I’m a bit late to this conversation, but maybe that’s just as well; I believed the stories of the ’40 Beheaded babies’, the ‘Pregnant woman with her abdomen ripped open, her foetus removed and shot’, ‘The two little pre-pubescent girls, raped and shot’, ‘The baby cooked in the oven’, the ‘twelve children tied together and burned’. I believed that a Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile had fallen on the hospital, killing 400 civilians.’ Then again, I believed that Iraqis had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, that international air-hostesses had been all raped by Iraqi forces in ’91. Heck, I even believed the story of Pvt Jessica Lynch’s brave fighting, capture, rape, torture and rescue….until, slowly and gradually the incontrovertible evidence of the falsehood of these claims came out. They were all presented as facts and served their blood-lust purposes, until they were no longer needed. I also believed in the fresh rounds of allegations of systematic rapes (although some of the more GTA-type fantasies were a little tough to swallow), but even those are now evaporating like mist on a summer’s morning. I hope they didn’t happen, as I would hate anyone to endure these acts, but the way they have ’emerged’ in a drip-drip, flash manner, every time Israel is getting too rough a time in the US media, another tranche of stories come out. My sincere apologies if I am wrong this time in my disbelief, as I have been every time in my belief, but I’m not buying it. I’m even beginning to think that at least half of the civilian deaths were caused by the IOF.