Worry About the West -- Not Israel Contributed by Bill Faith
Victor Davis Hanson:
The reactions and media coverage coming out of the West regarding this latest war in the Middle East are as bewildering as they are instructive.
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., for example, recently said, "I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah or for or against Israel."
Meanwhile, the Western news agency Reuters, responding to scrutiny by bloggers, withdrew wire photos taken by a freelance photographer of a smoky and burning Beirut. Reuters had failed to catch the freelancer's doctoring of the photos to emphasize unduly the damage from Israeli bombs.
And the Associated Press notes that initially reported Lebanese claims of 40 "civilians" killed by Israeli air strikes at Houla, Lebanon, in fact, were mistaken -- and that the latest reports have lowered the death toll to one.
[Read the whole thing .]
Still, when this is all over, we should not worry about the survival of Israel. For weeks, pundits have been lecturing how canny and adept Hezbollah has proved -- and how a clumsy Israel could only respond by destroying Lebanon's infrastructure. Yet, when the dust settles, the world will learn that Lebanon outside Hezbollah's domain is not destroyed. And, one hopes, those who have suffered in the Hezbollah-controlled south will reexamine their support for a terrorist organization that has brought them -- and itself -- to near ruin.
Instead far more worrisome is the moral crisis in the West itself. If so many of its politicians, intellectuals and media will not or cannot fathom moral differences in this war, they will hardly be able to see them anywhere else.
Contributed by Bill Faith on August 10, 2006 at 12:20 PM in , , , , , |