Michelle Malkin
August 2, 2006

Welcome to the marquee performance of "Qana: The Fraud and the Furious," brought to you by the Acting Guild of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage.

The drama unfolded over the weekend with mob scenes across the Muslim world, ostensibly -- ostensibly -- in response to civilian deaths in Qana, Lebanon. Angry Muslims from Beirut to Gaza to Lahore set fire to American and Israeli flags. They burned effigies of Western leaders. They raised their voices in chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."

The nervous nellies sitting in the world's balcony seats exclaimed that the tragedy in Qana will make the Muslims hate us more. But if the uproar over the accident in Qana -- an Israeli exception to the Hezbollah rule -- sounds like a tired old re-run to you, well, it is.

This ongoing production utilizes the same talented field of Jew-haters and West-haters and flag-burners and machete-wielders who brought you worldwide months of manufactured rage over the Mohammed cartoons, crazed riots in Nigeria over the Miss World pageant, sharia-approved murders in Somalia of World Cup soccer fans, the fictional Jenin "massacre," the fable of Mohammed al-Dura, and ululating protests over the corrupting influences of "The Satanic Verses," Theo van Gogh, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's, the sacrilegious Burger King ice-cream swirl, Valentine's Day and Piglet from "Winnie the Pooh."

The truth about Muslim outrage over Qana is that it's not really about the tragic deaths at Qana -- just like the Mohammed cartoon jihad was not really about the cartoons. It's a pretext for much grander goals to defeat the infidels -- be they Israeli, Danish, Dutch or American.

Remember: Muslim riots over the Mohammed cartoons printed by the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper last fall were manufactured amid attempts to bully Denmark over the International Atomic Energy Agency's decision to report Iran to the UN Security Council for continuing with its nuclear research program. Iran blamed Israel for the cartoons in a speech marking the 27th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

Now, the Qana jihad, gleefully stoked by Iran, is unfolding amid mounting UN Security Council pressure on Tehran to suspend its nuclear program. What better way to distract from Hezbollah's atrocities and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's annihilate-the-Jews plans than to start screaming about Israel's "war crimes" and Western crimes against humanity?

As we watch Hezbollah's horrible parade of dead children in Qana replay endlessly on television, here is a suggestion for all the intrepid American journalists gallivanting with Hezbollah's handlers in the region: Perhaps you could put down the figurative hookah pipes, take off your sympathy hajibs and find out the identity of the green-helmeted guy holding up baby corpses in Qana as props for your sensational, page-one pictures.

Is he just an ordinary bystander? A rescuer who just happened to be in the same place 10 years ago, traipsing around with dead children's bodies to exploit an accidental Israeli bombing prompted by terrorists hiding behind civilians?

A civilian volunteer or a propaganda producer?

To his credit, MSNBC reporter Richard Engel picked up on a question the blogosphere has been asking since the toddler corpse-paraders in Qana took center stage: Where were all the men? His reporting underscores Hezbollah's evil m.o. -- embedding themselves in civilian populations to force exactly the kind of tragic error from Israel that appears to have occurred at Qana. "[W]e went house to house in trying to figure out where all the young men were. It seems that some of them were fighters, some of them were Hezbollah members that were out -- this according to Hezbollah people who didn't want to be interviewed but we convinced them to talk to us."

To the photographer-stenographers who were herded to the scene eight hours after the strike, why is it that the bodies of the children were already in a state of rigor mortis? How to explain the sparkling clean pacifier clipped onto a dust-covered toddler carried around by the friendly corpse-parader? And why were the women and children kept in the building for so long? Questions abound. Answers are as scarce as men in that Qana building.

"All the world's a stage," Shakespeare wrote. The journalists of our age have chosen their costumes: court jesters in the Theater of Jihad.