by Vic­tor Davis Hanson

The reac­tions and media cov­er­age com­ing out of the West regard­ing this lat­est war in the Mid­dle East are as bewil­der­ing as they are instructive.

Rep. John Din­gell, D-Mich., for exam­ple, recently said, “I don’t take sides for or against Hezbol­lah or for or against Israel .”

Mean­while, the West­ern news agency Reuters, respond­ing to scrutiny by blog­gers, with­drew wire pho­tos taken by a free­lance pho­tog­ra­pher of a smoky and burn­ing Beirut . Reuters had failed to catch the freelancer’s doc­tor­ing of the pho­tos to empha­size unduly the dam­age from Israeli bombs.

And the Asso­ci­ated Press notes that ini­tially reported Lebanese claims of 40 “civil­ians” killed by Israeli air strikes at Houla, Lebanon, in fact, were mis­taken — and that the lat­est reports have low­ered the death toll to one.

In Qana, where the Israeli mil­i­tary had hit an apart­ment build­ing (and were quickly cen­sured by Euro­pean states­men), the num­ber of civil­ian fatal­i­ties reported also kept decreas­ing as reports were scru­ti­nized. Plus, we have learned that sev­eral hours lapsed between the drop­ping of the bombs and the fatal col­lapse of the build­ing, rais­ing fur­ther ques­tions about the rela­tion­ship between the bomb­ing and the fatal­i­ties that fol­lowed. Finally, based on pho­tographs from the scene, the onsite res­cue appeared staged for reporters.

These dis­crep­an­cies sug­gest we have lit­tle idea what actu­ally hap­pened on the ground there — other than that Qana has been a favored missile-launching site against Israel , as a recent deadly aer­ial assault from there on Haifa attests.

There is a depress­ing pat­tern here. The sources for West­ern erro­neous reports and faked pic­tures always seem to exag­ger­ate the dam­age to Lebanon — but never to Israel .

Like­wise, West­ern news agen­cies rarely list a pre­cise num­ber of Hezbol­lah losses, instead lump­ing them in with civil­ian fatal­i­ties. Does that mean that some­one who launches a mis­sile in Levis and sneak­ers is not a combatant?

In addi­tion, the his­tory and nature of Hezbol­lah do not mat­ter to many in the West.

Know­ingly or not, news out­lets con­tinue to spread Hezbollah’s pro­pa­ganda. One won­ders if West­ern­ers remem­ber or know that, until Sept. 11, Hezbol­lah had killed more Amer­i­cans than had any other ter­ror­ist organization.

Most ignore as well that Hezbol­lah pre­cip­i­tated the present cri­sis by kid­nap­ping and killing Israeli sol­diers, and launch­ing mis­siles against Israel ‘s cities.

In retal­i­a­tion, the Israeli Defense Forces use pre­ci­sion bombs to tar­get com­bat­ants and try to avoid civil­ian casu­al­ties (though the lat­ter is nearly impos­si­ble against an enemy who doesn’t wear uni­forms and uses non-combatants as “human shields”). In con­trast, every ran­dom mis­sile launched by Hezbol­lah is intended to hit a civil­ian target.

On one side of this con­flict is a true democ­racy that was attacked. On the other are ter­ror­ists who hijacked the sov­er­eign gov­ern­ment of Lebanon , insti­tuted theo­cratic rule over a third of the coun­try — and started a war.

Hezbol­lah, of course, has been enabled in large part thanks to Iran­ian petro-dollars and intim­i­da­tion. But the nature of Hezbollah’s patrons doesn’t seem to mat­ter to many West­ern­ers, either.

Those now call­ing for “dia­logue” with the “major play­ers” ignore that Iran promises to wipe out Israel . The French for­eign min­is­ter was quick to praise the regional role of theo­cratic Iran as “stabilizing.”

Then there’s Hezbollah’s other patron, Syria, a coun­try that bru­tally occu­pied Lebanon, har­bors ter­ror­ists and is sus­pected of being behind the assas­si­na­tion of Lebanese reformist Prime Min­is­ter Rafik Hariri.

So, what then does mat­ter to so many West­ern­ers about this war?

Our fear, of course. We want to avoid messy com­pli­ca­tions like stir­ring up another 9/11 or Madrid bomb­ing, spik­ing oil prices to over $80 a bar­rel, or tread­ing on polit­i­cally incor­rect ground by crit­i­ciz­ing the “other” of the for­mer Third World .

The West­ern press — usu­ally so care­ful to con­demn hate speech — is utterly silent about Arab racism. But a Euro­pean paper recently pub­lished a car­toon por­tray­ing Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ehud Olmert as a Nazi, secure that no rabbi would issue threats that could cost the edi­tors their heads.

Still, when this is all over, we should not worry about the sur­vival of Israel . For weeks, pun­dits have been lec­tur­ing how canny and adept Hezbol­lah has proved — and how a clumsy Israel could only respond by destroy­ing Lebanon ‘s infra­struc­ture. Yet, when the dust set­tles, the world will learn that Lebanon out­side Hezbollah’s domain is not destroyed. And, one hopes, those who have suf­fered in the Hezbollah-controlled south will reex­am­ine their sup­port for a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion that has brought them — and itself — to near ruin.

Instead far more wor­ri­some is the moral cri­sis in the West itself. If so many of its politi­cians, intel­lec­tu­als and media will not or can­not fathom moral dif­fer­ences in this war, they will hardly be able to see them any­where else.