The Qana Hoax?

Some additional facts have come out about the supposed "Qana Massacre" that don't quite square with the Enemy Media template of this incident in the Battle of Lebanon.

Per Powerline:

***The Jerusalem Post reports that....

Some 150 rockets were fired from the Lebanese village of Qana over the past twenty days, Air Force Chief of Staff Brigadier-General Amir Eshel said on Sunday evening.

Speaking to reporters, Eshel added that Hizbullah rocket launchers were hidden in civilian buildings in the village. He proceeded to show video footage of rocket launchers being driven into the village following launches.

***The IDF dropped a blizzard of leaflets warning residents of Qana to leave and didn't know that refugees were in the same building where Hezbollah terrorists were hiding.

Per Confederate Yankee:

***The ASSociated Press story on the IAF's Qana strike makes it sound like the the Israeli missile demolished the three-story house in question on impact (~1 AM local time Sunday morning). Yet in reality the house didn't collapse for another seven hours, meaning that there was ample time for all the occupants to get out safely. So why were they still inside the house?

***Of the fifty-six reported dead, forty-six were emphasized as being "women and children" but none of the men were identified or even discussed. Rather odd if these were all innocent civilians.

***The pattern of Hezbollah rocket attacks is incriminatingly familiar:

In Qana this morning, the Katyusha squads took their rocket launchers and rockets from inside the buildings, fired off the rockets at Israel and then rushed back inside.

C.Y. puts all these pieces together and gets a very different picture from the tiresome Enemy Media template:

It seems increasingly probable that the Shalhoub and Hashem men were likely members of Hezbollah, involved in launching the very rockets at Israel that called in the counter-battery fire that killed their families that were hiding deeper in the building.

It also seems possible that the deaths of the Shalhoub and Hashem women and children came not as a result of the initial Israeli air strike, but because of secondary explosions more than seven hours later, explosions that would seem to be consistent with ammunition and rockets "cooking off."

Again I ask: why were all those women and children still inside that building seven full hours after the Israeli missile strike? Isn't it obvious? Their Hezbo heads of households sacrificed them as propaganda weapons to halt the IDF's counter-attack that their Katyushas never could. Nothing blinds the ever-gullible Western press like dead women and children in the general vicinity of Israeli military action. Just like NBA referees never see the first elbow but always see the retaliation, so the Enemy Media has its anti-Israel template, and these Hezbos exploited it to the hilt.

So, once again, Israel - the victim of Muslim aggression in the form of deliberate attacks upon its civilian population - is framed as the villainous slayer of Lebanese waifs. A scam played out countless times over the past quarter century that never seems to lose its effectiveness.

That is why I don't share Jeb Babbin's angst over the Israelis' failure to take on the public relations side of the conflict. Not that the IDF shouldn't be doing all that it can to make its own case and try and spin events in their favor as much as possible, but really, as Mark Levin cynically observes, as stacked as the global deck is against the Jewish state, how much of a difference would a few more press conferences really make?

And besides, as I've noted just recently, what does the jaundiced opinion of the "international community" matter anyway? There's only one other country's opinion that truly matters for the Jews' fate, and as long as George Bush maintains his resolve, all the phony outrage in the world will be just the despicable gasbaggery it truly is.