From Canada’s National Post:
On Sunday morning, Hezbollah rockets slammed into the UN peacekeepers’ Lebanon headquarters in the town of Henniye. Because the U.N. has — finally — wised up and removed most of its unarmed observers from the war zone, there were mercifully few casualties. Three Chinese soldiers were injured. But had the headquarters been fully staffed to pre-war levels, the results almost certainly would have been tragic.
About 12 hours later, the dusk calm in a northern suburb of the Israeli city of Haifa was shattered as Syrian-made rockets fired by Hezbollah terrorists slammed into residential neighbourhoods. At least two apartments were struck. One building reportedly took five direct hits. Three Israeli civilians were killed: Hana Hamam, 62, Labiba Mazawi, 67, and Roni Rubinsky, 30. Medical authorities claim a forth victim, Dr. Tamara Lucca, 84, died of a heart attack while trying to make it to a bomb shelter. So in a single day, we had a Hezbollah attack on an unarmed UN outpost and the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Hezbollah, and yet there was no outrage from Secretary-General Kofi Annan or the international press corps.
On July 25, when Israeli jets hit UN Patrol Base Khiam and killed four unarmed observers, Annan reacted instantaneously with outrage at what he called Israel’s “apparently deliberate targeting” of the outpost. But so far he has been silent on the Henniye rocket attack.
[…] Then witness the reaction to the Israelis’ accidental bombing of an apartment in Qana, Lebanon, last weekend and Hezbollah’s deliberate rocketing of the Haifa apartments this weekend.
Yes, again, Israel’s attacks, whether accidental or not, were more deadly. But the press and UN claim their outrage is moral, not numeric. Kofi Annan claims his indignation is driven by his revulsion at the deaths of innocent non-combatants on both sides, and by attacks on known UN positions, period. Ditto, most media. The BBC, for instance, proclaimed in a news story that the Qana bombing had “shocked the world.” Yet it barely mentioned the Haifa deaths, even though it professes to be equally furious about Israeli and Lebanese deaths. Nor did most of the outlets that expressed indignation at Israel’s killing of four UN military observers at Patrol Base Khaim even mention the missile attack at Henniye. Their outrage is neither moral nor numeric; it is selective. [8 August 2006]