Israel is winning the war on the ground. When the theocrats of Iran let slip their dogs of war in Lebanon, they did not anticipate the speed and precision with which the IDF would strike back. Israel has done to Hezbollah in a matter of days what the rest of the world had failed to do in as many years. As well as defending itself against an existential threat, Israel has also struck a powerful blow for the West in the global war on Islamist terror.

The war of the airwaves, however, is not going Israel’s way. According to the global media, Israel is the aggressor against Lebanon, just as it is against Gaza. No matter that the U.N. and the international community did nothing to force Iran and Syria to halt their build-up of an offensive arsenal on Israel’s northern border, no matter how many missiles Hezbollah fires at Israeli cities, the story doesn’t change.

Everything is blamed on Israel. The plight of Western tourists caught up in the conflict and desperate to be evacuated; the suffering of Lebanese civilians whose country has been held hostage and is now reaping the whirlwind; even the Israelis bombarded by Hezbollah missiles — all these innocents are treated as direct or indirect victims of Israel’s “disproportionate” response.

That’s the story. It doesn’t matter that Hezbollah, like Hamas, deliberately instigated the crisis, by firing missiles at and abducting soldiers from the sovereign territory of Israel. It doesn’t matter that even most Arab states are conspicuous by their absence from the lineup of Hezbollah’s cheerleaders. It doesn’t matter that Israel, far from using its military superiority recklessly, has sought to target only facilities that pose a deadly threat to its own citizens. It doesn’t matter that Hezbollah, again like Hamas, surrounds its missile-launching sites, command and control centers and other infrastructure with civilians, using them as human shields. None of this signifies anything, because the story is that Israel has acted “disproportionately.”

The same journalists who have consistently obscured the unique predicament in which Israel has found itself since its foundation — as the only nation permanently threatened with annihilation by its neighbors — now conceal the genocidal motivation of Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. The indiscriminate missile attacks by Iranian-trained terrorists on Israeli civilians in Haifa and other towns or kibbutzim are the opening salvo of what Islamists hope will be a second Holocaust.

Like the gas chambers, the very existence of these missiles has been denied. Robert Fisk, the London Independent correspondent who sets the tone for much reporting of the Middle East, has consistently refused to believe in Hezbollah’s ballistic capability, for example. The warheads of these Iranian-made rockets are often packed with ball-bearings, designed to cause maximum carnage. Yet it is Israel that, in attempting to eliminate this threat, is said to be acting “disproportionately.”

The BBC distorts every event to depict Israel as the aggressor. Its correspondent in Beirut, Kim Ghattas, is herself Lebanese and makes no attempt to be neutral in her reporting. On Tuesday, BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen spoke of Israel’s “war crimes” and warned of a “worst-case scenario” if Israel is not forced to halt its attacks on Hezbollah: Lebanon, he said, could be taken over by “jihadis” — as if that were not already the case. But the facts must be made to fit the story.

Other actors in the drama are judged exclusively on whether they adhere to this storyline. Thus France escapes criticism, because Jacques Chirac was quick to denounce Israel’s “totally disproportionate” reaction to terrorist attack — even though last January the same Mr. Chirac had threatened a nuclear strike against “states who would use terrorist means against us.” Israel also earns opprobrium from Vladimir Putin — Russia is a state that is still living up to its reputation as an evil empire. Who, exactly, is calling whom disproportionate?

Then there is the United Nations. Tuesday, deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown told the BBC that he condemned both Hezbollah and Israel for “targeting civilians.” Hezbollah makes no secret of its aim of killing as many Jews as possible, but to tar the IDF with the same brush is outrageous — but not unexpected fom the U.N., which has signally failed to implement its own Resolution 1559 by leaving Hezbollah a free hand in Lebanon.

Unlike these hypocrites, Tony Blair is treated with derision. The voyeuristic media had eyes only for his trivial conversation with President Bush, which was accidentally recorded at the G-8 in St. Petersburg, rather than his statement in Parliament about the summit, when he blamed Iran and Syria, “who are at war not against Israel’s actions but against its existence.” The same Iranian weapons now being used against Israel, he observed, have been turned against coalition troops in Iraq, but the idea that Israel’s war is also the West’s war does not fit the story, so the BBC and most of the press did not bother to report his statement.

Indeed, the BBC does not take seriously any Western statesman who calls the true culprits by name. President Bush’s unusually direct criticism of Syria this week was simply dismissed by the BBC Washington correspondent Matt Frei with the assertion that there was no evidence to support Mr. Bush, adding gratuitously: “He is playing a very dangerous game.” Chancellor Merkel, who has quietly swung Germany behind the Anglo-American position, is merely ignored. Leaders who do not think Israel’s action is “disproportionate” are simply airbrushed out of the story.

Israel can defeat its enemies in the field, but those behind its own lines are more elusive — and maybe more dangerous. The few Israelis who are interviewed by the BBC are usually critics of the Israeli government such as Yossi Beilin — even though they are a tiny minority at this “unique moment of unity,” in Natan Sharansky’s words, with almost unprecedented unanimity of support for Ehud Olmert.

Equally unrepresentative of diaspora Jews, most of whom support Israeli policy in Gaza and Lebanon, the London Times recently carried a full-page advertisement protesting “the collective punishment of the people of Gaza.” Placed by a lobby group calling itself Jews for Justice for Palestinians, the signatories included the Nobel literature laureate, Harold Pinter, the film director, Mike Leigh, the actresses, Janet Suzman and Miriam Margolyes, the historian, Avi Shlaim, and 300 others. The spectacle of Jews denouncing Israel for defending itself lends a spurious legitimacy to the expression of those subliminal anti-Semitic reflexes that are ubiquitous in Europe.

In the Middle East, of course, such reflexes are anything but subliminal. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, described Israel this week as a “cancerous tumour,” while President Ahmadinejad compared Israel to Nazi Germany. He has threatened to unleash an Islamic “explosion” which would “burn all those who created [Israel] over the past 60 years.” Curiously, nobody at the BBC thought to call these gentlemen “disproportionate.”