Israeli Cabinet Rejects Masive

Israeli cabinet rejects masive reliance on troops.

The Israeli war with Hizbullah is going badly for the Israelis. Some generals think the problem is too few troops. But the Israeli cabinet rejected that way of thinking, Thursday, sticking to its current mixture of air power and light infantry.

Air strikes in the south will continue.

Bloomberg reports that the the Israeli assault on Lebanon may have much strengthened the hand of Shaikh Hassan Nasrullah.

Mitch Prothero in Salon.com on the myth that Hizbullah hides among civilians.

‘ Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths — the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far — on “terrorists” who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters — as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers — avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so many Palestinian militants have been.

For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they’ll get some fighters, too. ‘

A Christian Bishop in Jerusalem would get a better hearing among American Christians than would non-Christian leaders, right? Wrong.