Mike's Noise

The Qana Controversy

The controversy surrounding this past weekend's events in the Lebanese city of Qana is, so far, perhaps the most potentially damning episode to emerge from the month-long hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.

On Sunday, Israel bombed what it believed to be a Hezbollah stronghold in Qana.  In the aftermath of the raid, a high-rise apartment building collapsed, killing over 50 women and children. 

The Israeli air force released a statement acknowledging that they had targeted the area, but insisting that the time of the attack was at least 8 hours before the building was said to have collapsed.  The IDF also speculated that explosives stored by Hezbollah in the building may have triggered its collapse:

While the entire Israeli political echelon expressed regret for the results of the strike, Air Force Chief of Staff Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel said Sunday night that ... close to 150 Katyusha rockets had been fired from the Lebanese village over the past 20 days. Hizbullah had hidden rocket launchers, Eshel said, in civilian buildings in the village. Video footage he presented at a press conference in Tel Aviv Sunday night showed rocket launchers being driven into the village following attacks on northern Israel.

The rescue effort at the collapsed building proved to be an enormous spectacle for press photographers.  And eventually, bloggers began examining the photos and immediately smelled something fishy:

... 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.

The English blog EU Referendum has been the leading voice of critical analysis regarding the events at Qana as portrayed by press photographers.  Their first article, "Rescue Workers" Pose with Dead Babies for Media Photos, attempted to arrange numerous Qana photos by "time stamp," and concluded that it was possible that the same bodies had been photographed by numerous press agencies hours apart.  Who Is This Man introduced us to the ubiquitous "Green Helmet," a flak-helmeted rescue worker who appears in dozens of photos taken at various Lebanese locations during the past few weeks.

The AP attempted to defend itself against EU Referendum's allegations; their response is rebutted nicely in EU Referendum's post Game, Set, and Match.  And EU Referendum asks more questions in We Need To Know The Truth.

I would strongly encourage you to read these posts and look at the photographs.  For the record, Israel is now backing off from its earlier statements accusing Hezbollah of launching rockets from Qana -- though MSNBC is reporting that Hezbollah used the neighborhood that was bombed as a base of operations.  Obviously there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

Yet an AP editor had the gall to respond to EU Referendum's questions by stating, "I also know from 30 years of experience in this business that you can't get competitive journalists to participate in the kind of (staging) experience that is being described."

Funny, but that ain't the way I 'heared' it ...

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs sums it up nicely: "It’s one of the most repellent exhibitions of blatant, in your face, inhumanly calloused propaganda I’ve seen in quite a few years of exposure to the stuff."

We will probably never know the whole truth about what happened in Qana.  And it breaks my heart to suggest that anyone would stoop so low as to stockpile bodies and then parade them around in front of a pack of press photographers.  But so far, the evidence seems to make a compelling case that this is precisely what happened.

What a sick, sinful, and twisted world we live in.

Hezbollah is responsible for Lebanese civilian deaths

Over the weekend Drudge linked to this article published in Australia by the Sunday Herald Sun.  Accompanying the article were these three photographs of Hezbollah fighters, taken by an Australian journalist and smuggled out of the country:

These photos clearly depict Hezbollah terrorists wearing civilian clothing and transporting arms through residential neighborhoods.  The article further explains:

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."

The release of the images comes as Hezbollah faces criticism for allegedly using innocent civilians as "human shields". (emphasis added)

Anyone wanting to point fingers and make accusations over 'war crimes' ought to start with Hezbollah, who routinely violate established rules of war by disguising themselves as civilians, using civilians for cover, and using residential neighborhoods to stash weapons, thus setting the Israelis up to fire on civilians and UN workers.

Everything you need to know about Hezbollah and the UN

It's in this photograph, courtesy of Michelle Malkin:

Author Jed Babbin explains the photograph:

On page 155 of my book, "Inside the Asylum," is a picture of a U.N. outpost on that border. The U.N. flag and the Hezbollah flag fly side by side. Observers told me the U.N. and Hezbollah personnel share water and telephones, and that the U.N. presence serves as a shield against Israeli strikes against the terrorists.

And let's not forget this sad episode, in which the UN actively shielded Hezbollah from Israeli retaliation after Hezbollah terrorists kidnapped and murdered three Israeli soldiers in 2001.

The UN and Hezbollah have an uncomfortably close relationship, further aided by the fact that the bungling Europeans who run the UN would rather walk over hot coals than admit to mistakes or biases.

And if you have a minute, check out the official Hezbollah flag:

Yep, that's an uplifted hand clutching an AK-47.  Radical Islam -- truly a religion of peace.

ADDED: JayTea at WizBang has a pretty good post summarizing the historical relationship between Hezbollah and the UN, and posits a well-reasoned explanation as to why Israel accidentally (?) struck a UN observer post on Tuesday.

