Scandalous Biased Media reporting in Middle East.
danmac
Posts: 387
Israelis are dying: it must be an escalation
By Jonathan Cook
07/17/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Here we go again -- another “serious escalation” has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC World was telling audiences throughout Sunday. So what prompted the BBC’s judgment that the crisis was escalating once more?
You can be sure it had nothing to do with the more than 130 Lebanese dead after five days of savage aerial bombardment from at least 2,000 sorties by Israeli war planes that are making the country’s south a disaster zone and turning Beirut into a crumbling ghost town. Those dead, most civilians and many of them women and children, hardly get a mention, their lives apparently empty of meaning or significance in this confrontation.
Nor is it the Lebanese roads and bridges being pounded into dust, the petrol stations and oil refineries going up in smoke, the phone networks and TV stations being obliterated, the water and electricity supplies being cut off. The rapid transformation of a modern vibrant country like Lebanon into the same category of open-air prison as Gaza is not an escalation in the BBC’s view.
No, the BBC proffered a first, hesitant “escalation” on Thursday night when Hizbullah had the audacity to fire a handful of rockets at Haifa in response to the growing Lebanese death toll. The worst damage the Katyushas inflicted was one gouging a chunk of earth out of the hillside overlooking the port.
But the BBC felt confident to declare the escalation had turned “serious” on Sunday when Hizbullah not only fired more rockets at Haifa but one killed a group of eight railway workers in a station depot.
Now that Israeli civlians as well as Lebanese civilians are dying -- even if in far smaller numbers -- the BBC’s battalions of journalists in northern Israel finally have something to report on.
So BBC World’s broadcast at 9am GMT (noon Israel/Lebanon time) hardly veered out of Haifa or Jerusalem. After the presenter’s headline declaration that the Hizbullah strike on Haifa was a “serious escalation”, the news segued into a lengthy and sympathetic interview with an Israeli police spokesman in Haifa by Wyre Davies; followed by another lazy interview, lasting the best part of five minutes, with an Israeli government spokesman in Jerusalem; followed by Ben Brown in Beirut interviewing a British holidaymaker about her night of horror in her hotel.
And in those 15 minutes that was about as close as we got to hearing what the Lebanese had been enduring from a night and morning of Israeli aerial strikes on Beirut and the country’s south. If there was any mention of the suffering of Lebanese civilians -- and doubtless the BBC will tell me there was -- the reference was so fleeting that I missed it. And if I missed it, then so did most BBC World viewers.
The true nature of the “serious escalation” was soon apparent -- or at least it was if one watched Arab TV channels. They showed an urban wasteland of rubble and dust in the suburbs of Beirut and Tyre that was shockingly reminiscent of New York in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks.
They cut intermittently to local hospitals filled with Lebanese children, their faces a rash of bloody pockmarks from the spray of Israeli shrapnel. More terrible images of children burnt and lying in pools of blood arrrived in my email inbox from Lebanese bloggers.
But in the BBC’s lexicon, escalation has nothing to do with the enormous destruction Israel can unleash on Lebanon; only the occasional, smaller-scale blow Hizbullah scores against Israel.
Switching from the Arab channels back to the BBC for their 11am broadcast in the hope of finding the same images of devastation in Tyre and Beirut, I stumbled on yet another timid interview with Israel’s ubiqitious spokesman Mark Regev. It was followed by the two headlines: Nine dead in Israel after a “barrage” of attacks on Haifa; and foreign governments prepare to evacuate their nationals out of the region.
At noon James Reynolds as good as gave the game away: the Hizbullah strike on Haifa, he said, proved that the rockets are “no longer just an irritant”. Now it was clear why a “serious escalation” had begun: Israel was actually being harmed by Hizbullah’s rockets rather than just irritated. Until then the harm had been mainly inflicted on Lebanese civilians, so no escalation was taking place.
As I regularly flicked to the BBC’s coverage all afternoon, I found almost no mention of those dead in Lebanon. They had become “non-beings”, irrelevant in the calculations not only of our world leaders but of our major broadcasters.
