Going Gibson

It is ironic that amid all the charges of anti-semitism aimed at anybody who dare criticize Israel's policy emenating from the Right, it is the wingers themselves who are indulging in a line of thinking that is positively Gibson-esque.

It started with one statement from the IDF that the gap between the time of the strike and the collapse of the building is "unclear". There were no shortage of amateur detectives waiting in the (right) wings to connect the dots for them. Maybe the proximate cause of the damage on the building was not Israeli ordinances, but a weapon cache the Hezbollah detonated themselves. From there, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to a fully-fledged conspiracy theory in which "Hezbollywood" staged and directed the whole tragedy. It's worth noting that Powerline, of all blogs, is remaining sensible on this:

It isn't clear at this point whether the IAF has reason to think that the collapse occurred around 8:00 a.m., or has only noted that it was first reported then. Nor have the IAF's videos of the strikes, which may or may not resolve the question, been made public.

I don't mean to pick on Heidi of Euphoric Reality. Much bigger fish than she has participated in this despicable series of Chinese Whispers. Having said that, she displays quite as much nastiness as any of them. Here she is about Qana before she started denying that the Israelis were responsible.

So, no. I really don’t feel bad. I possibly feel a twinge of sadness for those poor kids, who lost their lives because all the adults around them were Muslim morons, and no one could be bothered to safeguard their lives - but those poor kids never really had a chance in life anyway. It’s shameful, really.

But hey. Why settle for saying that killing a bunch of Muslims is no big deal when you can say that they were the ones blowing themselves up all along?

This barbaric PR machine is constantly churning out propaganda against Israel and against our own soldiers - as we’ve seen by the plethora of false accusations barraging our troops now. The Islamists go to such lengths to get their photo op - nothing is too gruesome for them. Westerners, shocked by the images themselves, rarely put all the details together to know when they are being scammed.

Not any longer. Bloggers are now doing the investigative work that no one can trust the MSM to do. Innate skepticism, left over from past hoaxes, has earned every photo and video clip a second look. And second looks turn up the strangest discrepancies, improbabilities, and outright lies.

Here’s more analysis to look at.

I don’t know about you guys, but my bullshit sensor is going crazy.

I’ll summarize a few of the discrepancies for your convenience (some excerpted from IsraelInsider, EU Referendum, and Confederate Yankee) but you’ll need to look at all the photo evidence in the links above yourself:

1. As recently as two days ago, Israeli intelligence reported the building area had been used by the terrorists for storage and firing of weapons. Not exactly a good place to stash dozens of “women and children”.

2. The news media is reporting that the neighbors said that the building was a “children’s home” run by two families and chosen for its proximity to the local mosque.

According to one of the neighbors, the house that was bombed was a children’s shelter. The residents who agreed to speak said that there were two families who funded the shelter because of its proximity to the mosque.

Yet NPR reports that the buildings owners had left the city, and no one knows who was inside.

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 town, one resident told CNN’s Wedeman. Who were these people?

And a third “resident report” claims that the house was a humble tobacco farmer’s abode.

Oops- somebody (casting?) forgot to coordinate the script with the locals! Who hired these amateurs anyway?

Bonus points for the jab at the emotional hot button of poverty, by the way. My goodness, two feet must be expensive these days - “too poor” to walk out of a war zone, eh?

Notice the "why didn't they just walk away?" rhetorical question. Shades of Katrina. If she bothered to click outside of the right-wing echo chamber, she would not need to ask insinuating questions about who those people were. They were the Hashems and the Shalhoubs, seeking shelter from Israeli air strikes around Qana.

3. 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.[snip]

5. This photo in the NY Times shows the“collapsed” building with an intact ceiling, that had apparently NOT caved in on the bodies that were supposedly crushed by rubble. Oops - someone forgot to do some creative cropping!

6. 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.[snip]

10. Bodies crushed by rubble? The media photos show numerous bodies that are remarkably clean, right after their “removal” from the rubble. Nor are there any injuries consistent with being “crushed” by rubble or being “exploded” by ordnance. No blood, no burns, but strangely clean.[snip]

11. None of the“rescue workers” (Pallywood extras?) showed any visible signs of digging through dust and rubble to retreive bodies. In all photos, they too are remarkably clean. Oops - someone better get on make-up and wardrobe for that little
oversight! [snip]

Notice how if you take those five points Heidi regards as damning, you get a remarkably consistant picture -- the ordinance fell some distance away from the building, blowing out the walls sideways, but not the whole building sky-high. As a result, the victims died buried in rubbles rather than exploded and bloody. The rescue workers worked slowly and carefully. According to the BBC "Mechanical diggers probed gingerly, in case survivors lay trapped." Do I know this is exactly how it happened? Of course not. I don't have the hubris to pretend to be able to divine events happening half-way across the world. I'm saying this is what could have happened. I'm not poring over the fact that a rescue worker's radio is visible in one photo but invisible in another and photo timestamps from different photographers to pronounce that the whole thing was rigged.

I guess atrocity deniers everywhere are the same -- it's not enough to say that the victims deserved to die. Not only did they have it coming, we didn't do it.