Washington Post Reporter: Israelis Leaving Rockets For Hezbollah To Shoot At Them

• August 8, 2006

Tom Ricks, you’ve covered a number of military conflicts, including Iraq, as I just mentioned. Is civilian casualties increasingly going to be a major media issue? In conflicts where you don’t have two standing armies shooting at each other?
THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, “THE WASHINGTON POST”: I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they’re being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.
KURTZ: Hold on, you’re suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it’s fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?
RICKS: Yes, that’s what military analysts have told me.
KURTZ: That’s an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here.
RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.

John Hinderaker from Powerline responds:

Just let that sink in for a moment. Israel has constantly warned its citizens to stay in bunkers, and has carried out what most would say is a reasonably thorough air campaign to knock out Hezbollah rocket launchers. Hezbollah, on the other hand, deliberately locates its rocket launchers in civilian neighborhoods, fires from inside houses, and constantly parades the corpses of people who may or may not have been killed in air attacks before cameras for propaganda purposes. But in Ricks’s twisted world-view, it’s Israel that is deliberately getting its own people killed so that it can occupy the “moral high ground.”

And these are the people we trust to objectively bring us the news from the middle east.

Tags: Media

Zsa Zsa

Twisted is a good word for it.
robert108

This exchange just illustrates the emotion-driven lefties' inability to think clearly. Next, they will blame Karl Rove. Depend on it. They are desperately grasping at straws.
http://www.ski-blog.com/ Justin B

F*cking Jews. You know that they did the same thing in WWII by letting Hitler exterminate 6M civilian Jews all so that they could make the world feel guilty and give them Israel. I bet next, it will be Israel supplying Hezbollah with the rockets and blaming Iran and Syria so that they can go to war with them too.

In 1944, I saw some Zionist photographers taking pictures at Auschwitz and sending them to the media with doctored up and photoshopped bodies. There were only 1M people executed and burned there, but the photoshopped pictures have 200 ovens and almost 20M Jews killed. Lying bastards.

If the Jews are so evil they would leave behind missiles for Hezbollah to kill innocent Israeli civilians with so they could prolong and deepen the war, it seems to me that Hezbollah would be smart enough to trick the Heb bastards bynot firing the missiles and thwart their plan and agree to an immediate cease fire. Because Hezbollah does not want to kill Jewish civilians and somehow the Zionists are tricking them into prolonging the war by not immediately eradicating the Hezbos and intentionally not killing every F*ing one of them immediately.

Come out and say it. Stop calling them Zionists. Let the Anti-semitism flow through you. Throw rocks through the windows of the Jewish shopowner's place. Make them all wear little stars. Tattoo numbers on them. Tommie Boy from the Washington Post may as well be loading them and their children into train cars for the Treaty of Versailles.

HOW THE F* Does he get away with even insinuating that? Oh, by reporting it as something "some generals" have postulated on. He doesn't believe it personally, but has heard speculation saying that.
Wifey

Rockets without launchers are IEDs. How sucssefully are those used against Israel?
http://informaticsmd.blogspot.com/ S Silverstein

Ricks is a liar. His 'military analyst' is a fraud named Lucy Ramirez.
http://www.kenmccracken.blogspot.com/ Ken McCracken

Ricks isn't some schmuck liberal journalist. Hugh Hewitt had a great interview with him today, and this is guy you should pay attention to even if you don't agree with him.
Bat One

The problem with Ricks, as with so much of what is speciaouly considered journalism today, is that he he has made an outrageous claim, and based it on remarks by "some military analysts" who remain unidentified by name, rank, partisan persuasion, dint of experience or prior record of astuteness and accuracy.

I could just as easily refer to the opinion of my high schooler who "wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter." All of which would be just as true… presumably… as what Ricks has offered here, and clearly no less demonstrably accurate.

I have yet to read the Hugh Hewitt interview, and I have a great deal of respect for Ken's judgement, but in my opinion, Ricks has yet to establish his bono fides with this story. An awful lot of folks were convinced that Jason Leonard had the Night before Fitz-mas story nailed. And Leonard, poor schmuck, still thinks so too.
http://www.ski-blog.com/ Justin B

Reading the story. Again, the question becomes why say that as if to add creditibilty to such a story?

