The media war against Israel

[Wildrose-Wally]

The media war against Israel
The Jewish state is fighting not one enemy, but two: Hezbollah, and those who peddle its propaganda
Wednesday » August 2 » 2006
Tom Gross
National Post

LONDON - Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the current conflict in Lebanon. They are actively fanning the flames.

The BBC world service has a strong claim to be the number-one villain. It has come to sound like a virtual propaganda tool for Hezbollah. As it attempts to prove that Israel is guilty of committing "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity," it has introduced a new charge -- one which I have heard several times on-air in recent days.

The newscaster reads out carefully selected "audience comments." Among these are invariably contained some version of the claim that "Israel's attack on Lebanon" will serve as a "recruitment" drive for al-Qaeda.

But if anything is going to win new recruits for Osama bin Laden and his like, it will not be Israel's defensive actions, which are far less damaging than Western TV stations would have us believe, but the inflammatory and one-sided way in which they are being reported by those very same news organizations.

While the slanted comments and interviews are bad enough, the degree of pictorial distortion is even worse. From the way many TV stations worldwide are portraying it, you would think Beirut has begun to resemble Dresden and Hamburg in the aftermath of Second World War air raids. International television channels have used the same footage of Beirut over and over, showing the destruction of a few individual buildings in a manner which suggests half the city has been razed.

A careful look at aerial satellite photos of the areas targeted by Israel in Beirut shows that certain specific buildings housing Hezbollah command centres in the city's southern suburbs have been singled out. Most of the rest of Beirut, apart from strategic sites such as airport runways used to ferry Hezbollah weapons in and out of Lebanon, has been left pretty much untouched.

From the distorted imagery, selective witness accounts, and almost round-the-clock emphasis on casualties, you would be forgiven for thinking that the level of death and destruction in Lebanon is on par with that in Darfur, where Arab militias are slaughtering hundreds of thousands of non-Arabs, or with the 2004 tsunami that killed half a million in Southeast Asia.

In fact, Israel has taken great care to avoid killing civilians -- even though this has proven extremely difficult and often tragically impossible, since members of Hezbollah, the self-styled "Party of God," have deliberately ensconced themselves in civilian homes. Nevertheless the civilian death toll has been mercifully low compared to other international conflicts in recent years.

Last week, a senior journalist let slip how the news media allows its Mideast coverage to be distorted. CNN "senior international correspondent" Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hezbollah. In particular, he revealed that his story was heavily influenced by the group's "press officer," and that Hezbollah have "very, very sophisticated and slick media operations."

When pressed a few days later about his reporting on the CNN program Reliable Sources, Robertson acknowledged that Hezbollah militants had instructed the CNN camera team where and what to film. Hezbollah "had control of the situation," Robertson said. "They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn't have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath."

Robertson added that Hezbollah has "very, very good control over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny journalists access to those areas. You don't get in there without their permission. We didn't have enough time to see if perhaps there was somebody there who was, you know, a taxi driver by day, and a Hezbollah fighter by night."

Yet Reliable Sources, presented by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hezbollah.

Another journalist let the cat out of the bag last week. Writing on his blog while reporting from southern Lebanon, Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton casually mentioned in the middle of a posting: "To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I'm loath to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist's passport, and they've already hassled a number of us and threatened one."

Robertson is not the only foreign journalist to have misled viewers with selected footage from Beirut. NBC's Richard Engel, CBS's Elizabeth Palmer, and a host of European and other networks, were also taken around the damaged areas by Hezbollah minders. Palmer commented on her report that "Hezbollah is also determined that outsiders will only see what it wants them to see."

Palmer's honesty is helpful. But it doesn't prevent the damage being done by organizations such as the BBC, whose bias is obvious to those who know the facts. First, the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lopsided coverage, its Web site helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in London, but did not give any details about a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.

Indeed, the BBC's coverage of the present war has been so extraordinary that even staunch BBC supporters in London seem rather embarrassed -- in conversation, not on the air, unfortunately.

If the BBC were just a British problem, that would be one thing, but it is not. Thanks to British taxpayers, it is the world's biggest and most lavishly funded news organization. No other station broadcasts so extensively in dozens of languages, on TV, radio and online.

The BBC's radio service alone attracts over 163 million listeners. It pours forth its world view in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic and Turkish. (Needless to say, it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it does broadcast in the languages of other small nations: Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kinyarwanda and Kyrgyz, and so on.)

