A certain news agency has received a deliberate leak from a US military intelligence official, apparently intended to deter Iran from pursuing its nefarious plans by making a public announcement that the US knows all about them and is prepared to counter them.

The report states that Iran’s elite Quds Force, with the help of Hezbollah, has been training Iraqi Shiite assassination teams in four locations. Their targets are to be “specific Iraqi officials as well as U.S. and Iraqi troops.”

Telegraph:

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have launched an urgent inquiry after a mysterious explosion wrecked a military convoy in Tehran, killing at least fifteen people and injuring scores more
The explosion took place in the Tehran suburb of Khavarshahar as the military convoy left a munitions’ warehouse controlled by the Revolutionary Guards. According to reports received by Western officials, the convoy was taking a consignment of military equipment to Hizbollah, the Shia Muslim militia Iran supports in southern Lebanon, when the explosion occurred.

Senior Revolutionary Guard commanders immediately imposed a news black-out following the explosion, even though it could be heard throughout the capital Tehran, and no details of the incident have so far appeared in the Iranian media.

But Western officials yesterday said they had received reports that the explosion took place in Tehran on July 19, and that the Revolutionary Guards had launched an investigation into the causes of the blast.

“This was a massive explosion that was heard throughout Tehran,” one official told the Daily Telegraph. “Even though lots of people were killed the Revolutionary Guards are trying to conceal what really happened.”

Iran is believed to have recently stepped up arms shipments to Hizbollah in preparation for any future armed confrontation with the West over its controversial nuclear enrichment programme.

Kudos to the foreign intelligence service, Israeli or American, responsible.

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report in Newsweek:

A former FBI agent who pleaded guilty Tuesday to fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship and then improperly accessing sensitive computer information about Hizbollah was working until about a year ago as a CIA spy assigned to Middle East operations, Newsweek has learned.

The stunning case of Nada Nadim Prouty, a 37-year-old Lebanese native who is related to a suspected Hizbollah money launderer, appears to raise a nightmarish question for U.S. intelligence agencies: Could one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups have infiltrated the U.S. government?

“I’m beginning to think it’s possible that Hizbollah put a mole in our government,” said Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism chief under Presidents Clinton and, until 2002, Bush. “It’s mind-blowing.”

A U.S. official familiar with the case said Tuesday that the government’s investigation has uncovered no evidence so far that Prouty, who was employed by the CIA until last week, had compromised any undercover operations or passed along sensitive intelligence information to Hizbollah operatives. After joining the CIA in June 2003, Prouty was an undercover officer for the agency’s National Clandestine Service, the espionage division, working on Middle East-related cases. She was reassigned to a less sensitive position about a year ago, after she first came under suspicion, officials said.

Read the whole thing. It does not sound good at all.

World Net Daily quotes a London Arab newspaper’s discussion of Iran’s well-funded, and long-in-the-preparation plans for a wave of retaliation against a Western strike on its nuclear weapons development program.

Tehran has recruited and funded eight Islamic fundamentalist organizations to undertake retaliatory strikes against U.S. and British military and economic interests across the Middle East – and perhaps in the U.S. and Europe – in the event Iran’s nuclear facilities are attacked, reports a London Arab daily, Asharq Al-Awsat.

The plan, which has been heavily funded and was created by a number of experts in guerilla warfare and terrorist operations, includes suicide attacks against U.S. and British targets in the region as well as their allies. According to information gleaned from a senior source in the Iranian armed forces’ joint chief of staff, logistical support for the groups that would participate in the plan comes from Brigadier General Qassim Suleimani of the of the Revolutionary Guards’ al Quds Brigades. ...

The leader of one of the Iraq groups that is part of the “Judgment Day” plan told the Iranians his men would turn Iraq into hell for Americans in the event of an attack on Iran. The Revolutionary Guards’ military training camps have been made available to Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Al Sadr has received more than $20 million from the Iranians.