It wasn’t till the 7pm news that I saw meaningful images from Lebanon, as Gavin Hewitt followed a fire crew trying to put out an enormous oil refinery blaze in Tyre. Although we saw some of the suffering of the Lebanese population, the anchor felt obliged to preface the scenes from Lebanon with the statement that they were Israeli “retaliation” for the Haifa attack, even though Israel had been launching such strikes for four days before the lethal rocket strike on Haifa.
In the same broadcast, an Israeli cabinet minister, Shaul Mofaz, was given air time to make the claim that parts of the rockets that landed in Haifa were Syrian-made. Allegations by the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, widely shown on Arab TV that Israel had been using phosphorus incendiary bombs -- illegal under international law -- received no coverage at all.
On the 8pm news, one of the headlines was a menacing quote from Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader, that “Haifa is just the beginning”. Mike Wooldridge in the Jerusalem studio made great play of the quote, taken from a broadcast Nasrallah had made several hours earlier.
The BBC may have lifted the sentence from the Israeli media because they missed out the important conditional context inserted by Nasrallah -- it was only the “beginning” of what Hizbullah could do if Israel continued its attacks.
They could have found this out even from the Hebrew media if they had taken the care to look more closely: “As long as the enemy pursues its aggression without limits and red lines we will pursue the confrontation without limits and without red lines,” Nasrallah was quoted as saying by the daily Haaretz newspaper. In other words, Nasrallah was warning that Hizbullah would give back as good as it gets -- a standard piece of rhetoric from a military leader in times of confrontation.
The BBC is no worse than CNN, Sky and, of course, Fox News. It is possibly far better, which is reason enough why we should be outraged that this is the best international broadcast coverage we are likely to get of the conflict.
The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it. The journalists’ working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention. The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even the tiny bleeding children I see on Arab TV, are terrorists. It is just the way Arabs are.
That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed. The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.
There is no excuse for this asymmetry of coverage. BBC reporters are in Lebanon jusy as they are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon just as easily as they can find them in Israel. They can show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut as easily as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese casualties just as easily as they can those in Israel.
But they don’t -- and as a fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.
My previous criticisms of British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel’s military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have struck a raw nerve. Certainly they provoked a series of emails -- some defensive, others angry -- from a few of the reporters I named. All tried to defend their own coverage, unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that they personally do not take sides. They are not “campaigning” journalists after all, they are “professionals” doing a job.
But the problem is not with them, it is with the job they have to do -- and the nature of the professionalism they so prize. I am sure the BBC’s Wyre Davies cares as much about Lebanese deaths as he does about Israeli ones. But he also knows his career at the BBC demands that he does not ask his bosses questions when told to give valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police spokesman who offers us only platitudes.
Similarly, we see James Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at 12noon to show emotive footage of him and his colleagues running for shelter as Israeli air raid sirens go off, only to tell us that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa. That non-event was shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and evening. Was it more significant than the images of death we never saw taking place just over the border? These images from Lebanon exist because the Arab channels spent all day showing them.
Matthew Price knows too that in the BBC’s view it is his job as he stands in Haifa, after we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their version of events, to repeat their message, dropping even the quotes marks as he passionately tells us how tough Israel must now be, how it must “retaliate” to protect its citizens, how it must “punish” Hizbullah. This is not journalism; it’s reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.
Can we imagine Ben Brown doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC cameras telling us how Hizbullah has no choice faced with Israel’s military onslaught but to start hitting Haifa harder, blowing up its oil refineries and targeting civilian infrastructure to “pressure” Israel to negotiate?
Would the BBC bother to show pre-recorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in Beirut in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of course not. Doubtless Brown and his colleagues are forced to take cover on a regular basis for fear of being hurt by Israeli air strikes, but his fear -- or more precisely, the fear of the Lebanese he stands alongside -- is not part of the story for the BBC. Only Israeli fears are newsworthy.
These reporters are working in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless news executives far away from the frontline who understand only too well the institutional pressures on the BBC -- and the institutional biases that are the result.
