***update: check out video of Israel’s UN ambassador Dan Gillerman confronting Palestinian ambassador…Blogs of War looks closer…Op-For: The Same War…Gillerman’s full speech to UNSC, via Vital Perspective***

Fox News reporting: Israel targets Hezbollah headquarters.

Nasrallah inside the building? Hope so. Update: Reports that Nasrallah is unhurt.

Emily Zanotti blasts the Vatican’s condemnation of Israel:

This is no time for moral equivalence on the part of cheesy Cardinals with no foreign policy experience, and a lifetime spent sheltered by like-thinkers. Israel is the recipent of a barrage of attacks a week, countless suicide bombings, mortar attacks, and despite being barely several hundred miles squarely, its the most volatile place on the planet. They are a sover[e]ign nation whose rights have been trampled by a host of others, they are the home of the Holy Land, and they have the right to defend and to attack when their very existence is threatened. Perhaps it would behoove some in high places to take a good long look at the effects of their outright ignorance: the spread of secularism, the spread of radical Islam and the spread of war.

Amen.

Reader Mike S. agrees:

Where was the “Holy See” last week when Hezbollah decided to
cross the border from Lebanon into Israel–a “free and sovereign nation”–to
kidnap and kill Israeli’s? Where was the “Holy See” when terrorists fired
missiles into civilian populations in Haifa? For that matter, where is the
“Holy See” every time a wedding, pizza shop, or disco in Tel Aviv is blown
to smithereens, along with hundreds of Israeli “people who already have
suffered so much to defend their independence”? Why is Israel held to one
absurd standard by the Vatican (and the rest of the so-called “civilized
world” in fact), and the terrorists held to no standard at all? I think we
all know the answer…

“Cloistered” doesn’t begin to describe these people. I’m a Catholic, and it
just sickens me. It’s past time for mainstream Christians to expect–and
demand–more from our religious leaders than the tired liberal pieties of
the pre-9/11 world.

Andy McCarthy issues a wake-up call:

We’ve been told for some time now — against common sense and the weight of our own national experience — that the way to defeat international jihadism is to spread democracy.

So now the Lebanese democracy can’t control Hezbollah (which has been freely elected and controls about a fifth of its legislature), while the Palestinian Authority IS Hamas (the Palestinian people having democratically put them in power).

How much do we figure that Israel is hoping democracy breaks out in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad waiting in the wings? All it needs right about now is yet another democratic neighbor.

Democracy has many enduring benefits, but it doesn’t stop terrorists from operating — and in many ways, it makes life easier for them. When are we going to stop talking about it as a national security cure-all?

We have to kill al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and the rest. This is harder work than the administration’s rhetoric is preparing the nation for. We are not going to democratize these savages into submission.