YOU CAN LIE AND LIE SUCCESSFULLY BUT YOU CANNOT HIDE THE TRUTH. The Isreali Zionist neocons have created a tool that they are using to alert all their supporters to articles, polls, surveys etc that they feel need to have the opinion adjusted more to their favor. Download their tool “megaphone” so you will be alerted to the same sites in order to counter their deceitfully misleading efforts . 2 days ago they had a page that showed a snapshot of a yahoo survey before and after they sent out their alert, it showed how they totally skewed the survey results in their favor. The following link http://ws.giyus.org/points/list shows what they are working on this morning. Stand up to this attempt to mislead public opinion and drown this misleading voice under the wave of true public opinion like it deserves. This is an example of the **WAR waged by Israel upon EVERY one of US**, we are as a global society being fired upon by the israeli cyber-guerrillas. Arm yourselves!

I can only suggest you do your duty and shoot some Jews. Allahu Akhbar Muthafukaz!

Anonymous, I stated that the article was rubbish because it is not based on fact. The facts on Hizbollah hiding among civilians are many. The facts that support this article are non-existent - Therefore, it is rubbish.

When a "journalist" (that calls terrorists quote/unquote "terrorists") makes such a sensational claim that goes against all current perceptions of reality and is highly inflammatory, it is always nice if there are some solid facts provided by fairly reliable sources to back it up. Most people would not consider a guided tour by Hezbollah a reliable source of information on its own.

I would like to see some facts from the UN, or a major newspaper, or somebody credible that supports this article's premise.

Anonymous, please go find some facts that support your point of view. I will listen to them, even if you must include some name calling. However, I would reserve the term "Loser" for Hizbollah.

By the way, everyone already knows that "Anonymous" is Juan Cole...

Thank God the Israelis are using the smart bombs and not aiming for the civilians. Can you imagine how many more would have been killed if they were to use the stupid bombs like Hezbollah? Maybe it would be a better idea if Israel uses the same stupid weapons as Hezbollah and they should aim for the civilians like Hezbollah then less civilians might get killed.

No doubt Mitch is right that Hezbollah is very diciplined and tight lipped when it comes to current their military operations, even though past operations and "martyrs" are widely publicized on TV and on posters plastered all over their territory. Hezbollah's leaders strictly control the flow of information about their military wing. Mitch is right about all this, but this only corroberates what he is trying so hard to disprove. That Hezbollah's military is indeed hidding among civilians, that fighters have no choice but to hide among civilians.

What is especially disengenious about Mitch's article is the failure to state exactly where Hezbollah IS hiddding. If not among civilians then where? Hezbollah doesn't have military bases. There is no Hezbollah military infrastructure. Like Mitch says the Hezbollah militiary is not a in fact military but a militia, they fight a guerilla war and are skeptical of the population at large. Hezbollah is secretive and underground, so it can't flaunt its rockets or keep them in well marked bunkers. It can't maintain fixed defensive or offensive positions. So where are they hidding... There is nowhere to hide. Flexibility, and movement are the key to Hezbollah's guerrilla style of war. So when targets are hit by Israel there is no way to prove that they are in fact Hezbollah targets. In other words Hezbollah is in some sense 'hidding among civilians'.

Mitch,

Anderson Cooper 360 tonight (Friday) will have an insider's view of Hezbollah. Apparently they are not as tight-lipped as you made them out to be. We will see if the program is even worth watching.

On another note, how is taking over an appartment building *not* an example of hiding among civilians? How does telling the story of a fighter (maybe the typical Hezbollah fighter) who blends in so well that his neighbors don't know he's joined Hezbollah, how does that story *not* demonstrate that Hezbollah fighters are among the civilian population?

And what of the videos, widely available from sites like YouTube, of Hezbollah fighters and military equipment located in and firing from population centers? Are they fake because I didn't see them in the newspaper? Thankfully this new Web 2.0 trend has further lessened the dependency on journalists (of unknown leanings and biases) for the facts.

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/images/sturmer/ds7.jpg

Or Der Stumer?

"hiding among civilians" NO MYTH!

I think the responses to this article show how much we have entered "fourth generation warfare," where people are fighting the pr war in cyberspace rather than reading the article and responding to what it says.

Just because Prothero questions Israeli propaganda, it doesn't follow that he is "pro-Hezbollah," and, thus, the "war" needs to break out in the letters of response. Or maybe it does. Maybe every word we utter about what's going on in Lebanon is really part of the war, and Prothero is some kind of "enemy combatant," for even treating Hezbollah in a rational manner.

What I absolutely loathe about the "war on terror," that pathetic crap that has nothing to do with what happened to America on 9/11 and everything to do with the neo-con advisors who had access to Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices, is that it is also a war on words and thought.

I just wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper, because that paper was basically shilling for the I.D.F. and repeating the "hiding behind civilians" line. My argument with the newspaper's editorial was that it lacked "intellectual nerve." Israel is responsible for the civlian deaths in Lebanon, not because Hezbollah is wonderful morally or politically or militarily, but because Israel made a decision to go to war using air power and without proper intelligence. It ended up with a p.r. problem, its military leaders and politicians got egg on their faces, and then it came up with this kitsch of "civilizational clash" on the battlefield--they "fight" differently, not morally, like we do. This is the same message of those saying "Israel drops leaflets," unlike Hezbollah, which just targets civilians.

Christ. They have F-16s and Hezbollah doesn't. And the world of F-16s is hardly one that is worried about civilians.