They know that the Israel lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without suffering flak; that the charge of anti-semitism might be terminally damaging to the BBC’s reputation; that the BBC is expected broadly to reflect the positions of the British governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators; that to remain credible it should not stray too far from the line of its mainly American rivals, who have their own more intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.
This distortion of news priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives -- in the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in both Israel and Lebanon. As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a regional war -- a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army -- is likely to become inevitable.
So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you.
Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
By Jonathan Cook
07/17/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Here we go again -- another “serious escalation” has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC World was telling audiences throughout Sunday. So what prompted the BBC’s judgment that the crisis was escalating once more?
You can be sure it had nothing to do with the more than 130 Lebanese dead after five days of savage aerial bombardment from at least 2,000 sorties by Israeli war planes that are making the country’s south a disaster zone and turning Beirut into a crumbling ghost town. Those dead, most civilians and many of them women and children, hardly get a mention, their lives apparently empty of meaning or significance in this confrontation.
Nor is it the Lebanese roads and bridges being pounded into dust, the petrol stations and oil refineries going up in smoke, the phone networks and TV stations being obliterated, the water and electricity supplies being cut off. The rapid transformation of a modern vibrant country like Lebanon into the same category of open-air prison as Gaza is not an escalation in the BBC’s view.
No, the BBC proffered a first, hesitant “escalation” on Thursday night when Hizbullah had the audacity to fire a handful of rockets at Haifa in response to the growing Lebanese death toll. The worst damage the Katyushas inflicted was one gouging a chunk of earth out of the hillside overlooking the port.
But the BBC felt confident to declare the escalation had turned “serious” on Sunday when Hizbullah not only fired more rockets at Haifa but one killed a group of eight railway workers in a station depot.
Now that Israeli civlians as well as Lebanese civilians are dying -- even if in far smaller numbers -- the BBC’s battalions of journalists in northern Israel finally have something to report on.
So BBC World’s broadcast at 9am GMT (noon Israel/Lebanon time) hardly veered out of Haifa or Jerusalem. After the presenter’s headline declaration that the Hizbullah strike on Haifa was a “serious escalation”, the news segued into a lengthy and sympathetic interview with an Israeli police spokesman in Haifa by Wyre Davies; followed by another lazy interview, lasting the best part of five minutes, with an Israeli government spokesman in Jerusalem; followed by Ben Brown in Beirut interviewing a British holidaymaker about her night of horror in her hotel.
And in those 15 minutes that was about as close as we got to hearing what the Lebanese had been enduring from a night and morning of Israeli aerial strikes on Beirut and the country’s south. If there was any mention of the suffering of Lebanese civilians -- and doubtless the BBC will tell me there was -- the reference was so fleeting that I missed it. And if I missed it, then so did most BBC World viewers.
The true nature of the “serious escalation” was soon apparent -- or at least it was if one watched Arab TV channels. They showed an urban wasteland of rubble and dust in the suburbs of Beirut and Tyre that was shockingly reminiscent of New York in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks.
They cut intermittently to local hospitals filled with Lebanese children, their faces a rash of bloody pockmarks from the spray of Israeli shrapnel. More terrible images of children burnt and lying in pools of blood arrrived in my email inbox from Lebanese bloggers.
But in the BBC’s lexicon, escalation has nothing to do with the enormous destruction Israel can unleash on Lebanon; only the occasional, smaller-scale blow Hizbullah scores against Israel.
Switching from the Arab channels back to the BBC for their 11am broadcast in the hope of finding the same images of devastation in Tyre and Beirut, I stumbled on yet another timid interview with Israel’s ubiqitious spokesman Mark Regev. It was followed by the two headlines: Nine dead in Israel after a “barrage” of attacks on Haifa; and foreign governments prepare to evacuate their nationals out of the region.
At noon James Reynolds as good as gave the game away: the Hizbullah strike on Haifa, he said, proved that the rockets are “no longer just an irritant”. Now it was clear why a “serious escalation” had begun: Israel was actually being harmed by Hizbullah’s rockets rather than just irritated. Until then the harm had been mainly inflicted on Lebanese civilians, so no escalation was taking place.