Street-fighting training has been given in Isfahan, Iran, to members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as large sums of money and large quantities of arms.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recruited Imad Mugniyah, the Lebanese commander of Hezbollah’s overseas operations, to oversee retaliation against Western targets following any U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Officers sent to southern Lebanon last month are in command of more than 10 thousand rockets aimed at Israel’s cities. It is believed they’ve been given control of Hezbollah’s missiles to attack Israel if Iran’s nuclear sites are hit. U.S. officials and Israel intelligence sources believe Mugniyah is in charge of these operations.

“When and if the Iranians decide to hit the West in its soft belly, Imad will be the one to act,” a Western intelligence source said.

Approximately 80 members of Hezbollah received training last year in ultralight aircraft and undersea operations in order to carry out suicide attacks.

Implementation of the plan is set to begin immediately following a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities and would progress in six stages:

U.S. bases in Iraq and the Persian Gulf region to be struck by Iranian missiles.

Suicide attacks in a number of Muslim countries against U.S. embassies, military bases, economic and oil-related facilities tied to U.S. and British firms, and targets in countries allied with the U.S.

Attacks by Revolutionary Guards and Iraqi insurgents loyal to Iran against U.S. and British forces in Iraq.

Hundreds of rockets launched by Hezbollah against pre-selected targets in Israel.

If U.S. military attacks continue, more than 50 Shehab-3 missiles will be launched against Israel and 50 terrorist cells in the U.S., Canada and Europe will be given approval to launch attacks against civil and industrial targets in those countries.

As the crisis produced by the Iranian fanatics draws nearer to open conflict, the increasingly hysterical bleatings of this classical example of chattering class coward provide the near perfect note of ironic humor.

It is essential now for both sides to back down. No solution is possible if either side continues to insist that the other is completely in the wrong and they are completely in the right. And the first step towards finding a peaceful way out, is to acknowledge the self-evident truth that maritime boundaries are disputed and problematic in this area.

Both sides can therefore accept that the other acted in good faith with regard to their view of where the boundary was. They can also accept that boats move about and all the coordinates given by either party were also in good faith. The captives should be immediately released and, to international acclamation, Iran and Iraq, which now are good neighbours, should appoint a joint panel of judges to arbitrate a maritime boundary and settle this boundary dispute.

That is the way out. For the British to insist on their little red border line, or the Iranians on their GPS coordinates, plainly indicates a greater desire to score propaganda points in the run up to a war in which a lot of people will die, than to resolve the dispute and free the captives. The international community needs to put heavy pressure on both Britain and Iran to stop this mad confrontation.

Who knows? Perhaps Mr. Murray may yet have the personal opportunity one of these days to offer some suicidal Islamic terrorist one of those face-saving compromise proposals he’s so fond of during his last pathetic moments of earthly existence.

Richard Miniter warns that Iran have a network of sleeper cells inside the United States that could strike us if we bomb their nuclear facilities.

The consensus view among intelligence analysts, in and out of government, is Hezbollah maintains an extensive network inside the U.S. and Western Europe.

The sleepers in the U.S. may number as many as 800.

This has been the consensus view for some time. There are “hundreds” of Hezbollah members here, a U.S. official told USA Today on May 13, 2003. A senior FBI official told the paper that some 20 potential Hezbollah cells are being investigated.

Senator Bob Graham reiterated to the Miami Herald on Nov. 13, 2002: “recent warnings that Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, had a more established presence in the United States than al Qaeda, and was just as dangerous.” ...

Sen. Graham told the Miami Herald that Hezbollah has substantially greater numbers in the United States than al Qaeda.

Hezbollah has killed more Americans since 1982 than any other terrorist group, except al Qaeda.

Most of those are not “operational terrorists,” one American intelligence official cautioned Pajamas Media.

Many are here for illicit fundraising. Some channel donations from mosques or peddle videos and books. Others run criminal enterprises for the terror group, everything from car-theft rings to high-end cons.

One cell was involved in cigarette smuggling, capturing the difference between the wholesale price and the high-tax price paid by consumers. Cigarette taxes range from $1 to $3 per pack. The North Carolina cigarette operation was apprehended by the FBI and prosecuted by the Justice department.

