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01 August 2006 Blog Home : August 2006 : Permalink

Qana-llywood

I'm becoming more and more convinced, along with a number of other bloggers that the Qana event was, at the very least, heavily stage managed by Hezbollah.

The best evidence of prior planning is not to be found in Qana but in Beirut where, as Powerline noted, a large banner was printed up and displayed just hours after the "event". The banner's text clearly refers to the Qana deaths ("The massacre of children in Qana 2, is the gift of Rice. The clever bombs..Stupid") but the banner would have taken a day or more to produce.

Since I do banners like this for a living, I can tell you it take more than a few hours depending on the equipment. A banner that large can be done one of two ways. With a grant format printer. It would probably take about 3-4 hours to print, then hours more to sew and grommet so it could hung....The other way it to use a smaller series of machines all color calibrated and produce sections. At that point they would have to be stretch the length of the banner ( read large facility) and sewn together. ...Just putting an image together that large on a computer with Type would take a few hours. Then color tests, proofs and finally printing. That would be an all day affair for most print houses even with a grand format printer.

The Israelis have also noted some odd timing inconsistencies (via Stephen Pollard and others)

There is an unexplained gap of about seven hours between the one Israeli air strike that hit the Qana building housing the civilians, which took place around 1 A.M. Sunday, and the first report that the building had collapsed, said the chief of staff of the Israel Air Force, Brigadier General Amir Eshel. Speaking at a press conference at the Kirya military complex in Tel Aviv last night, Eshel said that of three Israeli air strikes on Qana early Sunday, only the first strike hit the building in which the civilians were staying. The other two hit areas at least 400 meters away.

"I can't say whether the house collapsed at 12 A.M. or at 8 A.M.," said Eshel. "According to foreign press reports, and this is one of the reports we are relying on, the house collapsed at 8 A.M. We do not have testimony regarding the time of the collapse. If the house collapsed at 12 A.M., it is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it."

Then there is the odd state of the building and the fact that the people in the building seem to have changed from residents to non-residents.

The roof of the building was intact. Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that there was a larger crater next to the building, but observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike.

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?

And then there is the question about how come the residents hadn't fled to Tyre like so many others. The road seems to have been easily passable for the hordes of journalists.

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.

And then we come to the (gruesome) analysis of the images shown worldwide. Richard North at the EU Referendum blog has three blockbuster posts that show how the same "rescue worker" seems to be remarkably busy. Confederate Yankee points out some inconsistencies in the dead bodies, AJ Strata has a bunch of others that he links to and Dan Riehl also points to the Grauniad's photos as confirming parts of Confederate Yankee's story.

I could add the clear evidence that the building (or its adjacent car park) was clearly used for rocket launches but it hardly seems worth it.

To recap: In Qana we have a building that seems to have collapsed in a way inconsistent with bombing, at a time inconsistent with bombing, with a bunch of non-residents inside who seem to have suffered rigor mortis remarkably quickly and who are being recovered only when the MSM are present and only by one or two rescue workers. Meanwhile in Beirut some print shop pulled an all nighter and then some in the few hours of the morning to produce an enormous poster complaining about the tragedy.

To recap the recap: MSM played for suckers by Hezbollah

[Both Michelle Malkin and Dan Riehl have round up posts similar to this one]

Update: Roger L Simon links (via Ynet) to a Francophone Lebanese Christian website that claims that the event was staged deliberately to undermine peace moves by the Lebanese government



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