Did you know that Israeli jets flew a bombing mission into Syria ten days ago? Didn’t make much news for some reason.

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.

No one’s talking about this. Tigerhawk has a good analysis.

It will shock nobody that I am more or less delighted whenever the Israelis bomb Syria. That country, which remains in a state of war with Israel, has, to date, dealt far more misery in the region than it has suffered, so the giant moral scale in the sky remains a long way from balance.

That said, the Israeli raid had nothing to do with reprisal. Its purpose was to interdict and communicate. Military action is its own idiom, especially when accompanied by leaks from the unleaky and silence from the places that usually erupt in indignation and rage.

Yes, Israel has demonstrated that it can penetrate Syrian, and therefore Iranian, air defenses. If the mullahs were confused on that point, perhaps because the military in any authoritarian system is prone to optimism, they are no longer. That is a handy bit of information for the mullahs to have. Let’s hope they put it to good use.

Second, the Turks have sent a message. How is it that a Kuwaiti paper reported the involvement of the Turks? That news was not broken by an investigative journalist, it was leaked. Turkey, or at least its virulently anti-Islamist military, wanted Syria and Iran to know that it will not stand by passively while they assemble arsenals of the world’s most dangerous weapons.

Finally — and this is the really loud message — the Arab world, taken as a whole, has responded with… silence. No other Arab government complained about the raid, forcing Syria to take its protest to the United Nations alone. No mobs poured into the famous “Arab street,” no flags were burned, no cars torched, and no “rage boys” screamed into television cameras. The message to Syria and Iran could not have been more clear: The Arabs are far more worried about Iran and its satellites than they are about Israel.

Recall that about the time the Israeli Air Force was visiting Syria, so was Democrat Dennis Kucinich with his idiotic attempt at peacemaking, another story that got little play in the US media.