Three Yemeni-born men in Rochester, New York were charged with funneling some $15 million to Hezbollah between 2002 and 2004, according to a filing at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York on Feb. 27, 2007. They were caught thanks to a sting operation by the FBI, conspiring to send $200,000 to Hezbollah. The three owned or operated delis, mini-marts and restaurants, from which they allegedly sold fake green cards and engaged in credit card fraud.

Other Hezbollah operatives are here to gather information on potential targets, searching for weak points in schools, malls and office towers.

Still others are foot soldiers who are loaned out Mexican drug cartels, where they serve as bodyguards and enforcers. The Mexicans call them “Turcos.”

Read the whole thing.

Six US helicopters have been shot down in Iraq during the last three weeks causing some of us to wonder what is producing this recent string of successes for our adversaries.

The not-necessarily-reliable Mossad-mouthpiece Depkafile claims to know the answer.

DEBKAfile’s sources in Tehran and Kurdistan disclose that, last month, two Iranian QW-1 and SA-7 missile consignments reached Iraqi insurgents allied with al Qaeda and one, radical Shiite Moqtada Sadr’s Shiite militia, the Mehdi Army. Israeli sources report the same anti-air weapons were delivered at about the same time to Hizballah units in Lebanon including the south.

Our military sources add that Iran’s arms industry has succeeded in replicating a quality version of the Chinese QW-1 and improved its electronics. It is 1.447meters long and packs 16.5 kilos of explosives. The IDF estimates that the first of these missiles used experimentally by Hizballah caused an Israeli helicopter to explode during take-off near the Litani River in the Lebanon War last summer.

Iranian markings have been erased from the equipment going into Iraq and Lebanon to suggest they were bought on the black market. Dated Soviet-era models of the SA-7 were indeed bought by Iran on Far East black markets and supplied to Iraqi insurgents and also pro-Tehran governors in western Afghanistan. Iran is preparing the ground for a Shiite insurgency against NATO forces there.

According to our sources, all three consignments to Iraq went through the North Iraqi Kurdistani town of Suleimaniya not far from the Iranian border. An Iranian clandestine center operates there like “the liaison center” the Americans raided in another Kurdish town, Irbil, last month. The Suleimaniya center operates with permission from Iraqi’s Kurdish president Jalal Talabani.

They weapons were smuggled in concealed compartments of trucks transporting building materials and iron from Iran for a Kurdish building company. After unloading their legitimate freight, the trucks drove on south up to the regional border where Iraqi insurgents off-loaded the missiles to their vehicles and distributed them to their networks in Baqouba, Ramadi and Tikrit — north of Baghdad and Hilla to the south.

In January, two-man teams of Iraqi insurgents and Hizballah operatives were trained in the use of the new weapons against American and Israeli helicopters as instructors for missile crews in Iraq and Lebanon. One crewman was taught to locate the target and help the second to aim. The training facilities were set up in Kermanshah and Qasr-e Shirin close to the Iraqi border.

Tehran is stepping up its provocations in reprisal for the US president George W. Bush’s directive to US forces to capture or kill Iranian agents, America’s refusal to release the Revolutionary Guards officers captured in Irbil and finally by the seizure last week of an Iranian diplomat in Baghdad.

Depkafile could be tellling the truth.

TCS Daily reports:

In a forthcoming study for the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, senior researcher Ely Karmon raises the alarming prospect of Hezbollah affiliated groups bringing the Lebanese terrorists’ brand of violence to the Americas. While acknowledging that it is too soon to draw clear conclusions about the nature and objectives of these Hezbollah “franchisees,” Karmon nonetheless notes that “successful campaigns of proselytism in the heart of poor indigene Indian tribes and populations by both Shi’a and Sunni preachers and activists” have contributed to the growing attraction of Islamist terrorist groups in Latin America. Karmon also observes that “there is a growing trend of solidarity between leftist, Marxist, anti-global and even rightist elements with the Islamists,” citing inter alia the September 2004 “strategy conference” of anti-globalization groups hosted by Hezbollah in Beirut.

