I haven't so much as looked at the pictures from Qana. I don't need to see them: War is hell. I don't need to see slain children to understand the concept.
But other people have looked at them, and are starting to question some glaring discrepancies in the Hezbollah/MSM accounts of what happened.
Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning?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 down, one resident told CNN’s Wedeman. Who were these people?
What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did, in droves.
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.
Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only 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: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping — sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.
Rescue workers filmed as they went carried the victims on the stretchers, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead.
But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. Their limbs appeared to have stiffened, from rigor mortis. Neither were effects that would have resulted from an Israeli attack hours before. These were bodies that looked like they had been dead for days.
You would think that the hard-bitten cynics (as they style themselves) of the MSM would be making some inquiries into these matters.
Alas, that wouldn't slot so neatly into their pre-written templates of Israeli brutality.
Lazy, incurious and credulous. It's starting to remind me of the Massacre of Jenin.