It is not just that the supposed crimes of Israel are completely overplayed, but the fact that this is a two-sided war (started, of course, by Hezbollah) is all but obscured. As a result, in spite of hundreds of hours of broadcast by dozens of BBC reporters and studio anchors, you wouldn't really know that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been living in bomb shelters for weeks now, tired, afraid, but resilient; that a grandmother and her seven-year old grandson were killed by a Katyusha rocket during a Friday night Sabbath dinner; that several other Israeli children have died.

You wouldn't have any real understanding of what it is like to have over 2,000 Iranian and Syrian rockets rain down indiscriminately on towns, villages and farms across one third of your country, aimed at killing civilians.

You wouldn't really appreciate that Hezbollah, far from being some ragtag militia, is in effect a division of the Iranian revolutionary guards, with relatively advanced weapons (unmanned aerial vehicles that have flown over northern Israel, extended-range artillery rockets, anti-ship cruise missiles), and that it has a global terror reach, having already killed 114 people in Argentina during the 1990s.

The BBC and other media have carried report after report on the damaged Lebanese tourist industry, but none on its damaged Israeli counterpart, even though at least one hotel in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, was hit by a Hezbollah rocket. There are reports on Lebanese children who don't know where they will be going to school, but none on Israeli children.

Many have grown accustomed to left-wing papers such as Britain's Guardian allowing their Mideast coverage to spill over into something akin to anti-Semitism. For example, last month a cartoon by the Guardian's Martin Rowson depicted Stars of David being used as knuckle dusters on a bloody fist.

Now the Conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph, Britain's best-selling quality daily, and previously one of the only papers in Europe to give Israel a fair hearing, has got in on the act. The cartoon at the top of the Telegraph comment page last Saturday showed two identical scenes of devastation, exactly the same in every detail. One was labelled: "Warsaw 1943"; the other: "Tyre, 2006." The suggestion, of course, is that modern Israel is no different from Nazi Germany.

A politician had already given the cue for this horrendous libel. Conservative MP Sir Peter Tapsell told the House of Commons that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was "colluding" with U.S. President George W. Bush in giving Israel the okay to wage a war crime "gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw."

Of course, there was no "Jewish quarter" of Warsaw. In case anyone needs reminding (Sir Peter obviously does) the ghetto in the Polish capital, established in October 1940, constituted less than three square miles. Over 400,000 Jews were then crammed into it, about 30% of the population of Warsaw. 254,000 were sent to Treblinka where they were exterminated. Most of the rest were murdered in other ways. The ghetto was completely cleared of Jews by the end of May 1943.

The picture isn't entirely bleak. Some British and European politicians, on both the left and right, have been supportive of Israel. So have some magazines, such as Britain's Spectator. So have a number of individual newspaper commentators.

But meanwhile, anti-Semitic coverage and cartoons are spreading across the globe. Norway's third largest paper, the Oslo daily Dagbladet, ran a cartoon comparing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to the infamous Nazi commander SS Major Amon Goeth, who indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them from his balcony -- as depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List. (A month earlier, Dagbladet published an article, The Third Tower, which questioned whether Muslims were really responsible for the September 11 attacks.)

Antonio Neri Licon of Mexico's El Economista drew what appeared to be a Nazi soldier with stars of David on his uniform. The "soldier" was surrounded by eyes that he had apparently gouged out.

A cartoon in the South African Sunday Times depicted Ehud Olmert with a butchers knife covered in blood. In the leading Australian daily The Age, a cartoon showed a wine glass full of blood being drunk in a scene reminiscent of a medieval blood libel. In New Zealand, veteran cartoonist Tom Stott came up with a drawing which equated Israel with al-Qaeda.

At least one leading European politician has also vented his prejudice through visual symbolism. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wore an Arab scarf during an event at which he condemned Israel, but not Hezbollah, who he presumably thinks should not be stopped from killing Israelis.

It's entirely predictable that all this violent media distortion should lead to Jews being attacked and even murdered, as happened at a Seattle Jewish centre last week.

When live Jews can't be found, dead ones are targeted. In Belgium last week, the urn that contained ashes from Auschwitz was desecrated at the Brussels memorial to the 25,411 Belgian Jews deported to Nazi death camps. It was smashed and excrement smeared over it. The silence from Belgian leaders following this desecration was deafening.

Other Jews continue to be killed in Israel itself without it being mentioned in the media abroad. Last Thursday, for example, 60-year-old Dr. Daniel Ya'akovi was murdered by the Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the terrorist group within Fatah that Yasser Arafat set up five years ago using European Union aid money.

