DEADLY JEWS

If Robert Fisk is to be believed -- I can't believe I just typed that -- Jews are some of the world's best marksmen. First an Israeli air-to-ground missile hits an ambulance dead centre on the Red Cross painted on its roof. Now it emerges that an Israeli warship fired a single shot hitting the cab of a pick-up truck packed with 27 people. This is truly amazing considering the distance involved: you see, the Israeli navy was by this time (July 15th) staying well off the coast after one of its vessels had been hit by a missile the day before while some 16 km out to sea.

Now, I have no idea what happened to the pick-up, if anything, and I'm certainly not making light of any deaths that might have resulted, but Fisk's retelling of this tale just doesn't ring true:

Ali Kemal drove north from Marwahin, away from the Israeli border, then west towards the sea. He must have seen the Israeli warship and the Israeli naval crew certainly saw Ali's pick-up. The Israelis had been firing at all vehicles on the roads of southern Lebanon for three days - they hit dozens of civilian cars as well as ambulances and never once explained their actions except to claim that they were shooting at "terrorists". At a corner of the road, where it descends to the sea, Ali Kemal suddenly realised his vehicle was overheating and he pulled to a halt. This was a dangerous place to break down. For seven minutes, he tried to restart the pick-up.

According to Mohamed's son Wissam, Ali - whose elderly mother Sabaha was sitting beside him in the front - turned to the children with the words: "Get out, all you children get out and the Israelis will realise we are civilians." The first two or three children had managed to climb out the back when the Israeli warship fired a shell that exploded in the cab of the pick-up, killing Ali and Sabaha instantly. "I had almost been able to jump from the vehicle -- my mother had told me to jump before the ship hit us," Wissam says. "But the pressure of the explosion blew me out when I had only one leg over the railing and I was wounded. There was blood everywhere."

Hmm, this all sounds vaguely familiar. Here's something new, the hovering low-flying Apache:

Within a few seconds, Wissam says, an Israeli Apache helicopter arrived over the f vehicle, very low and hovering just above the children. "I saw Myrna still in the pick-up and she was crying and pleading for help. I went to get her and that's when the helicopter hit us. Its missile hit the back of the vehicle where all the children were and I couldn't hear anything because the blast had damaged my ears. Then the helicopter fired a rocket into the car behind the pick-up. But the pilot must have seen what he was doing. He could see we were mostly children. The pick-up didn't have a roof. All the children were crammed in the back and clearly visible."

Wissam talks slowly but without tears as he describes what happened next. "I lost sight of Myrna. I just couldn't see her any more for the dust flying around. Then the helicopter came back and started firing its guns at the children, at any of them who moved. I ran away behind a tel [a small hill] and lay there and pretended to be dead because I knew the pilot would kill me if I moved. Some of the children were in bits."

Isn't it just like Jews to throw caution to the wind, hovering a helicopter where it's vulnerable to small-arms fire, RPGs and missiles, in order to confirm it's children they're attacking, and then machine-gunning the wounded?

Fisk may have it right but he's not to be trusted, ever:

...Israel would respond with 34 days of air-strikes and bombardments that killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians. Hizbollah missiles would kill fewer than 200 Israelis, most of them soldiers.

Hezbollah rockets mostly killed civilians:

Hezbollah's rocket force possesses about 13,000 rockets and is Hezbollah's main attack weapon in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, having fired some 3,970 rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon, killing at least 42 civilians and 12 soldiers (as of August 14, 2006).