You've probably never heard of the Chagos Islands and I'm sorry to be the one putting them on your to-worry-about list.

I'm doing so because this remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean includes Diego Garcia which hosts a British-American military base that is strategically vital for gathering intelligence and projecting air and naval power into both the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.

Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer agreed to give the Chagos Islands to the tiny Republic of Mauritius.

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There's a tiny barren island off the coast of Maine that both the U.S. and Canada claim. If Washington and Ottawa wanted to settle the long-simmering dispute over Machias Seal Island they could send diplomats to sit down at a "negotiating table" and come up a compromise or maybe even a "win-win solution."

That's how diplomacy works between civilized nations.

But that's not how diplomacy works between civilized nations and terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels of Yemen, or their patron: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nor is it how diplomacy works with the neo-fascist/neo-imperialist dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin, or the Communist ruler of China, Xi Jinping.

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The long war that Iran's rulers and their proxies have been waging against Israel took an unexpected turn last week. Thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon had ditched their cellphones – afraid Israelis were tapping them – for low-tech pagers.

But some time earlier, those beepers had been covertly transformed into miniature bombs that exploded suddenly and simultaneously, killing or incapacitating those Hezbollah operatives.

Few civilians – even those standing near the terrorists – were harmed. Many just looked on in astonishment.

Precision Israeli air strikes followed, eliminating more than a dozen top Hezbollah leaders.

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They say you can't kill an idea. Who are they? Quite a few people mouth this bromide but let's focus for a moment on Josep Borrell, the European Union's top diplomat.

A 77-year-old Spanish socialist, he has several times asserted: "Hamas represents an idea, and one cannot kill an idea with bombs."

He doesn't say what idea Hamas represents. But I will. It's killing Jews. Exactly what you saw on Oct. 7, 2023.

This is by no means a new idea.

Killing Jews is what the Roman emperor Hadrian did in Judea in the 2^nd century to suppress one of history's earliest anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist rebellions.

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Twenty-three years ago, on the sunny morning of Sept. 11, 2001, close to 3,000 people were murdered on American soil by 19 terrorists.

I knew two of the victims. One was working in the World Trade Center. The other was a passenger on the hijacked jet that struck the Pentagon.

That was one reason why my life, like the lives of so many other Americans, was transformed on that terrible day.

Another reason: In early 1979, I spent several months reporting on the revolution in Iran. I arrived just after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned from exile in France. Within weeks, a revolutionary council guided by his theology took power.

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