But this is far from being an exclusively Jewish issue. Some international journalists seem to find it amusing or exciting to bait the Jews. They don't understand yet that Hezbollah is part of a worldwide radical Islamist movement that has plans, and not pleasant ones, for all those -- Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Jew -- who don't abide by its wishes.

- Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph. His Web site is www.tomgrossmedia.com.

© National Post 2006

[zootm]

Interesting perspective, but it's obviously at least as biased as those it opposes (which makes sense, since it's an opinion piece). There's been quite a lot of pro-Israel press over here (at least, that I've seen, although I don't really keep up with these things).

[rockouthippie]

I don't consider that article to be biased in the least. It seems to state the facts. Of course, picking on Jews doesn't seem to be a habit we lost after Hitler murdered millions of them.

[zootm]

It's clearly an opinion piece. It's supposed to be biased, it's a persuasive piece. An argument to the contrary could be made, too.

It's a well-written, well thought-out piece, though.

[rockouthippie]

Point out any mistatement of fact. Please. Find me fact that refutes anything there. The conclusion of the article is absolutely correct.

I know you will argue, because you argue. Whether you can bring anything but programmed anti-semitism to the argument is in question.

I think Europe and the US sent jews there to die. Hitler couldn't kill enough and Stalin couldn't.

Let the arabs eat em?.

One little problem. They didn't die. Even though we ignored this well into the 1960s. Can somehow we fix that now?.

Instead of dying, they made a free democratic nation. You would imagine why all of their enemies hate them.

You might be able to understand why Hitler and Stalin hated them too.

And maybe you should consider the motives of anyone who speaks against the only democracy in the middle east.

[siebe83]

re: article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
There's more than just pro- and anti-Israel. It looks like all criticism towards Israel is considered anti-semitic.

Originally posted by rockouthippie
Point out any mistatement of fact. Please. Find me fact that refutes anything there. The conclusion of the article is absolutely correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirma...gative_premise

I know you will argue, because you argue. Whether you can bring anything but programmed anti-semitism to the argument is in question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

I think Europe and the US sent jews there to die. Hitler couldn't kill enough and Stalin couldn't.

Let the arabs eat em?.

One little problem. They didn't die. Even though we ignored this well into the 1960s. Can somehow we fix that now?.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_motive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

Instead of dying, they made a free democratic nation. You would imagine why all of their enemies hate them.

You might be able to understand why Hitler and Stalin hated them too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_analogy

And you should really consider a position that opposes Israel.

Israelis are a good people, but they don't have much oil.

?!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_pity ?

Nice conspiracy theory, by the way (Europe & US sending Jews to the Middle East to let them die). Any facts to back it up?

[rockouthippie]

Nice conspiracy theory, by the way (Europe & US sending Jews to the Middle East to let them die). Any facts to back it up? [/B]

Displacing millions of jews to an arab wasteland, because they we going to be killed in their home states isn't enough.

Then I would suggest that you look at how europe and the US hanged them out to dry in the late 50s and 60s.

You do the research. All of the links you provided are completely stupid.

I don't need a conspiracy theory, I have 9 million dead polls, 6 million dead jews and smoking ovens. And another 48 million people that are dead.

That was called WWII. You might not be old enough to remember jews that survived a concentration camp, that had Hitlers numeric tattoo. I've seen it.

Now give me a "Mel Gibson" link.

[siebe83]

Just the suggestion that Europe and the US sent (or "displaced", as you call it) the Jews to that Arab wasteland is stupid. It's the Zionists who wanted to live there and create a Jewish state. Lots of Jews shared that feeling and went there.

I'm not saying they don't have the right to be there (before you draw that conclusion), but the way Israel handles things at the moment is just not the right one, in my opinion.
If you then take any criticism towards Israel to be anti-semitic then there apparently is no longer room for discussion: Jews have the right to do what they like, it's their state and their policy and they are allowed to attack anyone they don't like at any cost. And don't you say they are doing it wrong or you're just like Hitler and Stalin.

[edit]
Screw Mel Gibson, what's he gotta do with this
You're continuously trying to make it look like your opponents in discussion have points of views they don't have...

[zootm]

Originally posted by rockouthippie
Point out any mistatement of fact. Please. Find me fact that refutes anything there. The conclusion of the article is absolutely correct.

Bias is not lying, it's just slanting, representing only your own side of the story. This is what persuasive pieces do. Christ almighty. This is early high school English, not rocket science.

