Hezbollah Has 4 Times More Rockets Hidden in Schools and Hospitals Than They Did in 2006

From Powerlineblog's The wages of not finishing the job:

Michael Oren, Israel's stellar ambassador to the U.S., is warning that Hezbollah has amassed an arsenal of approximately 15,000 rockets in South Lebanon, near the border with Israel. That's about four times more than Hezbollah had in 2006, when it launched constant rocket attacks deep into Northern Israel. Moreover, according to Oren, Hezbollah's rockets can now reach every Israeli city, even Eliat in the South.

To make matters worse, this time Hezbollah has placed its rockets under hospitals, homes and schools. So, if Israel were to try to take the rockets out, it would face howls of protest from the "international community" including, I suspect, President Obama. Israel may well have to pay a steep price for its cautious approach to the 2006 fight against Hezbollah and for not finishing that fight.

Back in 2006 I began my attack on the MSM when I contacted the Managing Editor of the Detroit News, Dave Butler, to express my disappointment in their coverage of Israel's fight against Hezbollah in 2006. Now I know that pointing out that the MSM had a liberal bias was an exercise of pointing out the obvious, but back several years ago I was still figuring this out, and I wanted to know why the coverage was so one-sided. As I pointed out back then:

Every day there is a story about the number of Hezbollah and Lebanese civilians killed so far, and there are frequent stories in your newspaper focusing in an the specific deaths of these people, but I can not find any news reports focusing on the death count for Israeli civilians and defense forces, or a single in depth article on some poor Israeli mother who has lost her children to a Hezbollah rocket.

My point in writing was not just to point out the one-sided coverage- my fear was that by favoring a pro-terrorist organization like Hezbollah, the News would be siding with the bad guys, and everyone knows that when you side with the bad guys you always eventually lose (whether in this world or the next). In this particular case, I feared that by siding with an immoral and evil group that represents the worst in humanity readers would be driven away, which would result in less advertising revenue, which would result in cuts being made to the sports section and the comics- and I love my sports section and color comics.

In my conversation with Mr. Butler, he stressed that neither side was immoral or wrong- that this conflict was a nonpartisan affair between two combatants of equal morality, and thus he could defend his coverage of the conflict. To him, there was no difference between a terrorist non-state group launching random rockets into populated areas in Israel and Israel's response to kill those terrorists who were launching the rockets and to destroy those rockets. To him, there was no difference between a uniformed solider trying to kill an un-uniformed terrorist, and the un-uniformed terrorist who hid in schools and churches and launched his rockets from those locations. He saw nothing wrong in a free-thinking adult choosing to put women and children and the sick in harms way in order to defend himself from a retaliation attack as he launched weapons of random mass destruction (WRMD's?) at women, children, and the sick. The Managing Editor of the Detroit News thought that he was brave and fair and morally right in equating the two sides of this conflict. Clearly, he was wrong for doing so, and his paper suffered accordingly for choosing to equate evil with good and be 'unbaised and nonpartial' when covering a conflict that clearly had good guys and bad guys.

One other point- over the ensuing letters that Mr. Butler and myself exchanged several interesting points emerged, which I believe will come up again when Hezbollah once again attacks Israel and that good nation is forced to respond. The most important point that emerged is the MSM's reliance on outside sources for information- whether it be the AP or the Wire Service or something- the MSM is just like me- simply an organization that mostly takes news from other sites and filters it and rewords it and then passes it along, while doing a little bit of original reporting on the side (I do original reporting too). If conflict once again erupts in the Middle East, be careful that your news source isn't just recycling what some biased AP or Wire Service reporter wants to feed to you.