Last week thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon, maiming hundreds and killing dozens of people. This was a large-scale terrorist strike targeting members of Hezbollah — the Party of God, a Lebanese Shia Islamist party — while sparing doctors working at Lebanese hospitals, who had been alerted to turn in their pagers beforehand by parties yet unknown. The exploding pagers contained batteries that included a small amount of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, a high explosive, which was incorporated as part of the battery manufacturing process. PETN is a nonvolatile powder and is very difficult to detect in small quantities, especially if it is encapsulated inside the plastic body of a battery.

However, just installing an explosive-charged battery in a standard production-line pager does not automatically a pager bomb make. There is also the crucial step of modifying the hardware and the firmware of the pager itself to provide the triggering mechanism. The simplest mechanism imaginable is a pattern matcher that waits for a certain text string to arrive as part of a page. Once the pattern matcher fires, it activates an electronic switch that short-circuits the battery, causing it to heat up and burst into flames (lithium-ion batteries heat up and can burst into flames or even explode when short-circuited).

This is what appears to have happened: the pagers started beeping all at once when they received the broadcast trigger message and then exploded a short time later. Since standard production-line pagers do not contain the hardware for short-circuiting the battery, these pagers must have been outfitted with custom electronics as well as an exploding battery.

Is that all? No, of course not! Broadcasting the trigger message to all the pagers required control of a base station located in Lebanon and somebody had to either be present to broadcast the page or to rig up electronics to do so remotely — more complexity and more hardware. And, of course, the entire technology suite had to be tested in some secret laboratory somewhere, to make sure that it would work right the first time.

Is that all? Not quite: there were also the exploding radios. They started exploding a day later. Apparently, the operation was not limited to just the pagers: similar tricks were performed with other types of battery-operated communications equipment, such as walkie-talkies. There weren’t as many of these, probably because, unlike the pagers, they hadn’t been purchased as a single large shipment. There were also many fewer of them. They were, however, an interesting proof of concept: now we know that your Android or iPhone or Tesla could be rigged to blow upon receiving a remote command just as easily as those pagers.

The entire operation, including setting up production for exploding batteries and for custom pager electronics able to short-circuit these batteries, assembling the pagers, programming the base station, delivering the pagers to Hezbollah buyers and setting up a local base station, all in a way that would not raise any suspicions, must have taken a great deal of time, effort and organizational acumen.

American propaganda sources (some people still use the phrase “media sources” to describe them) immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was the Israelis who were responsible for the exploding pagers. Anonymous American official sources (who but them, of course!) anonymously informed their pocket propaganda journos that the Israelis had warned them of the exploding pagers minutes before they started going off. Meanwhile, the Israelis themselves denied all responsibility.

However, my trusted anonymous sources (yeah, I can play this stupid game too, you know!) told me that it is unlikely that Israel could have pulled off the whole operation and that American intelligence operatives must have been involved. It would be interesting to find out who made the pagers, who sold the pagers to Hezbollah and who told the Lebanese doctors to turn in their pagers ahead of time. But it is highly unlikely that an investigation will ever be carried out to unearth such facts because one very important rule of conducting investigations is to avoid unearthing evidence that would incriminate the investigators.

Let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that it was the Israelis who engineered and orchestrated the whole thing. Two reasonable questions immediately leap to mind: What were they trying to achieve? and Were they ready to take advantage of that achievement?

Perhaps the Israelis simply wanted to demoralize Hezbollah leadership or to behead the entire organization. But this is a bad guess; the Israelis are smart enough to know that Hezbollah fighters are natural-born martyrs, that their leadership structure is rather diffuse and self-repairing, and that such an attack would only encourage them to lob more missiles at Israel (which is what it did).

Or perhaps the Israelis intended the pager explosions to serve as a sort of artillery preparation for a ground invasion? In that case, what could possibly explain the absolutely dismal level of preparation for it? Days after the attack IDF was still moving equipment to the north, hastily pulling a tank brigade out of Gaza, and causing traffic jams all over Israel with haphazard troop and equipment movements. Even today IDF is nowhere near being able to take advantage of the element of surprise provided by the pager incident, which has been completely lost by now.

Or perhaps Israel is just a mad dog that is so mad that it bit itself? Overlapping with the genocidal disaster unfolding in Gaza, the pager incident, if cemented in the eyes of the world as being an Israeli operation, would further convince everyone that Israel is a terrorist state and withhold all cooperation and support from it. Perhaps the Israeli leadership no longer cares about such things, their one job being to keep Bibi Netanyahoo out of jail. But perhaps somebody else is very much interested in finding a good excuse for withholding all cooperation and support from Israel. And who might that be? Satan?

Satan (or “The Great Satan,” as the Iranians like to call it) is in sad shape. Its president is non compos mentis and his wife has taken over the chairmanship of White House cabinet meetings. It’s good that Biden has been sidelined; now he won’t be able to order any more huge terrorist acts like the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline. The Ukrainian operation is going nowhere and pretty soon Zelensky will be ready to walk on his knees to the gates of the Kremlin, dragging the fetid corpse of NATO behind him, and to commit seppuku once he gets there. The effort to get the Houthis in Yemen to unblock the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, codenamed Operation Poseidon Archer, is a dud: The Red Sea and the Suez remain blocked (except for Russian and Chinese vessels) and the Israeli port of Eilat on the Red Sea is bankrupt. There is a presidential election coming up soon, featuring a cackling idiotress from hell (who is hiding from even the most fawning American propagandists) and a tempestuous geriatric who wants to make America great again (which is a lot like sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun).

Is this a good time for Great Satan to escalate a military conflict, either with Russia or on behalf of Israel in the Middle East? Perhaps not! A forthcoming international conference of BRICS+ and friends in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, Russian Federation is likely to decide the fate of the US dollar as a reserve currency. Lots of people from around the world are coming to that conference, bringing nails to pound into the US dollar’s coffin. The Ukrainian fiasco can be terminated with just one simple headline: “Zelensky missing!” Ukrainian rats would then abandon the sinking ship, which would then, you guessed it, sink. But a bit of finesse is required to flush Israel down the pipes because of the power of the Israeli lobby which owns half the members of the US congress.

Thanks to the emotive force of the exploding pager disaster, it will now be possible for US officials to interrupt the plaintive cries of Israeli lobbyists with urgent shouts of “What’s that horrible smell?” The Israelis already smelled quite bad because of the genocide in Gaza but, let’s face it, lots of people don’t really care about thousands of dead Palestinian women and children. The exploding pagers bring the bad smell factor to an entirely new level because that’s as clear a case of terrorism as anyone can imagine.

Not only that, but it’s indiscriminate terrorism because nobody can predict where it will strike next: Pandora’s Box has been opened. As you read this, you too may be looking askance at your portable computing device: could it have been tampered with by… Americans? You already knew that it eavesdrops on you and tracks your every movement. And now you know that it can also kill you or maim you when the time comes. Not a comforting thought, that…