[rockouthippie]

Originally posted by siebe83
Just the suggestion that Europe and the US sent (or "displaced", as you call it) the Jews to that Arab wasteland is stupid. It's the Zionists who wanted to live there and create a Jewish state. Lots of Jews shared that feeling and went there.

Oh yeah, these Europeans just really wanted to move to Israel. I guess when you lived in places where people just wiped out 9 million of your kind............because you wore a funny hat.....believed in God and freedom. I am a dutch american. I am missing many ancestors because Hitler bombed Rotterdam flat, after they surrendered.

The people that don't want you to be free are alive and well.

Go figure.

[siebe83]

Well, I can imagine those people felt threatened after WW2 and decided to go to Israel. Still, that was their choice. I wouldn't say they were sent or displaced there.

But that's kinda off topic anyway. As said, I agree with them being there. It's mainly the fact that you seem to take any slightly negative remark about the state Israel for anti-semitism that pisses me off. In your first post already you came up with the Hitler analogy. That way you immediately kill the discussion and make your opponents look like nazis before they even said something.

[rockouthippie]

What has Israel ever done wrong? Except live?.

Show me anything that they have ever done that was unprovoked.

[Wildrose-Wally]

Originally posted by siebe83
I'm not saying they don't have the right to be there (before you draw that conclusion), but the way Israel handles things at the moment is just not the right one, in my opinion.

I agree with this statement.

If there is ever to be any peace in the middle east, the State of Israel will have to utterly destroy their enemies. They will NEVER do this, because they value human life too much, and their enemy knows it.

Golda Meir, to Anwar Saddat just before the peace talks.
We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.

[rockouthippie]

Israel could turn the middle east in to a wasteland. So could Iran.

Choose. You have no other choice. Make your choice. Stop one of them.

[siebe83]

Let's blow up the world before the Arabs do it.

What's your point, exactly? There's more options besides turning the Middle East into a wasteland. I hope.
Turning it into a wasteland won't solve anything, anyway...


[edit]
You edited your post...
How would that work, exactly? (stop one of them) Utter destroyment? You think that's feasible?
As I see it, every act of violence in the last few decades (from both sides) has resulted in more hatred, distrust and violence from the other side. Just violence won't solve this conflict, ever.

[Wildrose-Wally]

Just to sit back and wait for it to go away will not bring peace either. Israel's enemies don't want Israel there, period. They will stop at nothing to get rid of it. That's why the only way to get peace there is for Israel to go on the offensive and destroy their enemies, no half measures like in the past.
Right now the Arab worls thinks that Isreal will never beat them, because Israel is too "nice", and if Israel keeps following the current road of trying to appease useless organizations like the UN, they will always be fighting the terrorists in the area.
However, if they show they have the "balls" to go against the establishment by being ruthless against their enemies, the Arab world will respect them for that, and eventually leave them, more or less, alone.

[zootm]

Originally posted by Wildrose-Wally
Right now the Arab worls thinks that Isreal will never beat them, because Israel is too "nice"...

I think that it would be more accurate to say that they believe that Israel will not prevail in any conflict because they believe their religion tells them so, rather than anything so rational as to attempt to evaluate the politics of the region. Much of a muchness in practice I suppose.

[rockouthippie]

Originally posted by zootm
anything so rational as to attempt to evaluate the politics of the region.

I have been watching at least 30 cogent years of watching people who got rich attempting to evaluate the politics of people that wanted to murder everything. And it wasn't Israel.

It isn't that difficult to understand JIHAD.... LISTEN TO THEM...

100 million people that want to kill the rest of us starting with Israel. Questions?.

[MegaRock]

Originally posted by rockouthippie
100 million people that want to kill the rest of us starting with Israel. Questions?.

Yeah, when are people going to wise up and wipe their ass off the planet before they complete their plans.

[zootm]

Interesting developments:

News organization withdraws photograph of Israeli fighter jet, admits image was doctored, fires photographer. Reuters pledges 'tighter editing procedure for images of the Middle East conflict'

Reuters has withdrawn a second photograph and admitted that the image was doctored, following the emergence of new suspicions against images provided by the news organization. On Sunday, Reuters admitted that one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, used software to distort an image of smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut in order to create the effect of more smoke and damage.

The latest image to face doubts is a photograph of an Israeli F-16 fighter jet over the skies of Lebanon, seen in the image firing off "missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh," according to the image's accompanying text provided by Reuters.

link

Doesn't really back or refute the article, but seems related on a smaller scale (this looks like a personal, rather than systematic, distortion).