Especially with the rocket attacks and the Israeli massacre at Qana all over the news. It makes it appear that Israel is playing some kind of game intended to put civilians at risk and the entire conflict is about keeping civilians safe from Hezbollah, so how does it make sense to provide some alternate universe where you are sacrificing your citizens to keep those same citizens safe from rockets?
robert108

Justin: You have it! The whole thing is a propaganda exercise to make Israel the bad guys for defending themselves against terrorism. If they succeed, the US will be next. It's not that complicated. It's the Goebbels Big Lie technique at work, as explained on another thread. We are seeing multiple examples of this every day. The terrorists can't win if we don't lose our resolve. Their main tactic is to lie so completely about everything that we somehow forget why we are fighting, and just give up. That is the only way they can win, and the MSM in our country and the International Press are willing accomplices to this strategy of the terrorists.
http://www.ski-blog.com/ Justin B

The sad part is that the PC world wants to believe that these Islamists are not nutcases and murderers and thugs. We suspend disbelief so that we can think of the people in Lebanon that harbor terrorists in their mosques are just peace loving citizens like the rest of us. We cover our eyes when they cut the head off of a person on video. We say, but they just want to live in peace.

Lies only work if you have a desire to believe them. And the PC world wants to believe that Radical Islam can be dealt with rationally. That is the lie. They can only be dealt with one way. That is utterly destroyed. And that is what we need to let Israel do. Israel is not interested in leaving pockets to clean up later. Maybe they focus on some first and others later, but the goal is to protect their citizens and the only way to do that is completely destroy the Islamists.
http://sayanythingblog.com/ likwidshoe

And the PC world wants to believe that Radical Islam can be dealt with rationally. That is the lie. They can only be dealt with one way. That is utterly destroyed.

"Oh, but you can't defeat an ideology" says the politically correct moron who doesn't study the history of World War 2.

I just had to add that…you've made good points Justin B.
robert108

The lefties in this country still cling to the Marxist view of foreign affairs: It's all about class struggle. The Islamics are the "poor and oppressed" and therefore get all the sympathy from those benighted lefties. Of course, the thinking-challenged lefties simply ignore the barbaric acts of terrorism, including strapping bombs on children and lauching rockets into civilian areas, because it doesn't fit their ideological mold, therefore, it doesn't exist. "I never had sex with that woman…Monica Lewinsky." "Not one time." (wags finger for emphasis) I have no doubt at all that he believed it as he said it.
http://ndblueblog.blogspot.com/ graeme

Prove what he said is false before you bust a nut over it. I read the interview Ken linked too and he sounds like a pretty objective guy to me. I wouldn't even say he is a lefty.
robert108

Very tricky, graeme, and very seductive, and completely wrong. He has the burden of proof here, not the other way 'round. Anyone can string words together to attempt to support his agenda, but proving that they are true is the trick, and this guy hasn't even come close. Until he offers some solid proof, it is proper to regard what he said as anti-Israel propaganda, nothing more.
Besides, what he says makes no sense at all, unless one is virulently anti-Israel and grasping at straws to excuse the Hez terrorism and their targeting of civilians by their every act.
http://www.ski-blog.com/ Justin B

Prove what he said is false before you bust a nut over it.

Prove what? That he has an unnamed source that claims that it is possible that Israel is leaving behind pockets of rockets just so they have shit to blow up?

He really didin't say a damned thing except that people are speculating that Israel is doing this or that. That is like me saying that your neighbor said that your wife like getting the cock from the pool boy. You come over and call me a lying sack of shit and I say, well, gee, I didn't say that I believed that your wife like the chlorine cock, just that the neighbor said it. I don't really believe, but I repeated it and reported it as fact or at least mentioned it as though it might be fact.

What do you want us to prove? That your wife does not love the pool boy cock or that the neighbor did not say that she does? I think at the end of the day, when you make charges or repeat charges like this, you damned well better offer more proof than just an unnamed source speaking off the record.
http://www.ski-blog.com/ Justin B

Mine likes the Schwann's Man and UPS, but not FedEx. Don't come here with some weak ass milkman or FedEx crap.

You repeat BS like that long enough and it takes on life of its own. Like repeating stories about smallpox blankets or 9-11 being a government conspiracy or Alien abductions or Tom Cruise not being gay.
http://sayanythingblog.com/ likwidshoe

graeme said, Prove what he said is false before you bust a nut over it.

Hey, great logic there! Let me try one:

Graeme Anfinson, from Fargo, North Dakota likes to abuse women and torture small animals. He sucked his thumb until he was 20 years old and is known to cuss at nuns and priests.

Now don't "bust a nut" Graeme, just prove what I said is false.

Good luck!
http://Array Wifey

When mister Ricks provides a live, GPS referenced satelite feed, showing himself standing on top of a pile of rockets, with an IDF General explaining that he ordered his troops to leave them intact for use against Israeli civs, then I will believe him. Till such time as this comes to pass mister Ricks is just another propaganda whore working to further the Wahabi Deathcult assholes. Period. Oh, and this is still 2H9, I'll not be getting the laptop back till this evening, so direct your lame assed defense of Deathculters and their media whores to me not Wifey. She really does not like you Graeme.

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Washington Post Reporter: Israelis Leaving Rockets For Hezbollah To Shoot At Them

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