RUSH: You have to see something and we’ve got it ready. We’re linking you to another website and I hope we don’t shut down their server because I want as many people as possible to see this. I can’t do it justice telling you about it. I can describe what it is, but you have to go see the pictures for yourself. They are pictures from Qana after the Israeli retaliation killed 56 villagers, mostly women and children and young teenagers and so forth. Now, what are the odds that would be the case, that an attack on a building would not kill very many men, just women and children and so forth? There are two wars going on.
One of the things I’m going to ask the former prime minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, is what matters most, winning the real war or winning the PR war? Winning the spin, winning the PR, or winning the real war? I’ve got an audio sound bite here for you from a program on CNN yesterday that just takes the cake from a news babe named Lara Logan. I guess she’s at CBS. Not really sure. But it really illustrates the nature of how 180 degrees out of phase everything is. Let me get back to this website. If you’ve already gone to my website to get the link I want to warn you these are really graphic pictures of dead children. These children are being paraded around by Hezbollah members described as rescue workers. They are posing these dead children for cameras, for a period of four to five hours. A little boy and a little girl, dust covered, obviously killed when the building collapsed. And, I tell you, folks, it is interesting to me to note this.
Apparently the only thing more valuable than dead Jewish kids to militant Islamist terrorist is dead Muslim kids for which the deaths they can blame on the Israelis. I have never seen a group of people more willing to sacrifice their own children to advance their ideology — well, I don’t know of one that’s ever done it, not in my lifetime, not in my historical understanding. Dead Muslim kids are obviously more valuable to these barbarians than even dead Israeli children are. The Israelis can’t go touting this kind of thing, they can’t play the PR game this way, they’d never be allowed to get away with it. But it’s clear, ladies and gentlemen, there are forces arrayed as I have been telling you constantly that seek to sabotage victory over this enemy, the Islamofascists. And if we don’t stop listening to the Lindsey Grahams of the world and the Arlen Specters of the world here at home, who — I don’t know whether they’re doing it on purpose or not, whether they’re just misguided, but they seek to weaken our ability to find and interrogate the enemy.
If we don’t start really kicking butt in this war, including not just allowing, but in fact
I’m wondering, you know, they quote a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, author of a book called ‘Running the World, A Book On US Foreign Policy.’ I said what they quoted this guy as saying months ago, months ago. It’s not like I’m show prep for the news that follows, although I am. Maybe I ought to start saying, ‘You can hear it now on the Rush Limbaugh program, or read it six months from now in the newspapers.’ Anyway, here’s the point. ‘It’s really a proxy war between the United States and Iran,’ said David Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, what are we doing instead? We’re talking about a lasting ceasefire. There’s no such thing. The reality of this is that there’s no such thing as a lasting or sustainable ceasefire. Our diplomacy, if we’re going to go the diplomatic route ought to be focused on building domestic and other support for the war, which would include Iran and Syria. Nothing is going to substitute for victory in all of this. But I want to pose something else to you here, folks.
In addition to the PR battle, I tell you, it’s a fundamental element of it, in fact, we have the Lebanese population, the Lebanese government, the Lebanese army, the military. They’re doing diddly-squat. We’ve got the Hezbos, who have in interesting fashion, and I think the same thing is being attempted in Iraq, and it poses the same kind of trouble, or the same kind of challenge. The Hezbos have pretty much made — and we’ve heard the puff piece stories. Oh, they’re wonderful humanitarians, the Hezbos, why, the social services they provide the general population, why, they’re doing such wonderful things, they care about people, they passed out health care and whatever the hell it is. Well, what they’re doing is making the general population of these countries dependent on them, and as such, that is how they secure — it’s either through blackmail or genuine support, but it’s how they get the support of the general population centers. You also have the Israeli factor in that. These are Arabs absolutely, so there are a number of factors in it. But the one thing that has really changed in warfare, from World War II forward — and I know that tactics change, but strategy doesn’t.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu is still something that’s regarded as timely, even though it’s thousands of years old. The one thing that you just don’t do these days is kill civilians. It used to be the name of the game in war. And it was done on purpose. Now, it was done to end wars, and it was done to achieve decisive victory, and it was done to save the lives of your own troops in the field. All of those things were factors. So we had this episode at Qana. You know who really killed those people are the Hezbos. Hezbollah killed those people. Hezbollah put those people in that building and brought the rocket launchers in close by, knowing full well that the launcher would be targeted. That building didn’t fall for eight hours after it was hit. What do you bet that the Hezbos finished the job that the Israeli bomb did not actually complete? What do you bet they killed their own people for the PR aspect? These people cannot compete militarily with any industrialized nation, so they have to fight the PR and the spin war. And it is amazing to me to see how easily the duped US and world media is.
