Masterminding yet another tragedy

Qana – it’s almost too convenient, too melodramatic. Nearly too perfect not to have been rigged up. Even HRW which has a solid reputation to support Hizballah (Human Rights Watch having pursued SLA officers who were trying to protect their own villages from the Hizballah) studied the attack and revised the death toll down to 28. The press took the local militia at their word, and threw around numbers as high as 80.

Even HRW knows how that kind of exaggeration can spoil a ‘cause’. How can anyone believe that Hizballah loses no guerillas, that the civilian dead can only be women and children. How stupid does Hizballah think that “world” behind the undefined “world opinion” really is?

Now the Libanoscopie website (associated with Revue du Liban, a magazine known for following European public opinion like zombies) even reports the case from another angle, and a patently obvious one. The popularization, near celebration of the deaths of those people in Qana is attributable to the endless duplicitousness of Lebanese politics, and Hizballah in particular.

Our translation:

Lebanon awoke on a new massacre of innocent, the victims are handicapped children who took refuge in a building which was attacked by Israel.

Qana is still a strong symbol of “the Grapes of Wrath” campaign in 1996 bore the brunt of this again. 40 or 50 killed today in Qana in the South Lebanon. Horror.

But why a similar horror, was it an error? A premeditated massacre? A source generally quite well informed tells us:
“Hezbollah was wedged in by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s plan to deploy the Lebanese Army throughout Lebanon and primarily in the south. Thus the Hizballah militia would ber disarmed. They wanted to ruin these negotiations. It put in pace a Machiavellian plan to create an event which would enable him to cancel this project. Knowing very well that Israel doesn’t have the heart to target civilians, militants of Hezbollah installed a base of launching of rockets on the roof of a building in Qana, and ended up crippling children with the firm intention to draw in an Israeli air attack to create a new situation. Using the massacre of these innocents to end the negotiations.”
Adding: “they used Qana which was already a symbol of a massacre of innocents to foment a Cana 2”.

Presiding over the room, Nabih Berri announced that the negotiations with American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were suspended until there was an unconditional cease fire. This was first demanded by Hezbollah, so it’s necessary to start again from the very beginning.

It puts into context how facile the affairs of the near east can be. Just as Syria was in all likelihood behind Rafic Hariri’s assassination, they used the oldest trick in the middle eastern book – they used terror, assassination, and the anguished emotions of a population as blackmail.
Even the loony western left get in on the act. They buy whatever it is that those they designate as a victim will tell them. They don’t seem to realize that they aren’t speaking for the victim, they’re providing free propaganda to the real criminals.

It’s the same old game. Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon removed the considerable Palestinian influence on Lebanese life. Syria promptly re-armed then to maintain the status quo: chaos, duplicity, fear, terror. Over the decades there has been enough of this world view from the corners of the near east unable to deal with basic morality, modernity, and coexistence to spill out into Asia Minor, Europe, and America.

Hizballah needs to be defanged. If the Israelis don’t do it, the Lebanese will be faced with a horrible choice again when it comes to its’ own countrymen: to disarm Hizballah by force themselves, by some magic of political pressure, or to simply hand the conduct on Lebanese life over to them out of fear of another civil war. No-one seems to have had the power or the stomach to challenge this problem to date, so it fell on the Israelis.

Ultimately the existence of Hizballah’s militia is the cause of this war’s civilian deaths. Deaths that could have only been averted if Arab culture would permit itself to grow.

The fuse is lit!