Israel is bombing Mosques...

And no one cares - because they know what the mosques are being used for...

Israel is bombing mosques in Gaza. Six of them and counting.

In recent years, the purported disrespect for Islam displayed in the writings of authors such as Salman Rushdie has been sufficient to provoke death sentences and mass rallies. The dissemination of Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, one of which showed the prophet with a bomb in his headdress in an artistic critique of the hijacking of Islam by extremists, prompted violent demonstrations around the world that rather underlined the cartoonists' point.

But today, with Gaza mosque after mosque targeted by the Israel Air Force, this unprecedented assault on Islamic places of worship has passed without particular hysteria.

Part of the reason is that critics and protesters are focusing on Israel's broader "crime" of trying to defend its civilians against ever deeper and more devastating Hamas rocket attacks. But still, the repeated direction of Jewish fire-power into Islam's places of worship, one might have assumed, would inflame the Arab world and its supporters into an orgy of anti-Israel fury.

As of this writing, that hasn't happened.

And it hasn't happened because the Islamists know they've been found out.

In a terrible incident on Tuesday, Israel hit an UNRWA school, and in the subsequent explosions a reported 40-plus people were killed, many of them civilians. An outraged UNRWA emphatically denied an IDF claim that a Hamas mortar battery had been firing from the school, and that secondary blasts indicated the presence of further explosives there; the Associated Press cited eyewitness accounts of "a small group of militants firing mortars near the school and running away." The accusations and counter-accusations will rumble on, and there's little likelihood of a definitive narrative emerging.

As regards the mosques, by contrast, Israel's declaration that it is firing on them because they are hubs of Hamas terrorism has met with no emphatic denials, no aggrieved assertions from Hamas clerics that their buildings are innocent places of humble worship, no pleas to the international community to enter the buildings and document their purity.

Britain's Observer newspaper reported last Sunday, after the IAF struck the Ibrahim al-Maqadma mosque in northern Gaza's Beit Lahiya, that Al-Jazeera's Gaza correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, believed the attacks "could galvanize the Arab world into taking action against Israel." But this doubtless objective correspondent's professional assessment did not prove prophetic.

The name of that mosque rather gives the game away, of course. Maqadma was one of the founders of Hamas and its military chief. He was killed in an Israeli helicopter strike in Gaza in March 2003, soon after a series of Hamas terror attacks, including a suicide bombing on an Egged bus in Haifa that killed 17 people.

Israeli security officials say the mosques that have been struck, long known as centers of Islamist indoctrination and vicious anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish incitement, are being used as weapons stores, command centers, as cover for networks of tunnels - in short, Hamas military positions. Again, there has been no frenzied rush by Gaza's clerics to dispute this devastating accusation.

"We did not easily take the decision to hit mosques," an Israeli security official said this week. But one of those targeted was the entry point to a whole series of tunnels, he said. Another was a storehouse for Grad missiles fired into Israel. (On Wednesday, the IDF released footage of a rocket being launched into Israel from immediately adjacent to the wall of a mosque.) "When you see, day after day, people going back into a mosque for their rocket supplies," the official said, "you have to act."