archy

They kill their own people
Rush Limbaugh has picked up on the vile conspiracy theory regarding Qana, which I mentioned in my long post yesterday.

Apparently the only thing more valuable than dead Jewish kids to militant Islamist terrorist is dead Muslim kids for which the deaths they can blame on the Israelis. I have never seen a group of people more willing to sacrifice their own children to advance their ideology...

That building didn't fall for eight hours after it was hit. What do you bet that the Hezbos finished the job that the Israeli bomb did not actually complete? What do you bet they killed their own people for the PR aspect? These people cannot compete militarily with any industrialized nation, so they have to fight the PR and the spin war. And it is amazing to me to see how easily the duped US and world media is.

[...]

Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it. Yet they send these pictures out without saying all of this is being staged for us.

This is a classic propaganda technique: demonization of the enemy. The enemy is not human. The enemy does not love its children. Demonization of the enemy involves an unstated puffing up of our own side in contrast (we are human, we do love our children). Our side never commits horrible crimes or even has tragic accidents. Any appearnce that we have is the result of a masterful conspiracy by the enemy to make us look bad. The enemy is so single-minded in their hatred of us that they will murder their own children in order to make us look bad. The only way to deal with such an enemy is to reign in our inate humanity and exterminate the brutes.

Limbaugh is still at the hypothetical stage of the game, "What do you bet that they did it?" It won't take long for this to transform itself into, "We know that they did it." If not by Limbaugh, then by his legions of dittoheads.

Of course, there is a remote chance that Hezbollah did murder their own children in order to fake a massacre; there are no crimes that human mind can imagine that someone, somewhere isn't capable of attempting.* My point is that Limbaugh and the others embracing this theory are not making their claims based on any kind of evidence. They are instead stating "facts" based entirely on the gut instincts of their conspiratorial worldview. They "know" our side doesn't do things like that. They "know" that the other side does. This no different than claiming George Bush or the Jews blew up the World Trade Center for some nefarious purpose or another.

Digby has an excellent post on the same subject.

* On the night of August 31, 1939, the Gestapo staged an attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz near the Polish border to provide a legal justification for the invasion of Poland. Gestapo agents dressed a prisoner named Franciszek Honiok in a Polish uniform and shot him while another Gestapo agent broadcast a message in Polish that urged the Poles living in Silesia to strike against Germans. The next morning Honiok's body was shown to the press as proof that the Poles had attacked Germany.