Surmounting manipulation

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Last night, I awoke haunted by images of children's bodies being pulled from the rubble in Lebanon. I couldn't sleep for hours, thinking about the brutality of war and responsibility for the carnage. My heart ached with grief.

In any war, mistakes happen, horrible mistakes. This may have been one. But who is the real culprit?

International law defines using civilians as human shields as a war crime. Hezbollah is violating Article 58 of Protocol 1, which requires parties to a conflict to "Avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas."

Israel is within its rights to pursue Hezbollah in populated areas: Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: "The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations."

Hezbollah (and Palestinian terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad), routinely commit war crimes by locating their command outposts, weapons and ammo storage, and rocket launchers in residential areas. Terrorists are war criminals, not those who fight them.

The current war launched by Hezbollah and Hamas -- and their Iranian sponsors -- is not just about Israel. Israel is a convenient target in the neighborhood: a "Small Satan," a proxy and a symbol of the "Great Satan" -- the U.S.

Jihadis openly and repeatedly proclaim to their faithful their double goal: a conversion of the whole Muslim world to their version of Islam, followed by enforced Islamization of the rest of world.

In modern jihadi warfare, the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Israel, are presented as aggressors whenever they are exercise self-defense -- not against a religion, but a radical, totalitarian ideology that wants to enslave the world. In that narrative, terrorists are victims. As George Orwell wrote in" 1984," "War is peace."

The terrorists have coldly played the victim card for years -- sending kids to throw stones at troops, shooting at soldiers while hiding behind the backs of women and children, wildly inflating casualty counts, hoping to provoke air strikes and artillery barrages to inflame the Arab "street" and whip up their version of "jihad." They also use U.N. peacekeepers as human shields -- they did it in 1996 in the same Lebanese village of Qana, and they're doing it this war as well.

After rockets and bombs fall, the terrorists invite gullible reporters for a guided tour. They send out town criers ahead of the press tours who voice rehearsed lines for the people to repeat -- always against America and Israel -- and point fingers.