The truth of what happened at Qana has been as distorted as what has happened and did happen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s almost identical. The Media is proving that they are incapable of accurately covering a war now, perhaps because they don’t want to. You’ll see what I mean when you take a look at this website. It’s eureferendum.blogspot. When you see this photo display, this guy has gone through a lot of work to show how the Hezbos are milking this, parading their own dead in front of the cameras, posing them at different times, taking them in and out of ambulances, covering them with dust, holding them for hours on end, and these are still photographers taking the pictures, obviously, and these photographers are obviously willing to participate in propaganda. They know exactly what’s being done, all these photos, bringing the bodies out of the rubble, posing them for the cameras, it’s all staged.
Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it. Yet they send these pictures out without saying all of this is being staged for us. They send these pictures out as though they are in a timeline of an exact sequence, which they are not, which you will see when you read it. So the point is, Israel is probably not even killing all these civilians. I asked the other day, when you have the Hezbos who don’t wear uniforms, how do you know what civilian deaths are versus Hezbo deaths, how do you know who’s who there? You don’t. If you’re going to hamstring yourself on the PR side of this, then it doesn’t have a rosy outlook. Before we go to the break. Here’s audio sound bite 14 from a list today from Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz. This is I guess last night. CBS News reporter Lara Logan is one of the panelists. Kurtz says, “Is Hezbollah winning the war of images, if that is defined as creating world sympathy in terms of civilian casualties?”
LARA LOGAN: The Israelis can’t get into this game where, you know, they show Hezbollah dead in order to count the images of their dead and wounded soldiers. That just becomes really tacky. I think — the sense I get is that the Israelis are really at a loss for how to manage the propaganda side of this war. I’ve seen rocket after rocket hitting homes in Israel where whole families would have been killed if they’d been at home. The problem for the Israelis, because not having that — you know, that devastating impact on their civilian population, means that they completely lose in the war of images.
RUSH: The world is upside down. So Lara Logan says more Israelis need to be killed, more Israeli kids need to be killed so that they can show they’re suffering, so that they can show the human suffering that’s going on out there. The thing that amazes me is she is fully aware that there’s an image war, she’s fully aware she is being spun, and she doesn’t care. She’s entirely thrilled, she’s willing to accept that she’s being spun and that the Israelis are not doing a good enough job of spinning. It’s almost like the media loved Clinton’s lies so much they marveled at how good he was at it. They’re marveling at the spin of these terrorists and the Hezbollah people. And of course where it would be tacky for the Israelis to hold up their dead children to the cameras and pose them, it’s not tacky for Hezbollah to do that. Note she didn’t say that. So we’ve got a morally inverted universe here, and the propaganda is being co-created, if you will, by the Hezbollah people and willing dupes, or perhaps worse, in the western media.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
I’m just telling you what we’re getting in the aftermath of the bombing in Qana is no different than what we got from the Drive-By Media after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It is the same thing. Now, I want to pose something to you. I know it’s going to shock some of you. Probably going to shock all of you. Well, I can’t say all of you. But it’s going to shock most of you. But the reason it will shock you, if you are shocked is because you’re not up to speed yet on what we face out there. I want to go back to the civilian casualty aspect of this. The A-bombs, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, all the firebombing of ten to 12 Japanese cities, the bombing of Dresden and so forth, all of those instances were instances where civilians were targeted. The civilians in Lebanon are — Lebanon is what it is, and the Hezbollah outfit is going to end up running this country.
