Manufacturing Reality

I never heard of "Israeli Insider" before, but today it's being used as the authoritative source for the fantasy bloggers' latest loonytoons yarn: that the collapse of the building in Qana, Lebanon, that killed at least 60 civilians -- at least half of them children -- was staged by Hezbollah.

On the morning of July 30, according to the IDF, the air force came in three waves. In the first, between midnight and one in the morning, there was a strike at or near the building that eventually collapsed.

Brent Sadler of CNN reports that the Israeli ordnance did not even hit the building but landed "20 or 30 meters" from the structure.

There was a second strike at other targets far from the collapse building several hours later, and a third strike at around 7:30 in the morning. There too the nearest hit was some 460 meters away, according to the IDF. But first reports of a building collapse came only around 8 am.

Thus there was an unexplained 7 to 8 hour gap between the time of the helicopter strike and the building collapse. Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters, in a press briefing, told journalists that "the attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear."

Gen. Eshel appeared genuinely mystified by the gap in time. He "I'm saying this very carefully, because at this time I don't have a clue as to what the explanation could be for this gap," he added.

The army's only explanation was that somehow there was unexploded Hezbollah ordnance in the building that only detonated much later.

Carla at Preemptive Karma muses:

It just couldn't be that Israel bombed the crap out of the building and it was so unstable that it collapsed..could it?

Barbara at Mahablog mentions the unthinkable:

Or, it could be that the building did collapse during the bombing attack and the reports of a later collapse are wrong.

But, Barbara adds, the question is moot, because in most other places, people are given real information about things that actually happen, as opposed to here in the United States, where people are fed wild theories about what might have happened, based on nothing even resembling evidence, and are then asked to believe that what might have happened is actually what happened:

Here in the United States I have no doubt the audiences of Faux Nooz and rightie talk radio are being told, over and over, ad nauseum, that the atrocity at Qana was staged, and that the Fable of the Staged Atrocity at Qana is already firmly established in rightie mythos. But outside the U.S. most people are exposed to actual news, not wild-ass speculation and propaganda disguised as news, so unless (someday) Israel can actually prove the allegation, it won't be making headlines. And Israel still will have lost the P.R. war. ...