The infrastructure of Hezballah's victim strategy

Opinion Journal:

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The most persuasive evidence here is photographic, so we urge readers to access the report itself on the Web site of the American Jewish Congress (ajcongress.org). Hezbollah's headquarters in Aita al-Shaab, for instance, sits in the heart of the village. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's office and home are in a densely built neighborhood of Beirut. In the town of Qana--site of an Israeli bombing on July 30 that killed 28 and that Hezbollah's apologists were quick to label a "massacre"--an arms warehouse can be seen adjacent to a mosque. There are photographs of rockets in the back seats of cars, missile launchers adjacent to farm houses, storage bunkers hidden beneath homes. There is also a trove of before-and-after photography demonstrating the precision of most Israeli bombing.

The report also shows how the use of civilian cover was explicitly part of Hezbollah's strategy. "[The organization's operatives] live in their houses, in their schools, in their churches, in their fields, in their farms and in their factories," said Mr. Nasrallah in a TV interview on May 27, several weeks before the war. "You can't destroy them in the same way you would destroy an army."

Exactly what Mr. Nasrallah means is illustrated in the testimonials of the captured fighters. Asked why Hezbollah would risk the destruction of civilian areas by firing from them, Mr. Suleiman replied that while in theory private homes belonged to "the residents of the village . . . in essence they belong to Hezbollah."

Perhaps that's true; if so, then Human Rights Watch has no grounds to accuse Israel of atrocities when Mr. Nasrallah has effectively declared everyone and everything in southern Lebanon to be his fief. Our sense, however, is that not all southern Lebanese were delighted to have their livelihoods appropriated for Hezbollah's political purposes, even if they were too intimidated to register a protest. Either way, it is Hezbollah, not Israel, that is guilty of war crimes here.

Beyond the war in Lebanon, these images suggest how Islamists seek to use the restraint of Western powers against them. They shoot at our civilians from the safety of their own civilian enclaves that they know we are reluctant to attack. Then if by chance their civilians are killed, they call in CNN and al-Jazeera cameras and wait for the likes of Mr. Roth to denounce America or Israel for war crimes.

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Now that the enemy strategy is so evident will the media stop acting as their useful idiots when they go into a victim offensive mode? Probably not. They are suffering from the liberal disease. Their arrogance prevents them from even acknowledging the truth. In their alternate universe, their bubble, the problem is resistance to our enemies through the use of force.