If we’re not careful, Hezbollah is going to become the official government of Lebanon, and it will become the first terrorist organization that has control of a sovereign state and can make arms deals with other nations and so forth and get a seat at the Security Council, all the while it is a proxy for Iran. If we’re not careful, that’s what’s going to happen here. And how to stop it, how to wipe out Hezbollah, not the way it’s being done now, and no negotiated peace is going to ever solve this problem. It hasn’t in the past, it’s not going to in the future. Just today the UN Security Council is beating its chest, look at us, look how big we are, look how important we are, why, we just gave Iran 30 days to stop their nuclear enrichment program or else. Or else what? Well, or else, like sanctions, economic sanctions. Oh, be still my beating heart. You know what the Iranian response was? The Security Council doesn’t even hold the force of law. They basically said, screw you. We’re going to do what we want to do. You gotta stop us. And of course the UN is not going to stop the Iranians from doing anything. They’re going to go through the motions of sanctions.
Last time we had sanctions, big-time sanctions with the UN was against Iraq, and we got the oil-for-food program. It just becomes laughable. Like I told you on Friday, somebody asked me where it’s headed, it’s headed to something really bad, I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get there, but there just isn’t a whole lot of energy here for dealing with this right now. Because the real focus of this has to be Iran and Syria, if we’re really going to have a war on terror then that’s where it starts, that’s where it is since we’ve already done the Afghanistan route. NATO troops, by the way, in the southern part of Afghanistan now patrolling there. We’ve got going on in Iraq what is going on. It’s a worldwide war on terror. Some people really don’t think it’s a war that needs to be fought, some in this country thinking that Bush is the real enemy, that Republicans are the real enemy, and if we just get rid of them, why, the world will be safer and full of bliss, peace, all these other things that the peace activists conjure up as this beautiful world.
Well, we’re nowhere near achieving it unless these people are actually taken out. Here’s the thing. And I know some people disagree with me on this that the civilians and the citizens in these tyrannical regimes are irrelevant. But one of the ways — how do you think a terrorist organization, which cannot compete with us or anybody else militarily, how else does it support itself, how else does it entrench itself? It does so by making the local population depend on its existence, making the civilian population depend on them. Until civilians — frankly, I’m not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men, but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it’s not going to end, folks. What do you mean, civilians start paying a price? I just ask you to consult history for the answer to that. It’s not their fault, Rush, it’s not their fault! No. Not saying that it is.
But as long as you’re going to allow these people to hide behind baby carriages and women and children and mosques and so-called apartment buildings, and if you’re going to launch military strikes at military targets, which Hezbollah is not doing — 120 rockets into Israel 
yesterday. Nobody has a care in the world, nobody has one word of condemnation for that. We don’t know what targets were hit, we don’t know how many people died. The Israelis are not parading their victims around on TV for propaganda purposes. As long as we are going to pussyfoot and patty-cake around, we’re not going to get anywhere, we’re not going to make any real progress. We may delay the inevitable, we may get ceasefire after ceasefire after ceasefire, but we’re not going to deal with the root cause of the problem. And as such, your kids and grandkids are going to be saddled with that at some point when they assume responsibility for the fate and future of the country.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
I saw a story here. I threw it away because I had two lines I could remember. It was a couple quotes from a 33-, 35-year-old woman in Qana in Lebanon. She said of course there’s Hezbollah here. Well, of course. You see the flags, of course Hezbollah is all over the place. But there weren’t any in the building the Israelis hit. Well, why didn’t you leave, she was asked. I mean, the Israelis have been broadcasting for days over the radio to get the hell out of there. They’ve been dropping leaflets. It’s not as though they’re being totally inhumane about this, not being inhumane at all. Why didn’t you leave? Well, for two reasons. We don’t have the seven dollars to get a cab to go to another village, and we also didn’t think it would ever really happen. Come on! That’s propaganda, too. Didn’t think it would ever really happen?
