Yesterday, an Israeli attack—aimed at Hezbollah fighters launching rockets into Israel—apparently caused an apartment building to collapse, killing at least 28 people, 20 of whom were children.

This is a tragedy. But to hear United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan talk about it, it was as if the Israelis deliberately targeted those civilians. As a July 31Washington Times article points out, Hezbollah is using civilians as human shields.

Annan took the occasion to excoriate Israel in the press, calling for a condemnation in the “strongest possible terms.” Annan stated, “No one disputes Israel’s right to defend itself. But by its manner of doing so it has caused, and is causing, death and suffering on a wholly unacceptable scale” (www.un.org,July 30).

Of course, similar calls for condemnations in the “strongest possible terms” of Hezbollah and Iran are not to be found.

Alan M. Dershowitz well describes the problem with such reasoning: by creating a moral equivalence between Hezbollah terror-making and Israeli efforts to stop it, the United Nations is legitimizing terrorists. In his July 25Chicago Tribune column, Dershowitz wrote,

If anyone wonders why the UN has rendered itself worse than irrelevant in the Arab-Israeli conflict, all he or she need do is read UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s July 20 statement. Annan goes to great pains to suggest equal fault and moral equivalence between the rockets of Hezbollah and Hamas that specifically target innocent civilians and the self-defense efforts by Israel, which tries desperately, though not always successfully, to avoid causing civilian casualties.

Annan, by citing the oft-repeated accusation of “disproportionate” violence, chided Israel for supposedly wholesale use of “collective punishment.” And that punishment, UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland told the Jerusalem Post, would “create a generation of hatred” (July 28). This, despite the fact Annan admitted Israel has the right to defend itself according to UN Charter, article 51.

As Dershowitz explains, when Annan chooses to call for an “immediate cessation of indiscriminate and disproportionate violence” on both sides—suggesting moral equivalence—Annan places Israel, a victim of Iran-sponsored aggression through Hezbollah, on the same level (in reality, lower) than the aggressors themselves.

This, as Dershowitz writes, is thoroughly repugnant. “Only the morally obtuse—or perverse—cannot recognize the difference between a terrorist group that targets civilian population centers with anti-personnel weapons designed to maximize civilian casualties and a democracy that seeks to prevent terrorism by employing smart bombs designed to minimize civilian casualties.”

Pushing for a moral equivalence between Israel and Hezbollah is distorting reality. Hezbollah is backed by Iran, and instigated this war with Israel. Israel is using its power to degrade Hezbollah’s ability to lob missiles at innocent civilian targets. Hezbollah is sitting on a cache of Iraqi, Iranian, Russian and Chinese weapons.

By instigating a war with Israel, Hezbollah has given Israel just cause to enter the Bekaa Valley and other Hezbollah-controlled areas in southern Lebanon in order to rid the region of the weapons that threaten Israel’s security and Middle East stability as well as the fighters that would launch the weapons. Failure to do so will result in the murder of more Israeli civilians in the future.