And now we know that Hezbollah terrorists were "all over" the UN post before it was hit.

MORE: From Debbie Schlussel, a nice photo of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan:

And courtesy of a Michelle Malkin reader, a timely cartoon:

(It's A Gnat! It's A Fly! It's UN MAN!)

Whoops!  That cartoon was drawn by -- hold your breath --  Pat Oliphant and published in 1972, obviously long before Pat came down with BDS.

Who is Hezbollah? Why are they here?

Iranian commentator Amir Taheri has some answers:

‘You are the sun of Islam, shining on the universe!” This is how Muhammad Khatami, the mullah who was president of Iran until last year, described Hezbollah last week. It would be no exaggeration to describe Hezbollah — the Lebanese Shi’ite militia — as Tehran’s regional trump card. Each time Tehran has played it, it has won. As war rages between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Tehran policymakers think that this time, too, they can win.

“I invite the faithful to wait for good news,” Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last Tuesday. “We shall soon witness the elimination of the Zionist stain of shame.”

... Terror has been [Hezbollah's] principal weapon. Throughout the 1980s Hezbollah kidnapped more than 200 foreign nationals in Lebanon, most of them Americans or western Europeans (including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy). It organised the hijacking of civilian aircraft and more or less pioneered the idea of suicide bombings against American and French targets, killing almost 1,000 people, including 241 US marines in Beirut and 58 French paratroopers.

... When it took over southern Lebanon, Hezbollah found a territory devastated by years of domination by the Palestinian al-Fatah (the area had once been called Fatahland) and the Israeli invasion of 1982. There were almost no schools, no hospitals, few jobs and certainly no security.

Hezbollah provided all that. At the same time the movement imposed a strict religious code that gave the poor Shi’ites a sense of moral superiority over other Lebanese who aspired after western lifestyles. A generation of Shi’ites in southern Lebanon has grown up in a world shaped by Hezbollah’s radical ideology.

... The mini war that is taking place between Israel and Hezbollah is, in fact, a proxy war in which Iran’s vision for the Middle East clashes with the administration in Washington. What is at stake is not the exchange of kidnapped Israeli soldiers with Arab prisoners in Israel. Such exchanges have happened routinely over five decades. The real issue is who will set the agenda for the Middle East: Iran or America?

Make no mistake: if Israel fails to destroy Hezbollah, radical Islamists (and especially the fundamentalist government of Iran) will waste no time assuring themselves that victory over their infidel enemies -- America and the Jews --  is all but certain.  And there is no telling how wreckless they will be in carrying out future terror attacks, perhaps with chemical or nuclear weapons.

Attrition and idiocy in the Middle East

It looks like the war being fought by Israel against Hezbollah and Hamas is going to end up being a war of attrition.  Already Israel is indicating that Hezbollah is running out of long-range rockets.

Under the old "shoot and run" protracted war plan, the one devised by Communist and Islamic terrorists during the last 50 years and used with great effectiveness by Hezbollah, the terrorists mounted a low-key, though continuous, series of attacks against a much more powerful enemy.  When the powerful enemy retaliated with overwhelming force, the terrorists begged for mercy from the international community and accused their enemy of a "disproportionate response" -- all the while continuing to amass stockpiles of war materiel and recruit new fighters.

But Israel has taken the fight to Hezbollah; instead of honoring Hezbollah's protracted timetable, Israel is simply saying, "Wanna piece of me?  Then we fight right now and we're going to throw everything we've got at you."  Under this accelerated war scheme, Israel hopes to put Hezbollah in a real bind, because they believe that Hezbollah is neither equipped nor trained to take on the Israeli military in a head-on conventional battle.

Ultimately, Israel's long-range goal for this short war seems to be the decimation of Hezbollah -- its leaders killed or in hiding, its small arms and ammunition depleted or destroyed, its larger more threatening weapons like Katyusha rockets either depleted or destroyed, and its ability to rearm itself severely crippled through destruction of roadways, airstrips, and through international pressure against the nations supplying the arms.  Then Israel will consider discussing a "peace" plan.

Israel is taking care of the attrition part quite handily, though they are destroying a great deal of civilian infrastructure and taking a great number of civilian lives in the process.  The United States hopes to put together an "umbrella" of nations that will provide international pressure on Hezbollah and on the nations who are supplying them with arms.  If Hezbollah has few arms and no powerful long-range rockets with which to threaten anyone, these two plans just might work.

And I desperately want to see both Hezbollah and Hamas go down in flames.

But over at Hot Air, Allah isn't so sure.  He thinks that Israel has been less-than-successful so far, and that international pressure will hamper Israel before they get the job done anyway.  He also wonders how effective this war will be against the real powers behind Hezbollah and Hamas: Syria and especially Iran. 

