The Truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Howard!
This goes to show how you can never trust reports out of the Middle East or find out the truth and who is right and who is wrong. .............Verrrry Interesting!
Why the Israelis are so sceptical about Qana
If you are wondering why Israelis are so sceptical about what really occurred at Qana, the answer is quite simple:
The Massacre at Jenin (that wasn't). From wikepedia "The battle attracted widespread international attention because journalists, particularly in the UK, falsely reported that a massacre of Palestinians had taken place during the fighting, and that hundreds, or even thousands, of bodies had been secretly buried in mass graves by the IDF, allegations that were later shown to be baseless."
For weeks there was a media frenzy with grieving relatives interviewed, coverage of funerals, and claim after claim of atrocities, each worse than the last, that Israel supposedly committed.
The media continued to report as fact that hundreds of innocent people, mainly women and children, had been brutally, cold-bloodly murdered despite being shown evidence that funerals were being faked such as being shown this video caught by a drone flying overhead.
This clip would be funny if the accusations being thrust at us had not been so serious: the supposedly dead person keeps falling out of the funeral shroud he's being carried in --and then getting up to climb back in again so they can proceed along. He falls out again and again.
It took some 6 months for the independent investigations by human rights organizations to make clear that no massacre had occurred. Of course, by then the damage was done in the media.
No one was covering the story of the "massacre that didn't happen" --the "massacre that didn't happen" didn't get weeks of airplay, it got a small mention if it got any mention at all. You can still hear many people in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere talking about the horrible Israelis and how they cold-bloodly mowed down hundreds of innocent children in Jenin a few years ago.
More recently we had the Hamas accusations that Israel bombed a rally and killed and injured nearly two-scores of people, including many children. We claimed it wasn't so.
In this instance, the Palestinian Authority came out and supported Israel and stated very clearly that it was a Hamas car at the Hamas rally that was filled with rockets and weapons that exploded due to Hamas negligence, thus killing the children and adults who were gathered around it.
In fact, over this two week period of time Hamas claimed we bombed a house and several other targets and Fatah came out and said nooooooo those were additional accidents in which bomb-makers accidentally exploded themselves and their family members.
Why did Fatah suddenly become so honest? Well you see, this was right before the Palestinian elections...you know, Hamas vs. Fatah...
A lot of the news clips that make it onto the nightly news of reputable news channels such as CNN, NBC, BBC, and so forth, showing theoretical Israeli aggressions and horrible activities against the Palestinians have also been shown to be....fabricated.
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 Front Page Magazine, "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 Israel Insider, 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."
So this is why we scrutinize and ask a lot of questions when claims of mass deaths are reported...
posted by Yael K
Why the Israelis are so sceptical about Qana
If you are wondering why Israelis are so sceptical about what really occurred at Qana, the answer is quite simple:
The Massacre at Jenin (that wasn't). From wikepedia "The battle attracted widespread international attention because journalists, particularly in the UK, falsely reported that a massacre of Palestinians had taken place during the fighting, and that hundreds, or even thousands, of bodies had been secretly buried in mass graves by the IDF, allegations that were later shown to be baseless."
For weeks there was a media frenzy with grieving relatives interviewed, coverage of funerals, and claim after claim of atrocities, each worse than the last, that Israel supposedly committed.
The media continued to report as fact that hundreds of innocent people, mainly women and children, had been brutally, cold-bloodly murdered despite being shown evidence that funerals were being faked such as being shown this video caught by a drone flying overhead.
This clip would be funny if the accusations being thrust at us had not been so serious: the supposedly dead person keeps falling out of the funeral shroud he's being carried in --and then getting up to climb back in again so they can proceed along. He falls out again and again.
It took some 6 months for the independent investigations by human rights organizations to make clear that no massacre had occurred. Of course, by then the damage was done in the media.
No one was covering the story of the "massacre that didn't happen" --the "massacre that didn't happen" didn't get weeks of airplay, it got a small mention if it got any mention at all. You can still hear many people in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere talking about the horrible Israelis and how they cold-bloodly mowed down hundreds of innocent children in Jenin a few years ago.
More recently we had the Hamas accusations that Israel bombed a rally and killed and injured nearly two-scores of people, including many children. We claimed it wasn't so.
In this instance, the Palestinian Authority came out and supported Israel and stated very clearly that it was a Hamas car at the Hamas rally that was filled with rockets and weapons that exploded due to Hamas negligence, thus killing the children and adults who were gathered around it.
In fact, over this two week period of time Hamas claimed we bombed a house and several other targets and Fatah came out and said nooooooo those were additional accidents in which bomb-makers accidentally exploded themselves and their family members.
Why did Fatah suddenly become so honest? Well you see, this was right before the Palestinian elections...you know, Hamas vs. Fatah...
A lot of the news clips that make it onto the nightly news of reputable news channels such as CNN, NBC, BBC, and so forth, showing theoretical Israeli aggressions and horrible activities against the Palestinians have also been shown to be....fabricated.
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 Front Page Magazine, "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 Israel Insider, 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."
So this is why we scrutinize and ask a lot of questions when claims of mass deaths are reported...
posted by Yael K
Labels: fabrication, fatah, Fraud, hamas, hizbullah, israel chirac, jenin, koret, mass graves, massacre that didn't happen, middle-east
posted by Allan W Janssen | 3:48 p.m.
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