"Hey, Look At Me, I'm Morally Bankrupt" article of the day

Does anybody else feel an irresistable urge to break into laughter every time CNN runs an Anderson Cooper spot wherein A.C. adopts his painfully mannered "Look at me I'm so serious and concerned and engaged and constipated all at once" expression? For all I know he really is a decent and concerned and reasonably bright guy, and his problem is just that he's a bad actor; but that expression that he adopts for the promos is so high-school-actor amateur hour that I double over whenever I see it. Oh, he is just so much a Person Who Cares...which, probably, he actually is, but he just comes across as a Person Who Can't Act In Commercial Spots.

At any rate, Anderson has a blog but lets other people do a bunch of the work, apparently, and if I were him I would stop letting Tom Foreman post because you just don't want your blog to disgrace itself with this stunning degree of stupidity and moral bankruptcy. Go on and read Foreman's musings on how maybe we're giving Hezbollah a bum rap with this mean ol' "terrorist" language, along with some of his more obtuse commentors like "Evan." Then you can make sense of my response, which I doubt they'll publish since they pick and choose which comments to post:

A terrorist is someone who deliberately attempts to bring about civilian deaths as a means to political ends. The distinction between collateral damage and deliberately willed civilian deaths is really quite simple: if the civilian deaths are not what you are trying to cause, and you would be happy if all civilians escaped your bombing and only military people suffered, then you are not a terrorist murderer; but if your reaction to hearing that your bombs had failed to kill any civilians would be, "Oh, !#$@#!, let's try another rocket," then you are a terrorist. The ethical distinction is not really that hard to make, though it is apparently beyond the intellectual reach of some.

Hezbollah are, by this standard, clearly terrorists on two separate grounds:

1. Their intent is to kill Israeli civilians. That is what their weaponry is designed for, and it is what they intend to accomplish by firing their rockets into Israel.

2. They also deliberately intend the death of their own Lebanese civilians. At every turn Hezbollah takes up positions, and carries out tactics, whose sole purpose is to ensure that if Israeli attempts to defend herself against Hezbollah, as many Lebanese civilians as possible will die. Indeed, Hezbollah has been caught setting up roadblocks to keep civilians from escaping the combat zone.

Hezbollah desires, and actively pursues, the deaths of Lebanese civilians for three reasons:

a. The harder it is to tell who is a civilian and who is a Hezbollah fighter, the more Israeli bullets will be wasted killing civilians, allowing the Hezbollah fighters to survive as the Israelis are distracted by the civilians.

b. Despite Hezbollah's rhetoric, they know perfectly well that Israel does not like to kill Lebanese civilians, and therefore the more Lebanese civilians Hezbollah can arrange for the IDF to kill, the less support Israeli public opinion will give to military actions against Hezbollah.

c. The international propaganda value to Hezbollah of dead Lebanese children is enormous, especially since the kind of fatuous reporter who writes blog entries like this one can be counted on to trumpet the "rising toll on Lebanese civilians" -- and blame it not on Hezbollah, but on the IDF.

The moral distinction between Hezbollah and the Israeli forces is perfectly captured in an image I saw recently on the web. Two soldiers, two baby carriages. The Israeli kneels with his gun in between the enemy and the baby carriage, protecting the child with his life. The Hezbollist kneels with his gun behind the baby carriage, protecting his life with the child. That is why the latter is a terrorist and the former is not. If this is too complex for you to grasp then you are, quite simply, morally bankrupt.

UPDATE: I want to remind you that Cooper did not write the piece. And since I brought him up, let me point you to this post from NewsBusters about the fine job Cooper did recently in exposing a Hezbollah propaganda junket for what it was.