Iran is the ascendant power in the region and they wouldn’t hesitate to have [Syria's] Assad replaced with a more cooperative, um, puppet if he made a move towards cutting off Hezbollah.

I wonder if Syria or Iran would be crazy enough to start openly pulling triggers themselves?

And did you read that John F. Kerry believes that if he were president, none of this would be happening?  Really now.  But for the real stunner, you have to read his remarks:

"The president has been so absent on diplomacy when it comes to issues affecting the Middle East," Kerry said. "We're going to have a lot of ground to make up (in 2008) because of it."

... "This is about American security and Bush has failed. He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq.…We have to destroy Hezbollah," he said.

So is Kerry saying that he would have pulled out of Iraq and instead invaded Syria and Lebanon?  And al-Qaeda wouldn't have responded to something like that?  I guess he would have invaded diplomatically though, no doubt with the help of France and Germany and Russia -- certainly not like that clod Bush who won't talk to anyone but Israel. 

And this guy wonders why he lost two years ago?

ADDED: Ralph Peters, whom I admire greatly, also thinks Israel could lose their battle with Hezbollah, pointing out that Israel's usually spot-on intelligence failed to detect the new weapons -- including cruise missiles -- that Iran and Syria have provided for Hezbollah, and reasoning, "If Hezbollah can hide rockets, Iran can hide nukes."  He is also critical of Israel's over-reliance on air strikes and artillary bombardments.

Of course you know this means war ...

I suppose that at one time or another each of us uses humor in order to partially deflect the severity of a tense situation.

There is obviously nothing funny about what is going on in Middle East right now, with Israel fighting Hamas and Hezbollah on two fronts (Gaza and southern Lebanon), Hamas ambushing Israeli forces again and kidnapping two more Israeli soldiers, and Syria and Iran trying to figure out a way to declare Israel's military actions against Hamas and Hezbollah as a proxy war against their sovereign nations.

Today's raid on a home in Gaza today by Israel is probably a foretaste of what is to come -- Israeli warplanes bombed the home because Hamas was using the residence to plan military operations.  Of course Hamas leaders failed to evacuate civilians from the home or from surrounding areas, so women and children were killed in the attack, and dozens were wounded.  I am saddened by such an event, but ultimately the responsibility falls on Hamas, who refused to evacuate the women and children, and on the adults, particularly the mothers, who chose to stay in the company of terrorists with their children.

There is a darker view of this as well -- the notion that Hamas wants as many civilian deaths as possible at the hands of Israel, simply because photos of dead children make great television and further solidify the hatred of Muslims (and Western liberals) for Israel.

I blogged earlier that these attacks by Hamas were an attempt to test Israel, now that Israel has lost the heroic Ariel Sharon as its prime minister.  But there can be no doubt that Israel knew all along that the only reason the Palestinians wanted the Gaza Strip all to themselves was so they could turn it into a giant terror operations base and training camp.  Now that Hamas has committed acts of war against Israel, Israel finally has a good reason to attack and destroy both the Hamas infrastructure in Gaza and the Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon.  Unfortunately the only language that Muslim terrorists seem to speak is the language of violence, and Israel seems poised to unleash Hell upon them.

I look at this situation and wonder why Christian organizations like Christian Peacemaker Teams and liberal or "blue" Christians have not been flocking to the West Bank and Gaza in force, trying to teach the Palestinians about non-violence and peace.  If (as Palestinians and their ardent supporters claim) the Israelis only know how to react to Palestinian problems with violence, then a peaceful campaign of non-violence would stymie Israel and could accomplish more good in five years than terrorism has accomplished in the last sixty.  I am not the only one who has articulated this idea.  But I surely would like to see someone seriously try it.

Sadly though, I am reminded of the words of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us."

Let us pray that this conflict is ended as soon as possible with as little bloodshed as possible.  Pray that God would change the hearts of the Palestinians and move them toward a non-violent solution to their dilemma.

If you thought The Church Lady was scary ...

Crikey!

Somali Muslims who fail to perform daily prayers will be killed in accordance with Qur'anic law under a new edict issued by a leading cleric in the Islamic courts union that controlled the capital.

The requirement for Muslims to observe the five-times daily ritual under penalty of death was announced late on Wednesday and appeared to confirm the hardline nature of the increasingly powerful Sharia courts in Mogadishu.

Sheikh Abdalla Ali, a founder and high-ranking official in the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia, said: "He who does not perform prayers will be considered as infidel and Sharia law orders that that person be killed."

And hard-core Christian-hating Leftists are more afraid of James Dobson and Pat Robertson than they are of radical Islamists.  (*sigh*)

Also, lots of folks think that Somalia will soon be "the new Afghanistan."  They already have the terrorist training camps.  It surely looks like they are heading in that direction.

