Hezbollah’s West Coast media office

A child’s death is always a tragedy, but this SF Chron report about Qana sounds like a Hezbollah PR office press release:

The tiny, lifeless bodies were laid out in a row on a black straw sheet in the concrete courtyard of the Tyre Government Hospital. Twenty-one of them, all still in the pajamas they were wearing before two Israeli bombs tore through Ali Hashem’s home in this southern Lebanese village early Sunday.

Dozens of members of the Hashem and Chalhoub families had sought refuge in the unfinished house about 10 days ago, thinking it was safe. Only eight survived.

After several sob stories with Lebanese pointing out the obvious — which is that their infants aren’t terrorists — we get to the article’s real point — the Israelis are cold-blooded civilian killers, who’ve murdered before:

There have been almost daily tragedies involving civilians since Israel unleashed its fury against Lebanon for Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12. In the days and nights since, the civilian death toll has sharply increased; the Lebanese Health Ministry now estimates nearly 550 people have been killed in air strikes.

But Sunday’s bombardment and killing of at least 56 helpless civilians — 37 of them children — is resonating with the Lebanese in a way that others did not: It occurred in Qana, the site of a bloodbath 10 years ago that is annually remembered with bitterness.

Just over 100 civilians cowering in a U.N. shelter were killed in an Israeli strike on the town on April 18, 1996. The attack sparked widespread international outrage and resulted in the “April Understanding” — an agreement by Israel, Lebanon, France, Syria and the United States that Lebanese and Israeli civilians would not be targeted in Hezbollah’s drive to end Israel’s decadeslong occupation of southern Lebanon. Four years later, the Israelis withdrew.

The story then flips back to the horrors, the horrors! As I’ve said, it is a horror when children die. Funnily enough, the story makes no mention of how the children ended up in a combat zone. You have to go beyond this MSM forum, which I was able to do thanks to a link that jg gave me (which took me from Dr. Sanity; to NRO’s Corner; to Rampurple, a Lebanese blogger, who wrote the following):

The situation in Ain Ebel is unbearable. Thousands of civilians have fled to the village from nearby villages and more than 1000 rockets have hit the village, there is no more food neither clean water and diseases r spreading.

Now here comes the most sickening part:

Hezbollah has been firing rockets from the village since Day 1 hiding behind innocent people’s places and even CHURCHES. No one is allowed to argue with the Hezbollah gunmen who wont hesitate to shoot you and i ve heard about more than one shooting incident including young men from the village and Hezbollah.

Urgent appeals have been done through phone calls from terrified people who wouldnt give out their name fearing Hezbollah might harm or even eliminate them.

This is the true image of our brave Islamic Resistance, putting the civilians and their homes as body shields to the Israeli bombardements.

Let the message spread and let those criminals move out of the village once and for all.

Free Ain Ebel from the terrorists !

The tragedy of villages held hostage to Hezbollah terrorists is not an isolated story. I’ve blogged — indeed, hundreds have blogged — about the fact that Hezbollah has made a strategic decision to use children to shield its military operations. Indeed, even a maverick at the UN has expressed disgust with Hezbollah’s tactics. You’d never know it, though, to read the Chronicle story. Instead of blaming the terrorists who trap children in the line of fire, the story, without saying so in so many words, clearly likens the Jews to the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, or any other 20th Century totalitarian killers. I would say that the Chronicle should be ashamed of itself for printing that kind of thing, but the Chronicle has no shame.

Talking to Technorati: Hezbollah, Hizbollah, Qana, Human shields, Media, Media bias, San Francisco Chronicle