Robert Spencer: Stage-Managed Massacre

Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
August 2, 2006

“The Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana early Sunday morning did more than kill 57 civilians,” says Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post. “According to a wide range of commentary in the international media, it inflamed already boiling public opinion in the Arab world against Israel, undermined what little support the United States has among the Lebanese people, and illuminated the continuing inability of Israel and the United States to achieve their goal of decisively weakening Hezbollah.” The Hindustan Times editorialized that “with Qana, one senses that the Israelis’ definition of ‘collateral damage’ has started to bear a striking resemblance to that of the very terrorist organisation that they are keen to destroy.” At a rally outside the State Department building protesting the Qana “massacre” on Monday, Leftist protestors chanted, “Hey, Rice! What do you say? How many kids have you killed today?”; “Israel Out of Lebanon! Ceasefire, Now”; and “Shame! Shame! Shame, on you!” An Australian Muslim in Qana told Australia’s Herald Sun: “I would say a few hundred have died. This isn’t war, it’s genocide.”

Except for one little detail: it is increasingly clear that the Qana “massacre” was a stage-managed Hizballah production, designed precisely to enflame international sentiment against Israel and compel the Israelis to accept a ceasefire that would enable the jihad terrorist group to gain some time to recover from the Israeli attacks. Some of the principal evidence for this:

* The Israeli bombardment took place about midnight, but the house where the civilians were gathered reportedly did not collapse until 8AM. Said Brigadier General Amir Eshel of the Israeli Air Force, “It is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it.” Indeed, it strains credulity that not only did these Lebanese civilians remain in a house that had been bombed for eight hours, but peacefully went to sleep in it after the bombing – since the victims were all apparently sleeping, despite continuing Israeli air bombardment in the area, when the building collapsed. Eshel suggested that “it could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there” – in other words, Hizballah bombs and/or weapons.

* Photos of the rescue operation, which were transmitted all over the world and appeared on the front page of the New York Times and other major newspapers, are extremely suspicious. The blog EU Referendum has done important work scrutinizing the photos, finding numerous anomalies. Most notably, the dating of the various photos suggests that the same bodies were paraded before reporters on different occasions, each time as if they had just been pulled from the rubble. In a rebuttal to this charge, AP’s David Bauder rather lamely asserts: “web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken.” Responds Richard North of EU Referendum: “Note, however, the use of the word ‘can’. He does not say that the ‘date stamps’ are wrong.” EU Referendum has also uncovered strange anomalies in the photos themselves: some workers are wearing different gear in different photos, yet clearly carrying the same corpse. Richard North comments about one of these workers: “It stretches belief to breaking point to argue that, on his way to the ambulance, he took off his helmet, his fluorescent waistcoat and his flack jacket just in order to pose for the cameras putting the body in the wagon – especially as we have the body being placed on the ‘guerney’ – which means the scenes are totally inconsistent.”

* The very existence of these pictures raises more questions. As Israel Insider puts it: “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.”

* The Christian Lebanese website LIBANOSCOPIE has charged that Hizballah staged the entire incident in order to stimulate calls for a ceasefire, thereby staving off its destruction by Israel and Lebanese plans to rid themselves of this terrorist plague: “We have it from a credible source that Hizbullah, alarmed by Siniora’s plan, has concocted an incident that would help thwart the negotiations. Knowing full well that Israel will not hesitate to bombard civilian targets, Hizbullah gunmen placed a rocket launcher on the roof in Qana and brought disabled children inside, in a bid to provoke a response by the Israeli Air Force. In this way, they were planning to take advantage of the death of innocents and curtail the negotiation initiative.”

* According to the German scholar Matthias Küntzel, “the Berlin daily the Tagesspiegel published a letter-to-the-editor from Dr. Mounir Herzallah, a Shiite from the South of Lebanon. Dr. Herzallah reports on how Hezbollah-terrorists came to his town, dug a munitions depot and then built a school and a residence directly over it. He writes: ‘Laughing, a local sheikh explained to me that the Jews lose either way: either because the rockets are fired at them or because, if they attack munitions depot, they are condemned by world public opinion on account of the dead civilians.’ Hezbollah, he says, uses the civilian population ‘as a human shield and then when they are dead as propaganda.’”

Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, declared that “War is deceit.” Specifically, he taught that lying was permissible in battle.[1] While the doctrines of religious deception (taqiyya and kitman) are most often identified with Shi’ite Islam, and ostensibly rejected by Sunnis, because they were sanctioned by the Prophet, they can still be found in traditions that Sunni Muslims consider reliable, and are practiced among Salafis. Jihadists today have spoken of the usefulness of deceptive practices.

Americans and Westerners are not used to dealing with carefully orchestrated and large-scale deception of this kind. It is time that it be recognized as a weapon of warfare, and an extremely potent one at that. Qana has already largely accomplished what it was supposed to. It will now take its place beside the Danish cartoons, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and all the rest as a useful focal point for Muslim outrage and a magnet for jihad recruitment. The dhimmi Leftist Western press is happy, for it can again show America and Israel as guilty in the world’s site. The mujahedin are happy, for jihad and Sharia will advance still more. The only people who couldn’t possibly be happy with this are the Israelis and others on the front lines of the jihad worldwide.

But who cares about them?

Notes:

[1] Bukhari, vol. 4, book 56, no. 3030; Muslim, vol. 4, book 32, no. 6303.

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Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book, The Truth About Muhammad, is coming October 9 from Regnery Publishing.