Truth always hurts

From The Herald Sun, July 28, 2006 12:00am, by Andrew Bolt ...

There has been a parade of prejudice, but I will show that terrorists were shooting from the UN posts, counting on Israel to not dare shoot back......Papers such as the The Age treated Israel's accidental shelling of a United Nations observer post as a deliberate war crime -- when, as I'll show below, terrorists were shooting from these very posts, thinking Israel would not dare shoot back.

Meanwhile, newspaper cartoonists draw these wicked Jews as Nazis, gloating ambulance bombers and implacable baby-killers. So ask these critics what Israel should do instead against an Islamist terror statelet next door that is astonishingly well-armed with missiles, and which hides among civilians.

....Here's what they really think it should do. It should wait quietly in some no-trouble queue, as Jews did at the gates of Nazi camps, while their neighbours invent what they need to wipe out their country for ever.

...What you are too rarely told is that Hezbollah is a terror group created in part by Iran, funded by Iran and still armed by Iran. And Iran, an Islamist regime, has glowing, smoking plans for Israel. Its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has urged Iranians to prepare for martyrdom and has told them Israel must be "wiped off the map". Hezbollah would like that. As its former leader Hussein Massawi helpfully explained, as if to idiots: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."

With what weapon might Iran -- or its Hezbollah proxies -- strike those Jews?
Well, oil-soaked Iran has for nearly 20 years worked on a secret nuclear program, and Hezbollah provoked this war just as the UN Security Council was debating what sanctions, if any, to impose on Iran to force it to stop.

But as both Israel and Iran both know, the UN and Europe are so morally weak that no one will stop what everyone fully expects is a program to build a nuclear bomb. So tick, tick, tick...
And bang! When Hezbollah fighters killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more in a cross-border raid a fortnight ago, Israel decided it would wait no longer in this quiet queue for destruction.

It struck back with who knows what plan in mind. To get the soldiers released, it said first. Now its demand is that Hezbollah disarm so never again will it have thousands of rockets -- rockets which one short day may be tipped with worse than high explosives and ball bearings.

It won't work, of course. Israel will buy some months, perhaps, but while Iran's ayatollahs rule and their jihadist creed prospers they will be back. And this oil-thirsty world -- with so many Western countries now with loud Muslim minorities -- will not block it. Of course, Israel's desperate reaction isn't quite what Hezbollah was counting on. "The truth is -- let me say this clearly -- we didn't even expect (this) response ... That (Israel) would exploit this operation for this big war against us," whined Mahmoud Komati, deputy chief of Hezbollah's politburo.
It thought that snatching Jewish soldiers -- to later trade their bodies for captured terrorists -- would get just the "proportionate" response it could ignore while it killed more Jews. But no, Mr Terrorist. Israel won't walk quietly to any grave. Not this time.

.....Israel is now painted in the media as so cruel that it barely minds if it kills children with its careless bombs. Perhaps Channel 9, taking Hezbollah-run tours of the damage in Beirut, has pushed this view hardest. Said Nine producer Wes Hardman, in Beirut: "To me, a soldier should take every care not to hit civilians, but that's not happening in Lebanon. If Israel think they are precision bombing, then they should be congratulated on their ignorance." But another newsman on the tour, CNN's Anderson Cooper, was not so ready to echo Hezbollah's talking points. He noted that the reporters on this "heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event" were allowed only to film what Hezbollah wanted them to, and added: "Civilian casualties are clearly what Hezbollah wants foreign reporters to focus on. It keeps the attention off them..."

And here's one thing Hezbollah doesn't want attention on: It hides its fighters and weapons among civilians so Israel cannot shoot back without risking killing a child. It shoots its missiles even from schools. Hear it from UN aid chief Jan Egeland. Egeland got huge TV coverage when he damned Israel's bombing of Beirut. But he got next to none when he added: "Hezbollah, stop this cowardly blending in among women and children...

"I don't think you want to be proud of having many more children and women than armed men (killed)." But it is proud -- because its media dupes report on such deaths and call Israel, not Hezbollah, inhuman. See how brilliantly that tactic this week, when Israel bombed a post of the UN International Force in Lebanon, killing four observers. UN boss Kofi Annan instantly leaped to a conclusion that made no sense at all. "I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces of a UN observer post," he said.

Israel now wants to kill UN peacekeepers? In God's name, why? But such is the venom against Israel that this slur sped around the world, picked up by gleeful believers from Moscow's Pravda to Mebourne's Age. It was the disposition to believe the crazy worst of Israel that said so much. True, we still need to know why Israel ignored warnings that its shells were landing on the UN post. But even brief research would have found more context -- that not only do Hezbollah fighters fire from behind screens of women and children, but shoot from behind UN observers, counting on Israel not daring to shoot back.

Read for yourself the UNIFIL press releases that have warned how Hezbollah has exploited their posts, and even shot their observers. Says the UNIFIL press release on the very day of this tragedy: "It was also reported that Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of four UN positions..." Says the UNIFIL report of 20 July: "Hezbollah firing was also reported from the immediate vicinity of the UN positions in Naquora and Maroun Al Ras areas..." And so on.

Retired Canadian Major General Lewis Mackenzie said he recently received emails from the Canadian peacekeeper killed at the UN post on Wednesday, who'd told him Hezbollah was using his post as cover, too. "He was describing the fact that he was taking fire within, in one case, three metres of his position for tactical necessity, not being targeted," Mackenzie said.
"Now that's veiled speech in the military. What he was telling us was Hezbollah soldiers were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them. And that's a favourite trick by people who don't have representation in the UN. They use the UN as shields knowing that they can't be punished for it."

So why had Annan left these posts there, where they helped only terrorists?
It's a metaphor for Israel's unwinnable war. Hezbollah and its allies hide behind the UN -- and civilians -- waging terror. And when Israel, a democracy, defends itself, the UN calls it evil. And our media chorus that never have they seen such cruelty. Israel seems doomed, given this. I fear it is not alone.

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