[rockouthippie]

This article from the LA Times states the situation better than I could:

Israels way out:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...-pe-california

[MidnightViper88]

Originally posted by rockouthippie
This article from the LA Times states the situation better than I could:

Israels way out:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...-pe-california

I can't believe what I'm seeing...But then again, with the reality disconnection the drive-by media has on the world, it's getting predicible now...




Some more interesting media stuff: Same wailer repeatidly pops up in news photos



Great Hezbo propaganda right there...

[shakey_snake]

I was actually thinking about this today at work.
Why would there be so much "Israel is being too aggressive" news coverage when the media is predominantly run by Jews (at least in the eyes of a number of people)?
Maybe the "stereotype" doesn't fit?
(and if you notice, CNN very rarely has negative things to say about the Jewish military)

[MidnightViper88]

No, but CNN seems to have a fascination with the Hezbos...There was some sort of CNN International report on the Hezbollah with Anderson Cooper that almost sounds as if they're trying to humanize the Hezbos...Anderson Cooper kicks off, "There are those who say that Israel underestimated the strength of the Hezbos. We have CNN's Tom Foreman look at where the Hezbos get their military strength."

FOREMAN: Hezbollah may seem like many guerrilla armies, but military analysts say Hezbollah is much better prepared than most for open warfare.

DAN BYMAN: (Georgetown Center for Peace and Security): Hezbollah's forces are brave. They know how to find cover. They know how to use their weapons effectively. Most guerrilla groups don't. They fight poorly. They run away in the face of danger.

FOREMAN: Another thing Hezbollah has going for it is shear geography. Their homeland here in southern Lebanon is full of mountains and trails and little villages, and they have had almost 25 years to dig in, and Hezbollah has help. Decades of running social programs, hospitals, and schools for Shiite Muslims have produced allies willing to provide a haven for Hezbollah.

Well, aren't the Hezbollah just a merry band of freedom fighters...They've even built schools and hospitals! Great social works for humanity! How could the Hezbollah be demonized as terrorists?!

Do they teach Shiite Muslims how to strap bombs on themselves in those schools? And where'd the help come from anyway: Syria? Iran?

I guess CNN doesn't want to ask the military questions...Have the Hezbollah gone an inch into Israel? Have they won any battles? Have they taken out Israel's infastructure? No, no, and no...Lobbing rockets into towns doesn't accomplish a damn thing...Where does CNN get off into thinking the Hezbollah are as tough as they "report" them to be?

And by the way, I wonder what kind of UN cease-fires allowed Hezbollah to run around freely for those 25 years...

Here's some more CNN fascination for you...

COOPER: Tom, it's fascinating. I mean, they're fighting a guerrilla war yet in many ways Hezbollah acts as though they are a government within a government.

FOREMAN: They have all the advantages of being guerrillas. They can move quickly. But they are in many ways acting like a government in this region, and that's no accident. Hezbollah has grown much better at manipulating its public image. It wants to look like a real army for a real nation, even though they are not, fighting against another real army, and they want to look like the underdogs who are standing up against it.

If the Hezbos are manipulating public image anywhere, it's gotta be within CNN...They're fascinated by them, almost to the point where I wonder if they support the Hezbollah (And what's with that "Look like a real army"? Their "uniform" is to dress like civilians)...

"It's real interesting how openly anti-Semite Nasrallah is, Anderson"

"Yes, it's really interesting, Jeffery, very interesting"

[siebe83]

How is this supporting Hezbollah? They show how Hezbollah manipulate the people around them. Hamas does the same: providing education, food and health care to manipulate people and get them to support Hamas. It's a dirty trick, and CNN shows it. I don't see how that's supporting Hezbollah; on the contrary, I'd say...
What's wrong with giving info about the inner workings of Hezbollah?

[rockouthippie]

Originally posted by siebe83
How is this supporting Hezbollah? They show how Hezbollah manipulate the people around them. Hamas does the same: providing education, food and health care to manipulate people and get them to support Hamas. It's a dirty trick, and CNN shows it. I don't see how that's supporting Hezbollah; on the contrary, I'd say...
What's wrong with giving info about the inner workings of Hezbollah?

Talking to hezbollah is supporting them. Showing any idea that supports them as anything but cowardly murderers is supporting them.

There is no middle ground.