Evidence of this was already available in the Washington Post’s front page coverage of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s September 22 mass rally, which mentioned that among those in attendance was a Lebanese expatriate who had flown in from Venezuela for the event and that “[a]t the mention of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a critic of America, cheers went up.”

As it happens, one month after the demonstration in Beirut, on October 23, Venezuelan police discovered two explosive devices near the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. According to a statement in El Universal from the acting police commissioner of the Baruta district, law enforcement officials arrested a man carrying a “backpack containing one hundred black powder bases, pliers, adhesive tape, glue, and electric conductors” who “admitted that the explosives had been set to detonate within fifteen minutes.” The man arrested was José Miguel Rojas Espinoza, a 26-year-old student at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, a Chávez-founded institution whose website proclaims that it offers a free “practical and on the ground education” contributing to “a more just, united, and sustainable society, world peace, and a new progressive and pluralist civilization.”

Two days after the failed bombing, a web posting by a group calling itself Venezuelan Hezbollah claimed—“in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful”—responsibility for the attack. The bombing was meant to publicize Venezuelan Hezbollah’s existence and its mission to “build an Islamic nation in Venezuela and all the countries of America,” under the guidance of “the ideology of the revolutionary Islam of the Imam Khomeini.”

DEBKAfile reports that American experts are currently in Israel looking at the Israeli EW experience during the fighting with Hezbollah.

The American EW experts are interested in four areas. 1. The Israeli EW systems’ failure to block Hizballah’s command and communications and the links between the Lebanese command and the Syria-based Iranian headquarters. 2. How Iranian technicians helped Hizballah eavesdrop on Israel’s communications networks and mobile telephones, including Israeli soldiers’ conversations from inside Lebanon. 3. How Iranian EW installed in Lebanese army coastal radar stations blocked the Barak anti-missile missiles aboard Israeli warships, allowing Hizballah to hit the Israeli corvette Hanith. 4. Why Israeli EW was unable to jam the military systems at the Iranian embassy in Beirut, which hosted the underground war room out of which Hassan Nasrallah and his top commanders, including Imad Mughniyeh, functioned.

Until the watershed date of July 12, 2006, when the Hizballah triggered the Lebanon War, Israel was accounted an important world power in the development of electronic warfare systems — so much so that a symbiotic relationship evolved for the research and development of many US and Israeli electronic warfare systems, in which a mix of complementary American and Israeli devices and methods were invested.

In combat against Hizballah, both were not only found wanting, but had been actively neutralized, so that none performed the functions for which they were designed. This poses both the US and Israel with a serious problem in a further round of the Lebanon war and any military clash with Iran.

DEBKAfile’s military sources add: Both intelligence services underestimated the tremendous effort Iran invested in state of the art electronic warfare gadgetry designed to disable American military operations in Iraq and IDF functions in Israel and Lebanon. Israel’s electronic warfare units were taken by surprise by the sophisticated protective mechanisms attached to Hizballah’s communications networks, which were discovered to be connected by optical fibers which are not susceptible to electronic jamming.

American and Israeli experts realize now that they overlooked the key feature of the naval exercise Iran staged in the Persian Gulf last April: Iran’s leap ahead in electronic warfare. They dismissed most the weapons systems as old-fashioned. But among them were the C-802 cruise missile and several electronic warfare systems, both of which turned up in the Lebanon war with deadly effect.

It appears to have been Charles Johnson who came across in a discussion on Lightstalkers.org, a photography forum, of the testimony of a first-hand witness of an exceptionally revolting form of photo fraud.
—spellings as found—

i have been working in lebanon since all this started, and seeing the behavior of many of the lebanese wire service photographers has been a bit unsettling. while hajj has garnered a lot of attention for his doctoring of images digitally, whether guilty or not, i have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were coreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in peoples arms. these photographers have come away with powerful shots, that required no manipulation digitally, but instead, manipulation on a human level, and this itself is a bigger ethical problem.

by Bryan Denton Fri Aug 11 07:36:08 UTC 2006 | Beirut, Lebanon

Matthew Sheffield has compiled a nice collection of links to exposés of faked photojournalism from Lebanon.

