978, armed guerrillas arrived on Zodiac boats from Lebanon, coming ashore near Haifa. Once inland, they encountered and murdered an American named Gail Rubin, whose close relative happened to be Abraham Ribicoff, a powerful U.S. senator. Next, they flagged down a taxi, murdered its occupants, then hijacked a bus. Traveling south along the picturesque coastal highway, they threw hand grenades at passing cars and shot some of the bus passengers. The attack was timed in hopes of disrupting peace talks between Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

The rolling pandemonium came to a halt at a junction north of Tel Aviv. “When I arrived, my unit was [still] an hour away,” Hefetz recalled. The bus had stopped, but it was a charred wreck. “No one knows [exactly] what happened. Call it the fog of war.” Hefetz soon learned that some of the assailants had escaped on foot and were moving toward the beach. He grabbed his gun and gave chase, eventually killing two of them, capturing a third, and rescuing some of the hostages. In the process, he took a bullet to his right shoulder and lost hearing in one ear. The incident, known as the Coastal Road Massacre, claimed the lives of more than three dozen people. But Hefetz’s valor raised the question: given what YAMAM’s commander accomplished on his own, what could the unit as a whole do if properly harnessed?

The answer was a decade in coming, during which time YAMAM was bigfooted by Sayeret Matkal during its response to terrorist attacks. In the notorious Bus 300 affair, for example, Sayeret Matkal commandos stormed a bus to rescue hostages and claimed it had killed four terrorists when, in fact, two had survived. The pair were turned over to Shin Bet operatives, who, a short distance away, murdered them in cold blood. The debacle and its aftermath, which disgraced Shin Bet chief Avraham Shalom—who had ordered the on-site assassinations and then tried to cover it up—left an indelible stain on Israel’s institutions and international credibility.

For every terrorist attack in Israel that makes the news, there are 10 that are prevented.

In 1987, Alik Ron, a man with deep credentials and a devil-may-care attitude, took over YAMAM. He had served in Sayeret Matkal and participated in the legendary 1976 raid on Entebbe, in which an I.D.F. team stormed a Ugandan airport and successfully freed more than 100 hostages. “I was in our most elite units and took part in the most celebrated mission in our history,” said Ron, who in retirement has become a gentleman farmer. “Only when I was put in charge of YAMAM did I realize I was in the company of the most professional unit in Israel.”

And yet when he first addressed his men to say how proud he was to lead them—describing all the great things they would accomplish together—they broke out laughing. Apparently, the operatives were fed up with being highly trained benchwarmers, always left on the sidelines. Ron persevered nonetheless. And he is withering in his assessment of his old unit (Sayeret Matkal) and its overseers. “Nobody, nobody, not the head of Shin Bet, not Mossad, not the prime minister, can give me an order [to kill terrorists after they have been captured]. He can get me an order, but I will do like this,” he said, lifting his middle finger. “I will not murder them. I will have already killed them in the bus.”

Ron soon got the chance to try things his way. In 1988, he learned that three terrorists had crossed in from Egypt and hijacked a bus full of working mothers on their way to Dimona, the epicenter of Israel’s top-secret nuclear-weapons program. As Ron raced toward the Negev Desert to link up with his team, he saw CH-53 Sea Stallions on the horizon heading in the same direction. Pounding his fist on his dashboard and unleashing a stream of expletives, Ron recalled, he screamed, “Sayeret Matkal . . . again?!”

Ehud Barak was on one of those helicopters, a man who would go on to hold virtually every position in Israeli officialdom—prime minister, defense minister, commander of the armed forces, and head of Sayeret Matkal. Recalling his first encounter with YAMAM 30 years ago, Barak, now 76, expressed astonishment at how Ron and his team had somehow managed to arrive ahead of Sayeret Matkal’s helicopters, raring to go. “We asked them what they brought with them,” Barak recalled. “It ended up they brought everything which was needed for taking over the bus. So we let them do it.”

Israeli-Egyptian border. August 2011. Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak (gesturing) visits the scene of a deadly jihadist incursion.

From the Israeli Defence Ministry/Getty Images.

According to David Tzur, who was a major at the time and would later take over as YAMAM’s commander, the so-called Mothers’ Bus incident was a turning point because it showcased the unit’s speed, judgment, and agility. “We were called to the field at 7:30 in the morning,” he said. “Before we arrived, [the attackers] had killed three hostages.” At around 10:30, the team’s snipers shot two of the attackers while other YAMAM members stormed the bus and shot the remaining assailant. “No hostages were killed during the operation,” Tzur proudly recalled. Israel’s national-security apparatus—including skeptical I.D.F. generals—took notice and recognized that when it came to counterterrorism they had a scalpel at their disposal instead of blunter instruments. “I don’t believe that anyone has a better unit,” Barak observed. “They are kind of irreplaceable.”

THE ROAD TO SINAI

Lately, YAMAM has gotten used to terror’s new face: extremists intent on inflicting maximum carnage with maximum visibility. “I’ve been in dozens of operations and many times under fire, [facing] many terrorists and suicide bombers,” N admitted. “But the [one] I remember more than all the others is the terror attack on the border in the Sinai Desert.”

It was August 2011, six months after the Arab Spring ouster of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak—and three years before ISIS formally declared its caliphate. YAMAM, tipped off by Shin Bet that a large-scale attack was imminent somewhere along Israel’s southern border, dispatched one squadron and a sniper team by helicopter. They waited through the night before getting word that shots had been fired at a bus, injuring passengers inside. A family of four, traveling the same highway, was ambushed and slaughtered. “This group of ISIS-Salafi jihadists that came from the Sinai Desert, they were a different challenge for us,” N said of the 12-man death squad. “We know from intelligence that they received training abroad. They were proficient with weapons, grenades, explosive charges, [and even] had handcuffs to kidnap people.” They also brought cameras to film their handiwork.

N, who was a squadron commander at the time, was fired at twice as his YAMAM team arrived on the scene. In the skirmish, one militant detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and a bus driver, and, N recalled, “a terrorist shot a surface-to-air missile at one of our helicopters, but it missed.” Two gunmen were spotted crossing the highway. One was killed in an exchange of fire while a second took aim at a passenger vehicle, killing the driver. By midafternoon the scene seemed to be under control, and Pascal Avrahami—a legendary YAMAM sniper—briefed his superiors, including then defense minister Barak. A short time later, shots rang out from the Egyptian side of the border. Four YAMAM operators scrambled for cover, and in the frenzy a 7.62-mm. round hit Avrahami above the ceramic body armor covering his chest. The sniper, a 49-year-old father of three, had been killed by an enemy sniper, who simply melted back into the desert.

I joined N this past April at Mount Herzl, the final resting place of many of the nation’s fallen warriors. It was Israel’s Remembrance Day, a somber holiday when life and commerce grind to a halt. On this day, N spent time with Avrahami’s parents at their son Pascal’s grave, embracing them and reminiscing about his outsize role in the unit. (The previous evening, as the sun descended, squad members had stood in the courtyard of the YAMAM compound, having refreshments and trading stories. Family members of slain commandos were taken inside a darkened shooting range where their loved ones’ holographic images were projected in midair. The scene was otherworldly but somehow appropriate for this secretive, high-tech cadre.)

On this Remembrance Day, N mourned the loss of his friend, whose 24 years of service made him YAMAM’s longest-serving member. But he stopped at one point to stress that his team is focused less on the past than on the future: “We know the enemy will always try and do something worse, something bigger, something extraordinary that they never did before. And for this scenario we are preparing ourselves.”

Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/inside-yamam-top-secret-israeli-anti-terrorism-operation

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