Many have pointed out that Qana — where, horribly, around an estimated 60 civilians including a number of children (although the Red Cross is giving a lower figure of 28) were killed after an Israeli air strike against Hezbollah — was used as the launch site for more than 150 rockets fired at Israel, including the hospital in Nahariya (which fortunately had been evacuated). People have also pointed out that, as has been the case throughout its strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel gave warnings that Qana would be targeted and urged residents to flee; it is more than passingly strange that in such circumstances people remained there — and kept their children there, knowing them to be directly in harm’s way from an IDF air strike. For its part, the IDF insists that it had no idea civilians were inside building, only that Hezbollah was using it as base for firing rockets at Israel. Indeed, despite the uncontrolled venom being hurled at Israel now from the British media, it is clear from any fair-minded assessment of the available information (which itself may well provide only a partial and even skewed picture) that Israel’s attempt to destroy Hezbollah has been hampered — possibly fatally — by its attempts to avoid killing innocent Lebanese civilians, because Hezbollah — well aware that Israel will always try to avoid the taking of innocent life —has deliberately sited its rockets and armaments in civilian buildings, thus using the Lebanese as human shields.

A set of three pictures published in the Australian Herald Sun shows this clearly. As the accompanying story says:

The images include one of a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun metres from an apartment block with sheets hanging out on a balcony to dry. Others show a militant with AK47 rifle guarding no-go zones after Israeli blitzes. Another depicts the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block blown up in an Israeli air attack.

The Melbourne man who smuggled the shots out of Beirut and did not wish to be named said he was less than 400m from the block when it was obliterated. ‘Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets,’ he said. ‘Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then it was totally devastated. It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more.’

However, a further question about Hezbollah’s behaviour in Qana is raised by the suggestion in the Israeli press that not only was Hezbollah using the residents of Qana as human shields, but it had actually prevented them from leaving — in order to use their deaths for propaganda purposes:

The IDF spokesman’s office says that Hizbullah uses the civilians as ‘human shields,’ and many reports have been received attesting to the fact that Hizbullah does not allow the citizens to leave - despite many IDF warnings to do so.

And now an even bigger question has arisen whether Israel was actually responsible for the Qana deaths. The Sydney Morning Herald (whose report on the tragedy was far fuller and fairer than the degraded British media accounts) reports as follows:

‘There was a first bombardment at 1am (0800 AEST),’ said resident Ghazi Aaidibi. ‘A few people went out of the shelter and about 10 minutes later a second bombardment destroyed it. There were 63 people inside, from the Shalhub and Hashem families.’

But the IDF says that the building in question was not destroyed until eight hours later. Haaretz reports:

The Israel Defense Forces convened a press conference Sunday evening, admitting that while the IAF did indeed strike the building in which the civilians were killed, the attack itself occurred near midnight, while reports of an explosion and the structure’s collapse were only received at around 8:30 A.M.

The air force did resume bombing Qana at 7:30 A.M., however the strikes were carried out on targets at a distance of 460 meters from the building. ‘The question we don’t have an answer to is what happened between 12 midnight and 8 in the morning,’ said IAF Brigadier General Amir Eshel.

Lebanese villagers in Qana who were witness to the bombing, however, say that the building’s collapse occurred in the wee hours of the night. Witnesses at the scene corroborated the IDF claim that the strike on the building, which is located in the Hariva neighborhood of Qana, was carried out at 1:00 A.M. After the initial strike, some of the building’s residents exited in an attempt to survey the damage, in effect saving themselves.

A few minutes later, IAF planes struck the building once again, causing the walls to collapse on the residents who did not vacate, killing them in the process. Arab media began reporting on the incident after dawn Sunday, approximately seven hours after the strike. The reports did not note, however, that the building collapsed a short time prior to Arab journalists’ arrival on the scene.

Now Israel has been forced to suspend its air strikes for 48 hours while it investigates the deaths at Qana. Whatever actually happened there, the fact is that despite the global opprobrium being heaped upon Israel —and despite the tragedies of civilian losses — the numbers of civilians who have been killed remain relatively small, compared with just about any wars elsewhere. This blog makes a striking comparison:

In July 1944, for instance, the RAF’s Bomber Command launched a ferocious attack on a narrow area of northern Caen in an attempt to break the German resistance, despite considerable doubts having been expressed over the utility of such an attack.

In all, 467 British Lancaster and Halifax heavy bombers dropped 2,276 tons of bombs, yet not one single dead German or any enemy equipment was found in the area that had been bombed. The French, however, were not so fortunate. Despite massive evacuations, many French civilians perished, estimated at between 3-400 to as many as 1,000. In all, French civilians killed in the Battle of Normandy are put at between 20,000 and 67,000.

Civilian casualties in war are always regrettable and the death toll in the Second World War is still subject to much debate. But, what is different now is that such casualties are being used actively as a weapon of war, where propaganda is as potent as bullets in achieving strategic aims.

Alan Dershowitz further points out says that Lebanon itself is not as innocent as it appears:

…the president of Lebanon Emile Lahoud is taking sides and flexing his nation’s muscle for the first time. He told a German magazine that he “respects Hizbullah” and its terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah, and he has threatened to turn the Lebanese army against Israel. This would cause a self-inflicted, and perhaps lethal, wound on Lebanon. Militias associated with several Lebanese political parties -including the party of the speaker of the parliament and of the Lebanese Communist Party - have already joined Hizbullah in attacking Israel.