The real reason these people don’t leave is because they can’t. The deaths on the Lebanon side of the border, the majority of them are dead because of Hezbollah. The majority of them are dead because of terrorists. Their own kids are more valuable to them, dead Muslim kids are more valuable to them than dead Jewish kids if they can say and convince people that the Israelis killed their kids. These are the people that put bombs on their kids, teach ’em how to go out and blow themselves up to advance the cause. It is stunning. None of this makes any presentation of the Drive-By Media the real evil here. Portrayed as innocent little victims, almost angelic, multicultural of course, people of ethnicity, rich culture and tribal histories and so forth. Displaced from their lands. Take a look at a map, all of the surrounding countries into Africa that are Arab, and in the Middle East, and look at little Israel, and talk about the Arabs being displaced from their land.
There?s an inverted morality here. There’s a totally upside down world. Hezbollah is making sure as many of it’s civilians as possible die each time Israel launches a salvo into a Hezbollah stronghold area. And then they parade the bodies of the kids around and pose them for photographers who are willing to pass on the propaganda, knowing full well they’re being propagandized, willing to do it nevertheless. Again, if you’re just joining me, there is an incredible illustration and poof of all this. I linked to a blog site at RushLimbaugh.com, and that blog site is holding up pretty well. We haven’t shut down their servers. It’s a European bunch, and they’ve documented some proof with Reuters and AP photographs.
The photographs are grisly. They are quite disturbing. I should warn you about that before you go see them, but you have to see how the PR and the spin war is being managed and how our Drive-By Media and the rest of the world media is just falling for it hook, line, and sinker because it’s their action line. Action line is, Bush is wrong, Israel sucks, Rice is bad, Bolton’s bad, gotta get rid of Rumsfeld and all these people, Bush is horrible, Israel’s horrible. In fact, Israel may have replaced Bush now in terms of being the primary target of the Drive-By Media. Bush will get it back. But they’re covering Israel in this war the way they’ve covered Bush in practically everything since he was inaugurated back in 2001. I’m just telling you when you go look at these pictures, and I urge you to do so, to understand just how the spin PR battle is being waged. You’ve got to exercise caution because they’re not bloody and gore, just really disturbing. Des Moines, Iowa, let’s go to the phones, Michael, glad to have you on the program and welcome, sir.
CALLER: Morning, Rush. As usual you’re right on target on this topic. And speaking on this topic, I really think we at this point in time have a golden opportunity to use the United Nations, and for Secretary Rice and John Bolton to help us, we should call for a ceasefire in the Middle East, but we should call for it just long enough to move all of the civilians out of Lebanon. That way our (cross talk) can be, look, folks, we’re going to not shoot anymore, we can bring in UN troops, we can move all the civilians out, and then if the two militaries want to go at one another, go ahead. I think that puts Hezbollah then on their heels where they would have to either agree to a very humanitarian thing to do, or it would show them in the light of what you are pointing out right now, which is, they’re keeping the civilians there.
RUSH: Wait a minute, you want to evacuate all civilians from Lebanon or just from southern Lebanon?
CALLER: Just from southern Lebanon, and then if these two militaries want to go at it, as Hezbollah has showed their bravado over the last several days, saying we’ll fight forever. Great, get the civilians out of southern Lebanon and let the two militaries go at it.
RUSH: That would be an interesting suggestion. But even when you say this, and I understand your thinking, everybody is trying to come up with an angle here to move this along, because we all know, folks, we’re just pedaling a tricycle here, we’re just pedaling a tricycle in terms of actually getting this thing done and dealt with. An interesting idea, but the point here, see, I think you’re still falling for the whole PR and spin versus reality, and I’m going to let you people in on a little secret. Most interviewers don’t do this. I’m going to tell you one of the questions, derivative questions I’m going to ask of Prime Minister Netanyahu if he’s able to make the program today. There are two wars going on. The PR, propaganda spin war, which presents no facts, zero, no facts whatsoever. It is totally spin. It is inverted, it’s out of phase, it’s an alternative universe and reality, versus the reality.
