Commentaries

Dennis Prager

Why the left's angrier at Mel than Naveed

Why? Why has the shooting and murder of Jews elicited less angst from the left than the anti-Semitic statements made by Mel Gibson when drunk?...

We should be worried about this: The liberal world fears – and much of it loathes – fundamentalist Christians considerably more than it does fundamentalist Muslims.

This is as true of most Jewish liberals – even though conservative Christians are Israel's and the Jews' most loyal supporters and even though Nazi-like anti-Semitism permeates much of the Muslim world – as it is of most other liberals, certainly including the mainstream media....

This is one more example of the greatest flaw of contemporary liberalism – its inability to recognize and confront the greatest evils. Since the 1960s, when liberalism became indistinguishable from the left – e.g., when New York Times positions became indistinguishable from those of The Nation – liberals tended to attack opponents of evil far more than those who actually committed evil. The left (around the world) was far more antagonistic to Ronald Reagan than to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and far more disturbed by anti-Communism than by Communism.

Jonathan Gurwitz

Failed Lebanon embraces killers

Mohammed Ali Hamadi is somewhere in Lebanon....We know it because Beirut was the destination of his one-way ticket when Hamadi walked out of a German prison last December.

Sixteen years earlier, the German government sentenced Hamadi to a life sentence for the murder of Robert Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver. Stethem was returning from an assignment in Greece in 1985 when Hezbollah terrorists hijacked his flight from Athens to Rome.

After hours of torture, the terrorists shot Stethem in the head and dumped his mutilated body on the tarmac in Beirut.

In 1987, German authorities caught Hamadi at the Frankfurt airport carrying liquid explosives. After denying U.S. requests for Hamadi's extradition, a German court delivered the "life" sentence. In Germany, however, murderers serving a life sentence can apply for parole after 15 years....

The great threat to Hezbollah when three decades of Syrian occupation came to an end last year was that Lebanon might become somewhat less failed. Power might emanate from the rule of law rather than the barrel of a gun. And in a society ruled by laws and in which militias are disarmed, men like Hamadi and [Hezbollah's second-in-command, Imad Fayez] Mugniyah would have fewer places to hide.

That's one reason why Hezbollah decided to reignite its war with Israel. Mayhem and destruction are its lifeblood. And no number of well-intentioned U.N. peacekeepers will alter its violent calculus.

Jack Kelly

When Western media act as terrorist propagandists

Mr. Hajj cloned the image of a plume of smoke rising from a bombed building, which made it appear the damage was more widespread than in fact it was. The doctoring was discovered by Web logger Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs), the man who proved the memo then CBS anchor Dan Rather was relying on for his expose of President Bush's National Guard service had been typed on Microsoft Word, which did not exist at the time of the date on the memo....

Perhaps Mr. Hajj also was attempting to remove dust marks when he cloned (twice) an image of a flare being dropped from an Israeli F-16 in a photo he took Aug. 2. The caption says, erroneously, that the F-16 was dropping bombs.

This doctoring was discovered by Web logger Rusty Shackleford (Jawa Report)....

Mr. Hajj was among those whose dramatic photos of dead children being pulled from the wreckage of a building the Israelis bombed in the village of Qana July 30 helped turn world opinion against Israel. Dr. Richard North, a British Web logger (EU Referendum), thinks these photographs were staged, because rescue workers clearly carrying the same corpse are wearing different gear in different photographs. The time stamps on the photos suggest they were taken hours apart, he said.

Posted by Danny Carlton at August 8, 2006 6:05 AM