Israel, not Hizbullah, is putting civilians in danger on both sides of the border

Israel has really become the 51st state.

Where in hell are the taxes?

Israel, not Hizbullah, is putting civilians in danger on both sides of the border:

"08/03/06 'Information Clearing House' -- -- Here are some interesting points raised this week by a leading commentator and published in a respected daily newspaper:

'The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli communities, next to schools, beside hospitals, close to welfare centres, ensuring that any Israeli target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the UN's Jan Egeland had in mind when he lambasted Israel's 'cowardly blending ... among women and children'. It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it also makes macabre sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one, and in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side represents a kind of victory.'

You probably did not read far before realising that I have switched 'Israel' for 'Hizbullah' and 'Ehud Olmert' for 'Hassan Nasrallah'. The paragraph was taken from an opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland published in Britain's Guardian newspaper on 2 August. My attempt at deception was probably futile because no one seems to seriously believe that criticisms of the kind expressed above can be levelled against Israel.

Freedland, like most commentators in our media, assumes that Hizbullah is using the Lebanese population as 'human shields,' hiding its fighters, arsenals and rocket launchers inside civilian areas. 'Cowardly' behaviour rather than the nature of Israel's air strikes, in his view, explains the spiralling death toll among Lebanese civilians. This perception of Hizbullah's tactics grows more common by the day, even though it flies in the face of the available evidence and the research of independent observers in Lebanon such as Human Rights Watch.