Hot Air » Blog Archive » IAF: No rockets or Hezbollah men near Qana building before airstrike (Update: New Qana hoax?)

IAF: No rockets or Hezbollah men near Qana building before airstrike (Update: New Qana hoax?)

posted at 10:13 pm on August 1, 2006 by Allahpundit
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I’ve been having modem problems all day or else I would have linked this earlier. As it is, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link it now.

Mind you, there were rockets fired near the building in the past, just not on the same day as the airstrike. Not good enough, says one leftist, who essentially accuses the IAF of letting the shot clock expire.

Meanwhile, here’s your distasteful video of the night. They’re not goofing on the victims so much as on that sub-retarded DU “simulation” of 9/11 with the rabbit cage, but it’s dicey enough that I wasn’t going to mention it here at all. Then I read this and had my outrage meter recalibrated, and suddenly it didn’t seem like quite as much of a big deal.

Update: Dan Riehl does what he does best: catching liars red-handed. No Greenwald or Armstrong blog shenanigans this time, though. This one involves ambulances, explosions, and — surprise — our friends in Qana.

Update: As noted earlier on Media Blog, the fact that there were no Hezbollah men near the building doesn’t mean there were no Hezbollah men in Qana. Quite the contrary.

In fact, it pretty much depends on how you define “near.” From Engel’s report:

Others [Hezbollah] were in another house that was nearby. I’m not sure if that was the initial target, but there was a separate apartment where young men were living that was not hit yesterday.

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Let me guess; Dan Riehl’s server has been knocked out by a distributed denial of service attack. If so, it figures. Now I have a new reason to want to destroy Islam.

And I do want to destroy Islam; I’m finished with that “freedom of religion” nonsense. From now on, any religion with a holy book that promotes distributed denials of service gets whacked.

And if you’re wondering where the Koran mentions DDOS’s, I think they plainly fall under the “every strategem” clause of Sura 9 verse 5. Come on, you don’t have to be an imam to know that “every strategem” means every strategem.

Kralizec on August 1, 2006 at 11:36 PM

There’s nothing wrong with Dan’s site. It’s loading beautifully for me.

Settle down.

Allahpundit on August 1, 2006 at 11:45 PM

There are many contradictions and sloppy statements in the Haaretz article. I wrote to the three reporters to request clarifications on the following:

1. “…the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.”

Does that mean there WERE NONE, or that they just didn’t have the info to give to you?

2. “However, it [IAF] changed its version on Monday.”

How so? No one disputes that over 150 rockets have been launched from Qana in the preceding 20 days.

3. “However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.”

The strike occured between midnight and 1:00 a.m. Are you trying to say that there were no rocket launches from Qana on the previous day, or as you wrote, the actual “day of the strike” – ie: after midnight? It is quite possible that there were no rocket launches between midnight and the time of the Israeli strike – a matter of minutes. So, technically, your statement is correct, but disingenuous. Either you are being deliberately misleading, or none of you are very precise and accurate writers.

4. Your report is contradictory. First you say “The survivors say rescue teams arrived only in the morning, as night conditions made the rescue mission difficult.” but then you say “…the electricity and phones in the village of Qana were almost entirely cut-off by IAF attacks.” Is that so? Apparently NOT, since they were able to make the call anyways. So which is it? Did the rescue teams get a call at night, but they couldn’t make it because of the dark, or did they get the call in the morning??? You can’t have it both ways. In either case, you are wrong, the phones were working. It only matters when the calls were made.

5. “The IDF provided no explanation for the second explosion…”

What second explosion? Either the building collapsed at midnight due to an IAF strike, and the rescue teams couldn’t make it because it was tragically so dark; OR, the building collapsed in the morning, having nothing to do with the IAF strike.

6. “The IAF admits the village was struck three times between Saturday night and Sunday morning.”

I take issue with your loaded use of the negative word “admits”. A more accurate word would have been “confirms”.

I find this particular article to be a sloppy bit of reporting. One would hope that between the three of you, you could apply a little more logic. You’re not asking the right questions, you’re citing questionable and unnamed sources, and your semantics seem deliberately chosen to paint a highly negative picture of the IDF and IAF.

By the way, did you know that the anti-Israeli left is now using this exact article as their “proof” of evil Israeli intent and a cover-up? Not well played, Yoav, Yuval, and Amos – not well played, at all.