The reality is, the guns that are blazing, the jets that are flying, the bombs that are being dropped, and the missiles that are being launched. And it appears that there actually are some eggheads who think it’s more important to win the image war, the spin war, the PR war. In fact, commentators that I admire are all upset at Israeli for two things. One, that they’re not fighting as Israel used to flight, flooding the zone with ground troops and ending this in days, and secondly, they don’t care, they don’t seem to care to fight the spin war, the PR war. They don’t seem to care about that and the commentators are very distressed about that, they’ve got to learn to fight the PR and the spin war, they’ve got to. Bush didn’t learn how to do it — can I ask you just a point-blank question? Do any of you have any evidence that Israel could ever win any kind of a spin or PR war? It’s impossible, folks. It’s simply not possible. There’s nothing — besides that, winning a spin PR war gets them what?
We’re back to the same old thing. We’ve got to be loved, particularly by the media. If the media understands and appreciates what we’re doing, then the world will see the truth. Well, fat chance when it comes to the world media and Israel or the world media and conservatives. Fat chance. It was one of the reasons I always advocate staying grounded in reality, and the reality here is not complicated. The Limbaugh Doctrine. And I don’t say this for egocentric purposes. Because my ego is sufficiently strong, don’t need to keep reminding myself how good I am. Victory is the only thing that works here. One side has to be defeated and only then will there be a sustainable piece. There is no Limbaugh Doctrine for victory in the media, particularly now. I don’t know that it’s possible for Israel. I know it’s not possible for them to win a spin or PR war. How would you do it? What would you tell them to do? Do the same thing the Hezbos are doing, start lying about what’s happening? Hold up a bunch of dead kids that you’ve killed yourself, blame it on the Hezbos, pose ’em for the cameras?
Do you know what the world media, the Drive-By Media would do with that? If the Israelis tried to portray themselves as victims in any way, shape, manner, or form, they would be destroyed in the media, they would be held up to ridicule. Folks, it’s just what it is. The question everybody has to decide is, what is the reality anymore? What is the reality that matters? Is the reality that matters still hard, cold reality facts, or is the new reality of spin and propaganda and PR, the actual method of victory when fighting wars today? That’s the question everybody’s gotta decide. I think it’s a silly question, but some people, “Let me think about that, it’s a good question.” Silly question. It’s a stupid question. When you’re talking — (interruption) well, sadly, it isn’t a stupid question Mr. Snerdley asks. When you’re talking about survival of a nation or people, I don’t want to survive on a bunch of pages of magazines and a bunch of pictures on television. I want to really survive. I want to be living and breathing and I want to be free. David in Brooklyn, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Rush, are people blind? I mean besides what you’re saying, that the civilian — that the Hezbollahs, you know, basically killing civilians, besides to that, as I remember correctly 80% of the civilians are backing Hezbollah. And I think they deserve consequence.
RUSH: That’s what got me going on this. That’s what the polling there says. But you don’t know if that’s true either. Come on, a poll of the Lebanese population? Do you think people in the country of Lebanon are going to really think a pollster is independent? “So, do you support what’s happening here with the Hezbollah group against the Israelis?” I bet the 20% that supposedly said no may not be living to tell ’em about it now. Come on, a poll of the Lebanese? Give me a break. It’s more spin. It’s more PR. What else are they going to say anyway even if it’s a genuine poll? What does it matter? What does it matter, other than if you want to go that really awful step and say, okay, you support ’em, you’re going to pay the price for doing so. Because this is the modern focus of evil in the world, this Islamofascism, and we’re going to deal with it. We’re not going to put up with it. We’re not going to take it anymore. If you support it, you’re in the line of fire. But let’s be honest. There is nobody in a position of power who is either going to say that or make policy based on it.
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