It was a matter of time before we saw an explosion of staff-eds in American papers on the fighting in Lebanon. And a good number of cartoonists and papers see right through Hezbollah’s use of human shields. A staff-ed in the Arizona Republic and a cartoon by Sandy Huffaker sum it up. First Huffaker:
And an Arizona Republic staff-ed writes:
The terrorists wear no uniforms. They intentionally locate their rocket launchers and heavy weaponry in densely populated areas precisely to take advantage of the reluctance of the Israeli army to shower its formidable firepower down upon places like Qana. Indeed, videotape footage showed Katyusha rockets being fired from alongside the building that was destroyed in Qana.
As for those Iranian-supplied rockets, which the terrorists rain indiscriminately onto Israeli towns and villages like Kiryat Shemona, many of them contain ball bearings specifically designed to kill Israeli civilians.
Only the fact that Israelis have built stout underground shelters for their citizens rather than using them as human shields in front of their enemies’ rockets has kept their death totals low. That is the essential difference in the “proportionality” by which so many in the West insist on judging this conflict. One side cares about the civilian death toll in this terrible Middle East conflict, and one side revels in it.
See other staff-eds addressing the human shields issue in the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and San Diego-Union Tribune (1 and 2).
