AP whitewashes Hizballah crimes
By Tony Abu X. | Friday, April 28, 2006 | Link |  1 comments

The AP covers a Hizb Allah ceremony commemorating the 10th anniversary of the "Qana Massacre", stating (via LGF):

The ‘Qana massacre’ is a reference to the more than 100 Lebanese civilians killed by an Israeli artillery bombardment of a U.N. base in the southern Lebanese village of Qana in April 1996. The victims, including women and children, had taken refuge in the U.N. base during an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas.

This statement implies that Israel deliberately bombarded the UN camp. But in fact Israel was returning fire on Hizb Allah, which had been shelling Isreal from positions they had set up right next to the camp. From the UN report on the incident (a report which then goes on to bash Israel, of course):

a) Between 1200 and 1400 hours on 18 April, Hezbollah fighters fired two or three rockets from a location 350 metres south-east of the United Nations compound ...

(b) Between 1230 and 1300 hours, they fired four or five rockets from a location 600 metres south-east of the compound ...

(c) About 15 minutes before the shelling, they fired between five and eight rounds of 120 millimetre mortar from a location 220 metres south-west of the centre of the compound. ... According to witnesses, the mortar was installed there between 1100 and 1200 hours that day, but no action was taken by UNIFIL personnel to remove it. (On 15 April, a Fijian [UN soldier] had been shot in the chest as he tried to prevent Hezbollah fighters from firing rockets.)

This has been a longtime tactic used by Hizb Allah (and before them, by the PLO during their decade long occupation of southern Lebanon): to launch attacks against Israel from civilian positions in order to draw Israeli fire and create civilian casualties. Unfortunately, the western mainstream media has been all too willing to use such incidents (including failing to provide the full context of the incident) to paint Israel as an evil aggressor.

Hiding behind civilians does not grant terrorists immunity from retaliation, and it absolutely does not negate Israel's right -- its moral and legal right -- to defend itself. Certainly, the collateral death of children is tragic, but those guilty for the murders are Hizb Allah, not Israel.

Update:

It should also be noted that the reason the civilians had sought refuge at the UN camp was that they were fleeing their village -- from which HA had been shelling Israel. As I understand it, HA then followed the villagers to the UN camp and continued their attacks from there.

Second Update:

I am thoroguhly disgusted by the view held by many of my fellow Lebanese (if not most, including many Christians) that Hizb Allah is a legitmate "resistance" movement -- a view held even while simultaneously cursing HA as crazy fanatics. Lebanon will never recover from the last few decades of war and Syrian-PLO occupation until the Lebanese view Israel as legitimate, and recognize that the Hizb Allah "resistance" movement is nothing more than a continuation of the Arabist-Islamist war that has been waged over the last few decades -- by Syria, Iran, the PLO and others -- against Israel, against the West and against Lebanon . I will write more about this when I have time.

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