Why?

Ramirez asks, and answers, the question: Why are the Israelis' bombs killing civilians?

Faking the News. Again.

Reuters has chosen to pull some nine hundred photos in their file of photographer Adnan Hajj after Little Green Footballs showed that several of his photos from the war in Lebanon were doctored.

Hot Air has links on the story.

There's no reason why Reuters couldn't have seen for themselves that these photos were phony. The photoshopping is pretty obvious, but Reuters ran them anyway perhaps because they show Israel inflicting "disproportionate" damage on Lebanese cities. It's no wonder nobody trusts the liberal media to report either the war in Iraq or the war in Lebanon accurately or fairly.

What's at Stake

Andrew Sullivan sums up an outstanding column by Bernard-Henri Levy on the Lebanese/Israeli war with this observation:

For the first time, we're not really discussing a conflict over land or territory or even the treatment of individuals. We're not talking about Arab nationalism. We're not talking about the Palestinians. We're not even talking about the political existence of the Jewish state. We're talking about the divine mandate that the Islamists believe they are following, an eschatological struggle toward the End-Times, where the Jews must be destroyed as a people and as a sovereign state in order for the Apocalypse to occur.

Levy says many good things in his essay, but one of the most important is this:

...the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day - not necessarily far off - when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon.

Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore.

Unless Israel completely defeats Hezbollah in Lebanon Hezbollah will just grow stronger and more determined to extirpate the Jews in the Middle East.

Back Home

My family and I are back from a five day visit to the marvelous city of Rome, and I'm trying to get caught up on what's been happening in the world while I was gone. I scarcely glanced at a newspaper in the past week.

I want to thank Bill for posting on Viewpoint a number of pieces that I had prepared before leaving and for adding a couple of his own.

I haven't been in every major European capital, but I can't imagine a city more beautiful, more full of art, architecture, history and charm than Rome. Perhaps London comes as close as any other city I've ever been in (I've never been to Paris). Tomorrow, when our luggage is supposed to arrive (having been loaded onto the wrong plane at JFK), I hope to share a couple of photos and some reflections on our trip.