… Intelligence sources have confirmed that elements of the Lebanese army have been working with Hizbullah terrorists from the beginning of this conflict, providing the terrorists with electronic, radar and other logistical supports. The Lebanese government is not as innocent - not as much of a victim - as it has gotten the international community and the media to believe. It is playing a dangerous and two-faced game of both sides against the middle.

Large segments of its Islamic population in Lebanon support Hizbullah, while much of its Christian population is terrified of the radical Islamic goals of Hizbullah but too intimidated to speak out. Israel and the United States do not want to turn Lebanese moderates into anti-Israel and anti-American zealots, but the tragic reality is that moderates have little influence in Lebanon these days.

For most of the British media, however, none of these facts can be allowed to challenge the narrative to which all developments must be fitted: that Israel is the aggressor, that it is using disproportionate force and that the innocent Lebanese are the victims of this war. As has been said here before, the fact that the Israelis are the truly innocent targets of unprovoked aggression in the pursuit of genocidal objectives to wipe them out is simply not accepted by such journalists, and therefore any facts which demonstrate that dreadful truth are simply not reported or buried and distorted out of recognition.

As Britons are thus incited more and more to hatred both of Israel and of Jews who are not queueing up to defame their own people, they are unaware of the extent to which the western journalists whose reports are so inflaming them are themselves being manipulated by Hezbollah. The lid of that sophisticated propaganda operation was briefly lifted here:

Writing on his blog Wednesday while reporting from southern Lebanon, freelance journalist and Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton, in what almost looked to be a throw-away line, relayed that ‘To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s passport, and they’ve already hassled a number of us and threatened one.’
This jogged our memory of some reports earlier in the week about how journalists are getting around parts of Lebanon, and how Hezbollah is trying to shape the coverage. One was an exchange on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources show on CNN, in which Kurtz interviewed CNN’s Nic Robertson about reporting from Lebanon. Just a few days before, Hezbollah minders had taken Robertson on a tour of a neighborhood in southern Beirut that had been hit by Israeli missiles.
Robertson told Kurtz, ‘Hezbollah has a very, very sophisticated and slick media operation,’ and in southern Beirut, ‘they deny journalists access into those areas. They can turn on and off access to hospitals in those areas.’ He also said that Hezbollah ‘designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath … Hezbollah is now running a number of [press tours] every day, taking journalists into this area. They realize that this is a good way for them to get their message out, taking journalists on a regular basis.’

And boy, are they getting their message out. Thus European journalists simply refuse to listen to evidence that Hezbollah are trying to murder the inhabitants of Israel rather than Israel trying to kill Lebanese civilians, as this witness testifies:

Being interviewed on a European radio station, the interviewer snarls at me when I mention that Haifa has a mixed Jewish/Arab population and that as we speak, many of them were sitting in bomb shelters together, hiding from Nasrallah’s rockets. I was surprised this information could be so irritating. I didn’t dare tell him about the guy who came up to me in downtown Haifa, showed my his bombed shop front and told me he was an Arab who wants the IDF to destroy the Hizbullah…

Back at the hotel, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy cowers in a doorway and British Foreign Office minister Kim Howells is rushed off by the security as the sirens go off again. As wailing continues, I can barely hear an editor from the German Bild, who phones me to demand why the IDF is acting aggressively.

Dusk and there’s another rocket attack on Haifa, a dozen meters from a major hospital. As a frail old woman is stretchered out of the bombed apartment in the run- down neighborhood, a British reporter asks me if it isn’t just a gas explosion, and seems disappointed when I identify a piece of Katyusha rocket.

The question that those screaming ‘disproportionality’ have to answer is just what they think is a proportionate response to the intention to commit genocide against the Jews– which is what Hezbollah stands for. Virtually nothing has been written in the British media about its leader, Nassan Hasrallah, who is by default being portrayed as some kind of resistance leader defending his people against Israeli aggression. CAMERA, the Committee for Accurate Reporting of the Middle East in America, has collated some of Nasrallah’s sayings about Israel and the Jews, from which one can see immediately that this is indeed a man hell-bent on genocide:

Within a month of Nasrallah’s taking over as leader, Hezbollah (with the help of Iranian intelligence) bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring over 200. The next attack perpetrated by Hezbollah—again with Iranian help—was the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 86 and injuring over 200.

The widening arena of Hezbollah’s attacks stemmed from Nasrallah’s perception that Jews anywhere are legitimate targets. In fact, Nasrallah has said:

‘If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.’ (Daily Star, Oct. 23, 2002)

Shiite scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb analyzed the anti-Jewish roots of Hezbollah ideology in her book Hezbollah: Politics & Religion. In it, she quotes Hassan Nasrallah describing his antipathy toward Jews:

‘If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.’ (New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2002)

Nasrallah also incorporates anti-Semitic rhetoric in speeches. For example, he has characterized Jews as the ‘grandsons of apes and pigs’ and ‘Allah’s most cowardly and greedy creatures.’ (MEMRI: Al- Manar, Feb. 3, 2006) Despite his anti-Semitic invective, there are few references to this in the main stream media.

The only thing that is disproportionate – and grotesquely, obscenely so – is the way in which so many in Britain and the west are determined to prevent Israel from defending itself against this terrible threat. And in doing so they fail to see that how gravely it threatens themselves, too. If Israel loses this fight against Iran’s proxy, those western imbeciles will have handed Iran and Islamist fascism a stunning victory against the entire free world. Every poisonous distortion in the British media brings that dreadful outcome one step nearer.