Be sure to catch the German television news magazine Zapp’s video of Green Helmet guy acting as director.

Last month (7/19), we reported on Human Rights Watch’s protest over the use of ball bearings as shrapnel in Hezbollah’s rocket warheads.

Lenny Maschkowski, an ordinary Israeli, took a number of photographs in the vicinity of Haifa, and sent these images to Bert de Briun, a friend of his wife who blogs at Dutchblog Israel.

Mr. Maschkowski’s photos demonstrate very eloquently just how physically destructive are the attacks being conducted by Hezbollah upon Israeli civilians.

Thane Rosenbaum, in the Wall Street Journal, begins coming to his senses.

Many Jews are in my position—the children and grandchildren of labor leaders, socialists, pacifists, humanitarians, antiwar protestors—instinctively leaning left, rejecting war, unwilling to demonize, and insisting that violence only breeds more violence. Most of all we share the profound belief that killing, humiliation and the infliction of unnecessary pain are not Jewish attributes.

However, the world as we know it today—post-Holocaust, post-9/11, post-sanity—is not cooperating. Given the realities of the new Middle East, perhaps it is time for a reality check. For this reason, many Jewish liberals are surrendering to the mindset that there are no solutions other than to allow Israel to defend itself—with whatever means necessary. Unfortunately, the inevitability of Israel coincides with the inevitability of anti-Semitism.

This is what more politically conservative Jews and hardcore Zionists maintained from the outset. And it was this nightmare that the Jewish left always refused to imagine. So we lay awake at night, afraid to sleep. Surely the Arabs were tired, too. Surely they would want to improve their societies and educate their children rather than strap bombs on to them.

If the Palestinians didn’t want that for themselves, if building a nation was not their priority, then peace in exchange for territories was nothing but a pipe dream. It was all wish-fulfillment, morally and practically necessary, yet ultimately motivated by a weary Israeli society—the harsh reality of Arab animus, the spiritual toll that the occupation had taken on a Jewish state battered by negative world opinion.

The Jewish left is now in shambles. Peace Now advocates have lost their momentum, and, in some sense, their moral clarity. Opinion polls in Israel are showing near unanimous support for stronger incursions into Lebanon. And until kidnapped soldiers are returned and acts of terror curtailed, any further conversations about the future of the West Bank have been set aside.

Not unlike the deep divisions between the values of red- and blue-state America, world Jewry is being forced to reconsider all of its underlying assumptions about peace in the Middle East. The recent disastrous events in Lebanon and Gaza have inadvertently created a newly united Jewish consciousness—bringing right and left together into one deeply cynical red state.

Brave insurgent defending burning Lebanon against Israeli warplanes.

But, oops! he’s really posing in front of burning garbage at the local dump.

Thomas S., an Allahpundit reader catches US News falling for a faked photo.

Michelle Malkin covers this one, and another new one which appears to incorporate an underwear model as victim.

And be sure not to miss Michelle’s latest video on the Reuters photos: Picture Kill. It offers another excellent Malkin-special summary.

In a related inside look at the Chinese strategic viewpoint, Confidential Reporter posted on Sunday:

China Confidential has learned that Beijing remains confident that Hezbollah will prevail—politically, if not militarily—in the current conflict, strengthening Iran’s regional influence and prestige. People’s Liberation Army analysts contend that Hezbollah cannot be truly defeated and disarmed without World War II-style flattening of the 20 or more Lebanese villages in which Hezbollah hides and houses its Iranian-supplied missiles. An aerial bombardment of this magnitude would almost certainly result in massive civilian casualties—which increasingly isolated Israel can’t afford.

Therefore, PLA strategists are said to argue, Israel is restrained by sensitivity to world opinion from militarily crushing its enemy.

The analysis conforms with PLA theories of “unrestricted warfare,” including terrorism, information war, and “lawfare,” which in principle make it possible for smaller, technologically disadvantaged forces to fight—and defeat—great powers.

