Revisiting Qana

The indefatigable zombie, crusher of media memes, appears to have uncovered evidence that brings into question the Qana incident - not the 2006 variety, but the incident in 1996 that eerily parallels what happened earlier this month.

Back in 1996, the blogosphere was in its infancy and the ability to debunk these issues on the fly were quite limited. Now, the power of the Internet and high speed connnections lets folks download and distribute audio and video so that they examine the evidence in tandem with the written articles of the incident. As zombie writes at LGF:

The Ambulance Hoax is connected to the Qana bombing, and they are both exact parallels of the exact same thing that happened in the exact same places exactly ten years earlier.

In 1996, there was "an ambulance bombed by Israelis."

A week later, there was the first "Qana massacre."

In 2006, there was "an ambulance bombed by Israelis."

A week later, there was the second "Qana massacre."

We now know the second ambulance attack was a fake, and the second Qana attack was at least partly fake.

Were they copycats of the first incidents? Yes. But now I have video of the 1996 "ambulance attack." And can you guess? Yup! It's TOTALLY FAKE. And now I'm beginning to think that the first Qana massacre must have been fake too! But we didn't have the blogosphere back then to debunk it!

Now, the videos aren't nearly as high quality as the 2006 video, but the actions of those in the videos suggests that something might be afoot. Was the carnage exaggerated or even staged? It is certainly possible.

Zombie goes on to wonder how long this has been going on. I'd have to say for decades, but there's been no way to debunk memes before they get firmly implanted in the media and in the Islamic world where these lies are propagated and distributed.

The Palestinians and indeed others in the Middle East have been doing these very sorts of things for quite some time. Witness Adnan Hajj and his photo editing of photos. Witness Hizbullah intimidating and pressuring journalists who were operating in South Lebanon. Witness the Gaza beach incident, which Palestinians claimed a family at a beach outing were killed by Israeli artillery but those Palestinian casualties appear to have been inflicted by Palestinian terrorists. Also note that the Palestinians have repeatedly claimed that the Israelis have used mysterious chemical weapons to kill people, and yet a closer examination of these claims reveals that no such weapons were used at all.