Chris At Home

• StrategPage: "The Hizbollah tactic of firing rockets from residential areas, and forcing civilians to stick around when the rockets are fired, has paid off." However: "While the Lebanese media won't discuss it much, most Lebanese are quite angry with Hizbollah. The stories, of how Hizbollah forces civilians to stay around rocket launch sites, are now widely known. Israeli intelligence agents in Lebanon are getting more good tips on Hizbollah activity, especially within Christian areas." Polls suggest 80% of Lebanese support Hizbollah; the other 20% could make a major contribution to its destruction if they provide intelligence information. Or be executed as spies by the terrorists.
• "Land for peace" is dead, as proven by the current war. Israel leaves Lebanon and is attacked by Hezbollah. Israel leaves the Palestinian territories and are attacked by Hamas. "In the 1990s, we were repeatedly told that Israel's problems could be solved via a geopolitical swap-meet. Everyone get together in back-slapping fellowship and trade land and, abracadabra, we'd have peace. It turns out, in Israel's case, this is nonsense. Hezbollah doesn't want land-for-peace, it wants genocide for peace."
• Michelle rounds up Qana and other greatest hits from the terrorist propaganda machine. Rage here:
  

  Because you do see the "brave" terrorist warriors in these pictures after all. They're the ones digging up the kids, and holding them up for the feast of the cameras. Indeed, the terrible truth that we in the West cannot confront is that, in some instances, they're the ones that are killing the kids in the first place. As we know if we are honest with ourselves at this stage, there is nothing too base and too vile for the proud "warriors" of Islam to do in the service of their anachronistic god; their banner is the Bloody Shirt, and they will never have enough blood to quench it. And any blood, as long as it is not theirs, will do.
  ...
  Most of the world does not, cannot, believe that -- in order to score some propaganda points with Western media and gain a small respite from Israeli arms in which to resupply -- that Hezbollah would herd a group of handicapped children and other civilians into a bombed building and then bring it down on them just for the photo-op. Some of the world is, this morning, not so sure.

  
  Dan also smells BS in Qana, the Confederate Yankee calls fraud. EU Referendum has disugsting analysis of the photographs, showing the hours of staging. The crack investigative reporters in the MSM file their fingernails.
• Very dense article on Jihad, peace, etc., demonstrating that the West does not communicate well with Muslims. Freedom translates as perfect slavery to the will of Allah, for example. Skim it.
• The Egyptian man who ran amok in a Coptic Christian church in April, stabbing worshippers, has been declared innocent. He's crazy, so he's innocent, so he's released. No word on whether his knife was returned.
• Wretchard has a theory. It assumes the Israeli military is incredibly foresighted and Hezbullah is very predictable. I hope it is true.
• Dingell: neutral. And I will not be voting Democratic for yet another reason. The French call Iran a stabilizing influence in the Middle East. I can only blame this stuff on heavy drug usage...
• The Egyptian Sandmonkey has an interesting question for Muslims: what would your reaction be if Hezbullah had better missiles and took out a building, killing 56 people? His co-workers love that idea.
  

  So I repeated the same question to 8 other co-workers, and the responses so far have been as follows: 7 said they would celebrate, and 2 said that such an attack would've been bad, but justified! Yeah! Not a single person said that the death of any civllian, on either side, is an equal tragedy. Civillians dead on our side is tragic, civillian deaths on their side cause for celebration. And if you think I am being unfair or demonizing arabs or whatever, do me a favor and try it at your work place and/or with members of your family. Conduct this little social experiment and see for yourself. The results are very interesting.
  
  This begs another question: If we were the ones who had the superior military machine, would we have shown them any mercy, or any regard to their civillian casualties? Would we have hesitated to wipe them all out? Armed forces, civillians, whatever? Would any of us have felt bad about it at all? Or would we be filled with the feelings of Pride, honor and dignity that we keep talking about day and night?

• The head of Islamic Jihad in the West Bank bit it, courtesy of undercover Israeli troops.
• More on the THAL anti-rocket system in Israel. And a suggestion that Israel might want to lease B-52s or an AC-130 gunship for a few weeks. Seems like a great idea to me...we could even loan them the crews.
• Lebanon as the new Spain:
  

  Some have suggested that the latest round of fighting between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon is the beginning of World War III. Think again.
  
  “This is more like the Spanish Civil War,” says Daniel Seaman, an Israeli government spokesman. “What we are seeing is a series of conflicts that foreshadow a future world conflict, just as the Spanish Civil war prefigured the Second World War.” Seaman’s analogy is worth exploring.
  
  Just as Hitler used Franco as his proxy in Spain to test new military techniques and equipment on the battlefield, so Iran is using Hezbollah as its proxy to do the same.

• Alan thinks the UN may have been spying for Hezbollah. I would suspect bribery first. This is the UN we are talking about...oh, wait, maybe bribes weren't needed.
• The Daily Star questions if the Sunni/Shia divide is worse than the Muslim/Jew divide. The article hints that the Iraq invasion created a more powerful Shia bloc, which necessitates Israeli and American involvement to keep the sectarian divide stable and guarantee security. I wish we were that smart.
• Muslims hate Jews, and it started with that Mohammed guy. More historical details are at the link. (Seriously, it is an interesting read.)
• Muslim clerics bored, issue fatwa against Botox injections.

Brent Sadler of CNN reports that the Israeli ordnance did not even hit the building but landed "20 or 30 meters" from the structure. ... There are other mysteries. The roof of the building was intact. Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that there was a larger crater next to the building, but observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike. ... While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there. Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted.

There was little blood, CNN's Wedeman noted: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping -- sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building. ... But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. While medical examination clearly is called for to arrive at a definitive dating and cause of their deaths, they do not appear to have died hours before. The bodies looked like they had been dead for days. Viewers can judge for themselves. But the accumulating evidence suggests another explanation for what happened at Kana. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial Israeli bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to "plant" bodies killed in previous fighting -- reports in previous days indicated that nearby Tyre was used as a temporary morgue -- place them in the basement, and then engineer a "controlled demolition" to fake another Israeli attack.