It is Raining in Sderot

E. D. Kain has written a great article on Newsvine about Israel, the attacks on a town named Sderot and how the world perceives, or ignores, the battle going on there:

Waiting for Iran and the other radical Arab States to come to the realization that they can live in peace with their Democratic neighbor Israel is a waste of time. It will never happen, so long as Iran is ruled by the iron, theocratic fists of the mullahs and extremists. The extremists have no desire to find a peaceful solution, because peace undermines their power. Don’t look to Hamas for a diplomatic solution.

The only way to take power from the extremists and terrorists is to cripple them, take away their effectiveness, and reveal them as the cowards and criminals that they are. When they can no longer harm Israel, then maybe their own people will realize who their true enemies are.

And perhaps someday the mainstream media will start telling the truth about Israel and the rain in Sderot.

Kain is right. We see on the news the deaths of children and hear how the IDF killed them, but do we hear about Hezbollah using people as human shields? Not usually. That would take away from their victim status. But as Human Events noted,

The Shiite terrorist faction intentionally positions itself amid civilians. It does so, moreover, in the knowledge that converting civilian areas into makeshift battle stations, complete with rocket emplacements and command centers, is a sure-fire way of prompting Israeli counterattacks and the inevitable civilian deaths that serve as the group’s most effective weapon in its propaganda war against the Jewish state. Consider the following list of news items:

• Throughout the current fighting, Hezbollah has prevented civilians from leaving their villages prior to Israeli military strikes.
• Hezbollah has used mosques as weapons depots, using them to stockpile weapons and ammunition and to launch ambushes on IDF forces. Senior IDF officials have further revealed that Hezbollah, acting on the conviction that Israel would not attack Lebanese residential areas, has taken to concealing long-range rockets in specially-designed rooms built in houses in southern Lebanese villages.
• Hezbollah has repeatedly fired rockets from civilian population centers. Aerial footage collected by the IDF unmistakably shows Hezbollah rockets being fired from civilian areas near Qana, the site of the July 30 air strike that was widely condemned as an unprovoked attack on civilians by Israel.
• A New York Times story on Christians fleeing Lebanon quoted a young Christian man, Fayad Hanna Amar, from the village of Ain Eben, deploring Hezbollah’s tactics. “Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,” Amar told the Times. “They are shooting from between our houses.” Amar said that Hezbollah fighters had poured into his village in groups of two and three in order to launch rockets, forcing the Israeli army to return fire.
• A July 28 press release [pdf] by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) noted that “Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of five UN positions” in southern Lebanon and explained that a “number of troops in some Ghanaian battalion positions is somewhat reduced because of the increased safety risk for the troops due to frequent incidents of Hezbollah firing from the vicinity of the positions” and Israeli retaliation.
• Mere days before he was killed in an Israeli strike on a UN post in Lebanon, an unarmed Canadian United Nations observer had written privately that Hezbollah was using the post to fire rockets into Israel. Of Israeli bombings, Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedner wrote that “[t]his has not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity.” As a former UN commander told the Ottawa Citizen, “What that means is, in plain English, ‘We’ve got Hezbollah fighters running around in our positions, taking our positions here and then using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defence Forces).”
• After touring south Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland demanded that “Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending…among women and children.” Added Egeland: “I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don’t think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men.”
• Israeli troops freshly returned from battling Hezbollah fighters in the village of Taibeh this weekend gave the following reason for the terrorists’ tenacity: “We can never beat them completely because we have to obey certain rules. They operate from within civilian populations, and can do whatever they like.”
• One need not rely on news reports alone. The most powerful proof that Hezbollah wages war amid civilians comes in the form of photographs smuggled out of Lebanon and published by Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper, and which show armed Hezbollah fighters deployed in the center of a residential district.

The above list is by no means exhaustive.

They are playing the media, using them as tools to spread propaganda. And they are good at it.