There is obviously a great deal of validity to the Chinese analysis.

Little Green Footballs publishes latest Adnan Hajj photo from Beirut (sent by reader humblegunner).

Rusty Shackleford debunks another Adnan Hajji modified photo. This plane may have been dropping bombs. The missiles are clearly an addition, but one bomb is too, so (in the end) there’s cause to wonder: were there any real bombs at all?

From Cox & Forkum.

This poor woman laments the destruction of her home in Southern Beirut by Israeli bombing, 22 July 2006. Reuters via Yahoo News.

And then, what do you know?

Here’s the same poor woman reacting to the destruction of her house in the suburbs of Beirut 05 August 2006. AP via Yahoo News.

Isn’t it an amazing coincidence?
——————————————Hat tip to Drinking From Home who provides close-up facial photos, demonstrating the presence of the same mark and the same scar firmly establishing the identity of the woman in both photos as the same, and who observes mildly:

Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home-owner in Beirut, or something isn’t quite right.

Scott Johnson at Powerline comes through with a link to a gallery of the work of the same photographer.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has another scalp to hang on his barn door, next to Dan Rather’s.

Yesterday, LGF identified Photoshop-manipulated imagery in the Reuters’ photograph of alleged “burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006.”

Charles Johnson is an experienced photographer, and knowledgeable Photoshop user, and was readily able to recognize repetitive smoke patterns produced by application of the Photoshop clone tool.

Reuters has since admitted that LGF was right, and withdrawn the photo. Interestingly, Ynet.news reports that the photographer responsible was also the source of many of the photographs from Qana, also demonstrated by bloggers (specifically by EU Referendum) to have been staged.

Score two major Blogosphere corrections of the MSM falling for Hezbollah propaganda tricks in under a week.

Berkeley graduate student Cecilia Lucas was moved by the revolutionary struggle of the Shiite people of Palestine to put pen to paper and produce this poem:

I Don’t Want to Love You, But I Do

You were born out of death to a life in a cage
Where bombs are not the only reason people die
Fed by the violence of hunger and homelessness
Raised by colonialism
Your heart and your will still grew strong

You scare me
Not just because they tell me to be scared
Not just because they repeat, repeat, repeat
The story of 1983
Begging me to understand
Americans are worth more than Lebanese….

And so on.

And the older, and more cynical, Iowahawk was moved to respond.

You were born in the Valley to a life in a suburban cage
Encino, where mean girls and cheerleaders
Drop bombs of hate on the unpopular girls
Shy poetry club chicks like you
With 1480 SATs and early admission to Berkeley
Fed by the violence and lookism of the dance squad
Raised in a four bedroom colonial
They wouldn’t let you wear your Che T-shirt to prom
But your heart and your armpit hair still grew proud and strong

You scare me too
Not just because you have that Code Pink Manson girl freak-vibe
Not just because you repeat, repeat, repeat
All those quotes from your dog-eared volumes of Chomsky
and Zinn
and Edward Said
Begging me to understand
Can’t we just hold each other
Instead of talking, talking, talking
About your Masters thesis?

And so on.

Hat tip to David Ross.

Vital Perspectives has a video of the IDF raid on Baalbek which took five Hezbollah prisoners, killed a number of terrorists, and captured a trove of Hezbollah documents.

Thomas Lifson, at American Thinker, raises the question of the complicity of mainstream Western Press with the deliberate murder of their own people by terrorists for propaganda purposes.

Something is very, very wrong with the reporting on Qana, for the moment, the worldwide symbol of Hezbollah’s media offensive. It is already reasonably clear that major media photographers were willingly made into tools of propaganda, accomplices in the hideous desecration of corpses of children. The timing of the building collapse hours after the actual air attack raises very awkward questions. Why were women and children kept inside the building for so long? Were they murdered?

Now, the previously-announced toll of 57 appears to be as phony as the picture of the dust-covered baby with a sparking clean pacifier.

But, as Charles Johnson reports, the wire services responsible for disseminating the staged photos are refusing to admit the obvious.

