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As usual, the media is cooperating with the terrorists. A decade ago in the Bosnian War, Slobodan Milosevic happily invited television crews to broadcast the hostage U.N. peacekeepers' plight to the world. Saddam employed a similar device. Bomb us, and you murder your own people. Today, southern Lebanon is crawling with journalists interviewing every Lebanese civilian they can scare up, ordinary folks who have long tolerated the terrorists' presence.

THE HUMAN SHIELD strategy is a relatively new tactic, first cooked up by Saddam in the First Gulf War. The Iraqi dictator, however, used Western civilians, not his own people, to discourage attacks. This strategy was soon copied by Milosevic in Bosnia and the Taliban in Afghanistan. American peace activists even picked up the trick, volunteering to be human shields prior to the Second Gulf War. What's new here is that Hizbullah has taken the criminal tactic one step further in cynically and cowardly using its own people as civilian shields.

This is not Clausewitz's brand of warfare. It bears no resemblance to traditional warfare among civilized nations, which was waged with honor and dignity. Rather we have non-state terrorist groups hiding behind the skirts of women and the bibs of babies. As we've seen in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan and now Lebanon, civilians, particularly dead civilians, are more important to winning than rockets and guns. And it takes a lot of dead women and infants to win a war.

Another question needs addressing: Why does Hizbullah, which started this war, get a free pass from the media and human rights groups when it puts its civilians at risk and when its missiles kill Israeli civilians? Critics call Israel's response disproportionate. What is disproportionate is the anti-Israel coverage from the international media. Much of it, in my view, bordering on anti-Semitism.

Christopher Orlet is a frequent contributor and runs the Existential Journalist.

topics:
Mainstream Media, Television, Military, Iraq, Israel