[siebe83]

[edit]nm :/

[shakey_snake]

Originally posted by rockouthippie
Showing any idea that supports them as anything but cowardly murderers is supporting them.

There is no middle ground.

As long as things are only falling into two categories, Do you consider yourself crazy or ugly?


There are many shades of gray and beyond that many different colors, especially in conflicts with as deep of histories as this one. Limiting ourselves to good and ungood is selling ourselves short.

[spiderbaby1958]

To Whom It May Concern:

I'm SO fucking sick and tired of war being used as a metaphor to ratchet up rhetoric and obscure the truth, whatever that may be. How many Israeli civilians have been killed by the media in this "war"? If the BBC isn't bombing targets in Israel, then fuck you and your "war"; shut the fuck up.

And this whole "press bias" thing! Man, in America, we've gotten a bellyful of that from this administration. They love to pontificate about the media being "politically motivated" as if they themselves are above such ignoble motives. No one ever accuses the press of being politically motivated without political motivation, especially in such inflammatory terms.

If you don't think that Israel is guilty of war crimes for killing scores of uninvolved children, that's perfectly legitimate, make your case. I'm an American who's been listening to NPR for twenty years, and I consider myself to be woefully uninformed about the conflict in Israel. It makes me suspicious of what my fellow Americans really know. I'm genuinely interested in your perspective, but if your're going to rave about the "guilt" of the BBC when real people are really dying, you're gonna turn off my interest pretty fast.

I'm not saying it's propoaganda. I'm saying it's bad propaganda.

[spiderbaby1958]

Originally posted by MidnightViper88
I can't believe what I'm seeing...But then again, with the reality disconnection the drive-by media has on the world, it's getting predicible now...




Some more interesting media stuff: Same wailer repeatidly pops up in news photos

[Image]

Great Hezbo propaganda right there...

I'm wondering why, if Hezzbollah is going to put the same woman in front of more than one event, why couldn't they find a woman without an easily distinguishable scar on her cheek?

There are a lot of possibilities here. The woman may be acting on her own intiative (I'm not clear about the relative geography involved just yet.), or acting on behalf of Hezbollah, or on a behalf of someone with entirely different intersts. She may be just be a crazy woman who does this all the time.

If the BBC is being taken in by someone, it's good to point it out, but I don't think it has a lot of bearing on the greater reality of what's going on. With or without emotionally effective news photos, the slaughter is real, the slaughter continues, and even if the Lebanese are suffering more than the Israelis, the slaughter is horrible and devestating on both sides.

Guess what? Everybody on all sides is always trying to manipulate the news. It's the efforts that arten't this ham-handed and obvious that we really have to worry about.

[shakey_snake]

Actually, there is one good possibility

[rockouthippie]

Originally posted by shakey_snake
As long as things are only falling into two categories, Do you consider yourself crazy or ugly?

There are many shades of gray and beyond that many different colors, especially in conflicts with as deep of histories as this one. Limiting ourselves to good and ungood is selling ourselves short.

It is black and white. People who fire rockets into civilian populations in unprovoked attack BLACK. People defending their home ... WHITE ...

Do you consider yourself stupid or mentally challenged?.

Maybe you consider that there is some gray area in understanding the terrorists that killed thousands of people by flying jetliners full of innocent passengers into the trade centers.

Maybe serial killers and mass murderers are just somehow misunderstood.

I believe in gray areas sometimes, but not this time. Here, we have people that are BLACK as hell, trying to make it gray, so that they can get even BLACKER. Perhaps you find something gray about the Iranians trying to build nuclear weapons?.

[spiderbaby1958]

Originally posted by shakey_snake
Actually, there is one good possibility

If you can find it on Google, it must be true.

[AlexZello]

What do you think of Obadiah Shoher's views on the Middle East conflict? One can argue, of course, that Shoher is ultra-right, but his followers are far from being a marginal group. Also, he rejects Jewish moralistic reasoning - that's alone is highly unusual for the Israeli right. And he is very influential here in Israel. So what do you think?

[spiderbaby1958]

Haven't been here in a while, and I see that my arch-nemisis, Rockouthippie, has been banned.

[AlexZello]

Originally posted by AlexZello
What do you think of Obadiah Shoher's views on the Middle East conflict? One can argue, of course, that Shoher is ultra-right, but his followers are far from being a marginal group. Also, he rejects Jewish moralistic reasoning - that's alone is highly unusual for the Israeli right. And he is very influential here in Israel. So what do you think?

uh, here's the site in question: <samsonblinded.org/blog> Middle East conflict