Egyptian Blogger Sandmonkey notes (with refreshing honesty) the results of an informal local opinion poll taken by himself.

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a co-worker, on the concept of the disporportinate Israeli attacks on Lebanon compared to Hezbollah attacks. He pointed to me his dismay at Hezbollah’s rockets inefficiency at hitting targets. He said “If you noticed, they bomb each other almost equally in amounts of missiles shot, but 90% of Hezbollah’s rockets miss or hit nothing, while all of Israel’s rockets hit something. If Hezbollah had better rockets, the civillian death toll on the Israeli side would be huge, and they would be really hurting by now.”

Impressed by this point of view that I haven’t considerd before, I asked him what he would’ve thought, if a Hezbollah rocket had attacked a building in Israel, killing 55 civillians, of which 30 were children. He responded immeidtely “I would’ve thought it was great! A7san!”.

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…

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?

I am just wondering!

What do you think?

Reuven Koret makes the case that the whole Qana affair was staged.

On the morning of July 30, according to the IDF, the air force came in three waves. In the first, between midnight and one in the morning, there was a strike at or near the building that eventually collapsed.

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 was a second strike at other targets far from the collapse building several hours later, and a third strike at around 7:30 in the morning. There too the nearest hit was some 460 meters away, according to the IDF. But first reports of a building collapse came only around 8 am…

Thus there was an unexplained 7 to 8 hour gap between the time of the helicopter strike and the building collapse. Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters, in a press briefing, told journalists that “the attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear.” ..

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.

Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning?

National Public Radio’s correspondent reported that residents of that building had left and the victims were non-residents who chose to shelter in the building that night. They were “too poor” to leave the down, one resident told CNN’s Wedeman. Who were these people?

What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did, in droves.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.

Rescue workers filmed as they went carried the victims on the stretchers, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead.

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.

The well-documented use by Palestinians of this kind of faked footage—from the alleged shooting of Mohammed Dura in Gaza, scenes from Jenin of “dead” victims falling off gurneys and then climbing back on—have merited the creation of a new film genre called “Palliwood.”

Richard at EU Referendum documents the manipulative use of the body of a child casualty in photograph after carefully staged propaganda photograph (published uncritically by the media around the world).

Follow up on Mr. Green Helmet.

Ynet news story (complete with video of rockets being fired from Qana):

An IDF investigation has found that the building in Qana struck by the Air Force fell around eight hours after being hit by the IDF.

“The attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear,” Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters told journalists at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, following the incidents at Qana.

Eshel and the head of the IDF’s Operational Branch, Major General Gadi Eisnkot said the structure was not being attacked when it collapsed, at around 8:00 in the morning.

The IDF believes that Hizbullah explosives in the building were behind the explosion that caused the collapse.

Another possibility is that the rickety building remained standing for a few hours, but eventually collapsed.

But chances are good that the whole incident is another manufactured event, staged for the benefit of the gaping morons of the world press, who obligingly report whatever terrorists give them.

The media, the Lebanese Red Cross, and the government of Lebanon are all playing Hezbollah’s game by pointing to civilian casualties and whining over the Israeli bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana, a base used to fire hundreds of rockets at Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert inappropriately expressed “great sorrow” for the airstrikes, which could only have produced civilian casualties among Hezbollah supporters who deliberately ignored leaflets and other warnings from the Israeli Defense Forces to evacuate the war zone.

AP

At least one media voice is reporting the truth, the Australian Herald Sun has published a series of photographs of the cowardly insurgents deliberately hiding (with heavy weapons) in residential areas, titled Photos that damn Hezbollah .

Do not miss this Israeli war song with a catchy beat.

Chorus:

Yalla ya Nasrallah, we will screw you Inshallah
We’ll send you back to Allah with all the Hezbollah

video – (Hebrew, with English subtitles)
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Hat tip to Sondra K, who gives it a 10.

BREAKING NEWS

AP reports that the government of Lebanon has announced Hezbollah’s acceptance of a peace proposal: