Right Wing Nut House

The IDF may be winning the battle in southern Lebanon to carve out a buffer zone that will eventually keep Hizbullah terrorists from attacking Israeli cities and towns, but they are badly losing the atrocity war.

This “atrocity gap” gets larger daily and threatens the mainstream media’s one sided coverage of the conflict. In fact, some analysts say that it is probable that the lopsided advantage that Hizbullah is showing in the atrocity area could lead to a disastrous state of affairs for the mainstream media. They would be forced to report something like the truth; that Hizbullah revels in targeting and killing innocent civilians while Israel doesn’t. These analysts point to the fact that it is getting harder and harder for the MSM to be sanguine and “neutral” in the face of Hizbullah’s ever growing number of rockets launched aimed at killing civilians while still ginning up enough outrage at the accidental killing of civilians by the IDF.

The Israeli problem is obvious. By nature of the fact that the Israeli atrocities happen by accident, unlike Hizbullah there is no overall plan for the IDF to kill civilians. Many analysts scoff at the excuse that the Israeli Air Force, if they put their mind to it, could really go to town and kill tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians given the superiority of their weaponry and enormous destructive power of their bombs. Lack of atrocity planning by the Israelis is no excuse they say.

The terrorists made a huge stride forward in their atrocity scorecard today:

A woman and two men were killed and at least 189 people were wounded on Sunday evening when a massive barrage of rockets struck at least six sites in a crowded residential area of Haifa.

Two people who were critically wounded died of their wounds shortly after. Several others were listed in serious condition. All of the wounded were evacuated to local hospitals within some 30 minutes.

One building sustained a direct hit and collapsed, trapping dozens of people inside. Emergency workers labored to extract the victims.

The incident was defined a high-casualty event. This was the first time such a definition was applied to an attack on Israel since rockets started landing in Israel almost four weeks ago.

One Hizbullah terrorist speaking on condition of anonymity complained that Hizbullah may be winning the atrocity war as far as “murderous intent” and “cold blooded heartlessness” but that the terrorists were actually losing the all-important “atrocity perceptions” battle.

“What’s the use of deliberately slaughtering innocent Israelis if you infidels in the media don’t give us proper credit for our barbarity?” the terrorist said. “Israel accidentally kills some civilians and the media calls it a ‘war crime. You want war crimes? Nobody can do war crimes like the Party of God,” he said.

Analysts are undecided whether it is more important that Israeli accidental atrocities are perceived as much worse than Hizbullah’s deliberate murder of the innocent or whether the sheer number of Hizbullah atrocities will eventually wear down the MSM and win the day for the terrorists.

These analysts say the outcome of the atrocity war will be one of the more interesting sidelights to the Israeli-Islamist conflict.

UPDATE

Luck of the Hiz:

A massive rocket barrage was fired Sunday afternoon at Kibbutz Kfar Giladi in the Kiryat Shmona area. Ten Israelis were killed in the attack and another two people died of their wounds at the Ziv Medical Center in Safed and the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, to where they were evacuated in critical condition.

Fifteen people are still hospitalized at the Safed and Haifa hospitals, two of them in serious condition, three in moderate condition and six in light condition.

[snip]

Celebratory processions were held in Nablus following the lethal attack. Cars with photographs of Hassan Nasrallah drove past with Hizbullah flags.

The dead were all Israeli reservists evidently gathering in a parking lot waiting to be deployed.

The tragedy brings to mind the unlucky hit by a Scud missile on the American barracks at al-Khobar during the Gulf War. Twenty-eight Americans died and 93 were wounded when the one in a million hit by the crudely aimed Scud caused most of the casualties during that conflict.

To say that these men were a legitimate target would be correct. But they were not the target. Hizbullah could not possibly have had any inkling that the reservists were gathering in that parking lot nor did they themselves know where their missile would end up. Their target was Israeli civilians. The fact that it hit soldiers doesn’t negate the intent of the atrocity.