Achmed’s Flag Emporium

If you took Western news outlets at face value, you’d think that every Arab hamlet, no matter how humble, must have at least one thriving American and Israeli flag merchant. For whenever the Big or Little Satan sneezes, it seems all anyone has to do is run down to Achmed’s Flag Emporium to set one on fire for the cameras.

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting article at National Review; he see us in the West as "suckers." Make your enemy, Israel in this instance, the bad guys "for resisting terrorism."

What's that you say? Bad guys for resisting terrorism, wouldn't that be good?

Well, not when according to Goldberg their:

strategy depends on the willing support of what Lenin called “useful idiots.” These are the accommodating Westerners — many of them intellectuals — all too willing to take the word of totalitarians and even more eager to believe that the champions of democracy are in the wrong. Some social scientists call these people “French,” but that is too limiting. For there are plenty of them in America, too.

Qana is a prime example of how this "assymetric warfare" works:

Less than a week ago, Israeli jets bombed a building in the Lebanese village of Qana — a building Israelis believed to be evacuated — and it later collapsed. More than 50 people, many of them children, were pulled from the wreckage, dead. Newspapers, politicians and a host of useful idiots condemned another Israeli massacre. Images of dead children saturated the airwaves. Israel immediately apologized.

The script is even more familiar. The Qana “massacre” was very convenient for Hezbollah politically. It stymied Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Beirut, forestalled talk of disarming Hezbollah, and rallied international opinion around the terrorist group. Aspects of the Qana story don’t jibe, starting with the timeline. The building collapsed seven hours after the bombing (which remains the likely explanation now). Some of the bodies don’t look like they were killed in a building collapse, and refrigerated trucks were reportedly brought in before the media could visit the site, perhaps delivering corpses. An elaborate 30-foot-long banner condemning a bloody lipped Rice for the attack was improbably at the ready for a protest that morning. Bloggers around the globe are steadily picking apart other details, to the dismay of many who like their anti-Israel storylines tidy (see confederateyankee.mu.nu for a summary).

But again, even if the deaths were the byproduct of Israel’s bombing, that hardly makes it an intentional massacre, and it hardly makes Israel the villain. Hezbollah deliberately places its weapons caches beneath schools and homes, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. It shoots its rockets from civilian population centers. If the rockets slaughter Israelis, Hezbollah wins. If Israel responds and kills civilians, Israel loses. And either way, you can be sure some sucker will blame Israel for the whole thing.

Regardless of what is discovered, it will be ignored by the msm and the rest of the world.