Well, Richard North continues to do a brilliant job of quizzing the photos of the Qana incident.

Meantime at the superbly written Augean Stables I came across a lot of great stuff, especially their demi-fisking of a Kossite contributor who has a stupid bone to pick with Dr North. The best part is that you don't actually have to read the Daily Kos to get with the latest in Left-speak, in this case the parable of the flowers and the weeds.

I loved this bit in particular:

'smintheus informs us that the rest of North’s work is “writing obsessively about inconsequential details.” This comment reveals quite nicely what happens when someone with a predisposition to reject the argument, reads uncomfortable material (like me reading tax forms)'.

You know, I rarely type this, but LOL! That's exactly what it is. The problem with the left is that they're defrauding reality, and they hate to be reminded of the fact. Of course on the right the problem is handling being correct, which is very hard to do constructively or with dignity. How exactly can one make 'liar, liar etc' sound respectful and constructive without finally sighing and saying 'oh, ok, I give in, black is white etc, whaaatever'. 'Tis a conundrum.

Update: I was pleased to find Mark Steyn taking this line on the Qana happening:

'I don’t claim to know what really happened at this season’s “massacre” – at Qana – but I do know this: it’s not what the western media reported.'

Pilate asked 'What is truth'.

Richerd A.E. North asks 'What is the truth' concerning the Qana outrage.

The 'the' here is a vital one. Pilate would have been a perfect post-modern, little bothered by matters of detail, obsessed with the effects of actions rather than their particularities and moral mechanics. He would have really taken to the idea of disproportionality: after all, what's the bottom line? How many have the Hezbullah actually killed?

Read Richard's latest post. It's a defence of asking questions, of weighing evidence.
Seeing all of the pictures together in the way Euref has assembled them stimulates the mind to think about how the scene unfolded.

From much experience we know how startlingly sympathetic much of the press is to anti-Israel terrorists like Hezbullah and Hamas. It's clear looking at the photos that they are not photos of a rescue and recovery operation, but a particularly macabre and prolonged photo opportunity for an international press baying for a ceasefire.

They of course think they are doing us good; more to the point doing the Lebanese good; but it's clear from the photos there must have been a kind of patience being exercised by all concerned while the photo ops were teed up. It's this which fertilises the suspicions. The man we see again and again is said to be Abu Shadi Jradi. This man is consistently referred to as a civil defence official by all the news reports I've seen. But what, I ask, is a 'civil defence official' in this part of Lebanon except a Hezbullah man? Why is it only he and another man of similarly authoritative appearance, mr 'white t-shirt', who are seen prominently with the bodies? Is it that they are feared or that they are trusted exclusively?

Another question (and there are many). Richard North has been informed that there is no secret regarding timestamps to photos but that reporters came from all over the world and thus their cameras were operating on different time settings. Maybe so, but this just raises the question as to how all these journalists were able to set themselves up in time to capture all these urgent scenes. No one got an exclusive, it seems, because there was zero spontaneity. They were in the hands of the local "Civil Defence Authority" aka Hezbullah.

Many have pointed out (another latest updated sceptical post) the apparent rigor mortis in some of the bodies, the lack of wounds consistent with an airstrike and building collapse, the time gap between the time the Israelis said they struck and the building collapsed. These are all good points, but I think that the extent to which the media universally got the story in a uniform way through uniform images- the clear evidence of a 'civil defence force' with everything under control except for the lifeless little bodies- makes clear to me that this news was managed. Therefore Qana can't have happened as we have been led to believe, because, as 9/11's desperation showed, as any calamitous event shows, no one can manage a true disaster- least of all the incompetents of an Islamofascist regime.