Just to be a little clearer/fairer about the situation in the Middle
East....
Begin forwarded message:
_http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2928_
(http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2928)
Media Advisory
Down the Memory Hole
Israeli contribution to conflict is forgotten by leading papers
7/28/06
In the wake of the most serious outbreak of Israeli/Arab violence
in years, three leading U.S. papers—the Washington Post, New York
Times and Los Angeles Times—have each strongly editorialized that
Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon were solely responsible for
sparking violence, and that the Israeli military response was
predictable and unavoidable. These editorials ignored recent events
that indicate a much more complicated situation.
Beginning with the Israeli attack on Gaza, a New York Times
editorial (6/29/06) headlined "Hamas Provokes a Fight" declared
that "the responsibility for this latest escalation rests squarely
with Hamas," and that "an Israeli military response was
inevitable." The paper (7/15/06) was similarly sure in its
assignment of blame after the fighting spread to Lebanon: "It is
important to be clear about not only who is responsible for the
latest outbreak, but who stands to gain most from its continued
escalation. Both questions have the same answer: Hamas and Hezbollah."
The Washington Post (7/14/06) agreed, writing that "Hezbollah and
its backers have instigated the current fighting and should be held
responsible for the consequences." The L.A. Times (7/14/06)
likewise wrote that "in both cases Israel was provoked." Three days
and scores of civilian deaths later, the Times (7/17/06) was even
more direct: "Make no mistake about it: Responsibility for the
escalating carnage in Lebanon and northern Israel lies with one
side...and that is Hezbollah."
As FAIR noted in a recent Action Alert (7/19/06), the portrayal of
Israel as the innocent victim in the Gaza conflict is hard to
square with the death toll in the months leading up to the current
crisis; between September 2005 and June 2006, 144 Palestinians in
Gaza were killed by Israeli forces, according to a list compiled by
the Israeli human rights group B'tselem; 29 of those killed were
children. During the same period, no Israelis were killed as a
result of violence from Gaza.
In a July 21 CounterPunch column, Alexander Cockburn highlighted
some of the violent incidents that have dropped out of the media’s
collective memory:
Let's go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about
June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at
a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road
between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead
it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.
Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles
at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The
successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.
Now we're really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June
9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing eight
civilians and injuring 32.
That's just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the
bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them
Palestinians, most of them women and children.
On July 24, the day before Hamas' cross-border raid, Israel made an
incursion of its own, capturing two Palestinians that it said were
members of Hamas (something Hamas denied—L.A. Times, 7/25/06). This
incident received far less coverage in U.S. media than the
subsequent seizure of the Israeli soldier; the few papers that
covered it mostly dismissed it in a one-paragraph brief (e.g.,
Chicago Tribune, 7/25/06), while the Israeli taken prisoner got
front-page headlines all over the world. It's likely that most
Gazans don’t share U.S. news outlets' apparent sense that captured
Israelis are far more interesting or important than captured
Palestinians.
The situation in Lebanon is also more complicated than its
portrayal in U.S. media, with the roots of the current crisis
extending well before the July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers
by Hezbollah. A major incident fueling the latest cycle of violence
was a May 26, 2006 car bombing in Sidon, Lebanon, that killed a
senior official of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group allied with
Hezbollah. Lebanon later arrested a suspect, Mahmoud Rafeh, whom
Lebanese authorities claimed had confessed to carrying out the
assassination on behalf of Mossad (London Times, 6/17/06).
Israel denied involvement with the bombing, but even some Israelis
are skeptical. "If it turns out this operation was effectively
carried out by Mossad or another Israeli secret service," wrote
Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s top-selling daily (6/16/06; cited in AFP,
6/16/06), "an outsider from the intelligence world should be
appointed to know whether it was worth it and whether it lays
groups open to risk."
In Lebanon, Israel's culpability was taken as a given. "The
Israelis, in hitting Islamic Jihad, knew they would get Hezbollah
involved too," Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at Beirut’s Lebanese
American University, told the New York Times (5/29/06). "The
Israelis had to be aware that if they assassinated this guy they
would get a response."
And, indeed, on May 28, Lebanese militants in Hezbollah-controlled
territory fired Katyusha rockets at a military vehicle and a
military base inside Israel. Israel responded with airstrikes
against Palestinian camps deep inside Lebanon, which in turn were
met by Hezbollah rocket and mortar attacks on more Israeli military
bases, which prompted further Israeli airstrikes and "a steady
artillery barrage at suspected Hezbollah positions" (New York
Times, 5/29/06). Gen. Udi Adam, the commander of Israel’s northern
forces, boasted that "our response was the harshest and most severe
since the withdrawal" of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000
(Chicago Tribune, 5/29/06).
This intense fighting was the prelude to the all-out warfare that
began on July 12, portrayed in U.S. media as beginning with an
attack out of the blue by Hezbollah. While Hezbollah's capture of
two Israeli soldiers may have reignited the smoldering conflict,
the Israeli air campaign that followed was not a spontaneous
reaction to aggression but a well-planned operation that was years
in the making.
"Of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which
Israel was most prepared," Gerald Steinberg, a political science
professor at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, told the San Francisco
Chronicle (7/21/05). "By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to
last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already been
blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and
rehearsed across the board." The Chronicle reported that a "senior
Israeli army officer" has been giving PowerPoint presentations for
more than a year to "U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and
think tanks" outlining the coming war with Lebanon, explaining that
a combination of air and ground forces would target Hezbollah and
"transportation and communication arteries."
Which raises a question: If journalists have been told by Israel
for more than a year that a war was coming, why are they pretending
that it all started on July 12? By truncating the cause-and-effect
timelines of both the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts, editorial boards
at major U.S. dailies gravely oversimplify the decidedly more
complex nature of the facts on the ground.
Norman Solomon on Mideast War, Jamal Dajani on Mosaic/LINK TV
(7/28/06-8/3/06)
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
|
