The
world awoke Sunday to the news that an Israeli airstrike killed 57
Lebanese civilians, leading Israel to stop airstrikes for 2 days - but
evidence indicates the "massacre" may have been a fraud.
The
supposed massacre caused a major turnabout in world diplomacy. US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suddenly canceled her plans to fly
to Beirut, saying "my work towards a ceasefire is really here [in
Jerusalem] today." The implication was clearly that the onus was now
upon Israel. French President Jacques Chirac condemned Israel's
"unjustified action which demonstrates more than ever the need for an
immediate ceasefire," Jordan's King Abdullah called it an "ugly crime,"
and other world leaders echoed these sentiments.
Though Israel emphasized that Hizbullah was to blame for waging its
rocket war against Israel from within a civilian population, Foreign
Ministry officials repeated their "deep regret at the loss of innocent
life in the campaign against Hizbullah," and were forced to promise a
"thorough and comprehensive examination."
However, the incident may have been all one big fraud, staged by Arab
elements for the world media in order to lead precisely to the
situation described above.
The central piece of evidence leading to this conclusion is the fact,
mentioned by IDF officials from the very beginning, that the building
collapsed a full seven hours after the Israel Air Force bombing. Why,
then, would the residents inside not have been evacuated in the
meantime? As Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel of the Israeli Air Force told
reporters Sunday night, “It is difficult for me to believe that they
waited eight hours to evacuate it.” Without additional evidence, Eshel
merely left open the possibility that Hizbullah terrorists, or
explosives they left behind, caused the explosion.
"Indeed," writes Robert Spencer for FrontPageMagazine,
"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."
Gen. Eshel also said that the building was used by Hizbullah to store
explosives. This was supported by a letter by Dr. Mounir Herzallah, a
southern Lebanese Shiite, who wrote that Hizbullah terrorists came to
his town, dug a munitions depot and then built a school and a residence
directly over it.
In addition, as Reuven Koret writes for IsraelInsider,
the bombing of the area occurred in three waves. The first bombs,
according to CNN correspondent Brent Sadler, did not hit the building
in question, but rather landed "20 or 30 meters" away. The second
strike hit targets further away, and the third strike, around 7:30 in
the morning, landed over 400 meters away. The first reports of a
collapsed building arrived a half-hour later.
Another CNN correspondent, Ben Wedeman, noted that there was a larger
crater next to the building. He observed that the roof of the building
was intact and that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a
result of the Israeli strike.
Thus, the building was used to store explosives, was apparently not
destroyed by the bombing, and sheltered dozens of women and children
throughout a night of bombing. The identity of the victims was also not
clear, except that they were not the original occupants of the
building; a National Public Radio correspondent reported that they had
left. "The victims were non-residents who chose to shelter in the
building that night," Koret writes, and who were "'too poor' to leave
the town, one resident told CNN's Wedeman. Who were these people?"
Hear Koret speak about the Hizbullah manipulation on
IsraelNationalRadio.com.
As an aside, the hospital in Tyre, Lebanon, and Human Rights Watch both
reported today that 28 people were killed in the Kafr Kana bombing, and
not twice that number, as originally reported.
Other facts brought by Koret and Spencer:
* Sometime after dawn a call went out to journalists and rescue workers
to come to the scene. Though Hizbullah has 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.
* Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until
after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was
explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of
live or injured people being extracted.
* There was little blood, CNN's Wedeman noted, concluding that the
victims appeared to have died while they were sleeping - despite the
thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras
were removing the bodies from one opening in the collapsed structure,
and journalists were not allowed near it.
* Rescue workers carrying the victims on stretchers occasionally
flipped up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies
of the dead. But, Koret noted, the ashen-gray faces of the victims gave
cause to think that the bodies looked like they had been dead for days.
* Photos of the rescue operation transmitted all over the world are
"extremely suspicious," Spencer writes, citing work by EU
Referendum showing
numerous anomalies in the photos. "Most notably," he writes, "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 addition], some workers are wearing
different gear in different photos, yet clearly carrying the same
corpse."
* The Christian Lebanese (French-language) website
LIBANOSCOPIE
has charged that Hizbullah 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.
Spencer concludes, "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."
|