(h/t Smartchristian.com)

One year ago today - London subway bombings

Today is the one year anniversary of the London subway (or "tube") bombings by Islamic terrorists.

Michelle Malkin is busy working on the mother of all blogger round-ups.  She highlights this noteworthy comment by Andrew Ian Dodge:

I am still incensed that the Muslim community spends more time whingeing about “islamophobia” than they do trying to route out extremism. I am incensed that whenever question about terrorist attacks by young British Muslims is posed Muslim representatives seem to be far more keen to blame Pres. Bush, Blair, Sharon or anyone else than the evil in their midst.

Also noteworthy: Drudge is reporting today that the FBI, working with international law enforcement, has uncovered a plot to bomb NYC's Holland Tunnel.  And get this:

Counterterrorism officials are alarmed by the "lone wolf" terror plot because they allegedly got a pledge of financial and tactical support from Jordanian associates of top terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before he was killed in Iraq, a counterterrorism source told The News. (emphasis added)

Financial support.  But of course the liberal know-it-alls decided that our efforts to keep an eye on international financial transactions were simply a waste of time, so bye-bye banking surveillance program. 

And obviously we got word of this plot through intercepted communications -- more evidence that the phone surveillance program was working before it too was torpedoed by the New York Times.

Fortunately we stopped this one, but how many more terrorist plots slipped through our fingers just so the New York Times could win a Pulitzer?

LaShawn Barber and Captain Ed have more.

Added: Kim Priestap at WizBang links to this post by AJ Strata, who shares my concern about the loss of our valuable terrorist communications and bank surveillance programs.

Flashbacks:
Terror In London
7/8/05 blogging roundup and my comments
London Hit Again - 7/21/05
The Wrong Man
Bomb confiscated in London packed with nails and rat poison

John Allen Muhammad - scary as hell

Have you been following the trial of John Allen Muhammad, the notorious "DC Sniper"?  This week Muhammed's accomplice Lee Malvo testified against him:

Testifying today in Maryland at the trial of fellow sniper John Muhammad in six of the deaths, Malvo testified that Muhammad was planning to extort millions of dollars from authorities. He says Muhammad wanted to use the money to set up a camp, and train children how to terrorize cities and "shut things down."

  And Malvo says he believed Muhammad -- calling him "a man of his word."

He says Muhammad told him he wanted to shoot as many as six people a day each day for 30 days in the Washington area, and then target children and police officers with explosives. (emphasis added)

Muhammad is a Gulf War Vet.  But more importantly he is a prison convert to radical Islam.

Few people want to talk about the dangerous radical Islam that is spreading in our prisons, mostly among African-Americans.  But we had better start paying attention soon.

Muhammad was a domestic Islamic terrorist and a natural-born US citizen.  He is the primary example of why our government is engaged in domestic surveilence -- even of US citizens -- as a part of its efforts to curtail terrorism.

We should not forget John Allen Muhammad.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has more about these two ghouls, including the creepy cartoons drawn by Lee Malvo while he sat in prison.

What Zacharias Moussaoui and Atwar Bahjat teach us about life and death

Last week, a United States Federal jury decided against giving the death penalty to Zacharias Moussaoui, the terror suspect arrested a few weeks before 9/11, and the poster child for Homeland Security and the Patriot Act.  Moussaoui's laptop computer contained critical information about Al Qaeda operatives working in the US, including several terrorists who would go on to play a part in the 9/11 hijackings, but government red tape prevented the FBI from searching Moussaoui's laptop until after 9/11.

Conservatives were outraged at the jury's decision.  Undoubtedly there is a large number of people (including myself at times) who wish to see someone held accountable for the death and destruction of 9/11.  But apparently Moussaoui's jury felt that they had insufficient evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Moussaoui had accurate foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and could have prevented them, had he cooperated with authorities.  That was the centerpiece of the charges against him.

Many have argued that Moussaoui's trial actually served a higher purpose by allowing him to betray the "warrior" image commonly ascribed to jihadis in favor of his own personality -- a shallow, loudmouth punk unworthy of a "martyr's" death.  But whatever the circumstances, I can live with the jury's decision.

Conservatives argue that once again, the jury's verdict causes the United States to appear "soft" and "uncomitted" in our efforts to fight terrorism.  But I don't think a Moussaoui death sentence would have in any way affected the image of the US in the eyes of radical Islamists, who have considered us to be soft and cowardly ever since Jimmy Carter ran from a direct confrontation with the Iranians over twenty five years ago.

Rather, I am pleased to live in a nation that routinely chooses to deal with the problem of evil in ways other than death.  The same thing can't be said for radical Islamists.