As I regularly flicked to the BBC’s coverage all afternoon, I found almost no mention of those dead in Lebanon. They had become “non-beings”, irrelevant in the calculations not only of our world leaders but of our major broadcasters.
It wasn’t till the 7pm news that I saw meaningful images from Lebanon, as Gavin Hewitt followed a fire crew trying to put out an enormous oil refinery blaze in Tyre. Although we saw some of the suffering of the Lebanese population, the anchor felt obliged to preface the scenes from Lebanon with the statement that they were Israeli “retaliation” for the Haifa attack, even though Israel had been launching such strikes for four days before the lethal rocket strike on Haifa.
In the same broadcast, an Israeli cabinet minister, Shaul Mofaz, was given air time to make the claim that parts of the rockets that landed in Haifa were Syrian-made. Allegations by the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, widely shown on Arab TV that Israel had been using phosphorus incendiary bombs -- illegal under international law -- received no coverage at all.
On the 8pm news, one of the headlines was a menacing quote from Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader, that “Haifa is just the beginning”. Mike Wooldridge in the Jerusalem studio made great play of the quote, taken from a broadcast Nasrallah had made several hours earlier.
The BBC may have lifted the sentence from the Israeli media because they missed out the important conditional context inserted by Nasrallah -- it was only the “beginning” of what Hizbullah could do if Israel continued its attacks.
They could have found this out even from the Hebrew media if they had taken the care to look more closely: “As long as the enemy pursues its aggression without limits and red lines we will pursue the confrontation without limits and without red lines,” Nasrallah was quoted as saying by the daily Haaretz newspaper. In other words, Nasrallah was warning that Hizbullah would give back as good as it gets -- a standard piece of rhetoric from a military leader in times of confrontation.
The BBC is no worse than CNN, Sky and, of course, Fox News. It is possibly far better, which is reason enough why we should be outraged that this is the best international broadcast coverage we are likely to get of the conflict.
The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it. The journalists’ working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention. The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even the tiny bleeding children I see on Arab TV, are terrorists. It is just the way Arabs are.
That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed. The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.
There is no excuse for this asymmetry of coverage. BBC reporters are in Lebanon jusy as they are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon just as easily as they can find them in Israel. They can show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut as easily as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese casualties just as easily as they can those in Israel.
But they don’t -- and as a fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.
My previous criticisms of British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel’s military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have struck a raw nerve. Certainly they provoked a series of emails -- some defensive, others angry -- from a few of the reporters I named. All tried to defend their own coverage, unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that they personally do not take sides. They are not “campaigning” journalists after all, they are “professionals” doing a job.
But the problem is not with them, it is with the job they have to do -- and the nature of the professionalism they so prize. I am sure the BBC’s Wyre Davies cares as much about Lebanese deaths as he does about Israeli ones. But he also knows his career at the BBC demands that he does not ask his bosses questions when told to give valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police spokesman who offers us only platitudes.
Similarly, we see James Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at 12noon to show emotive footage of him and his colleagues running for shelter as Israeli air raid sirens go off, only to tell us that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa. That non-event was shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and evening. Was it more significant than the images of death we never saw taking place just over the border? These images from Lebanon exist because the Arab channels spent all day showing them.
Matthew Price knows too that in the BBC’s view it is his job as he stands in Haifa, after we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their version of events, to repeat their message, dropping even the quotes marks as he passionately tells us how tough Israel must now be, how it must “retaliate” to protect its citizens, how it must “punish” Hizbullah. This is not journalism; it’s reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.
Can we imagine Ben Brown doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC cameras telling us how Hizbullah has no choice faced with Israel’s military onslaught but to start hitting Haifa harder, blowing up its oil refineries and targeting civilian infrastructure to “pressure” Israel to negotiate?
Would the BBC bother to show pre-recorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in Beirut in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of course not. Doubtless Brown and his colleagues are forced to take cover on a regular basis for fear of being hurt by Israeli air strikes, but his fear -- or more precisely, the fear of the Lebanese he stands alongside -- is not part of the story for the BBC. Only Israeli fears are newsworthy.
These reporters are working in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless news executives far away from the frontline who understand only too well the institutional pressures on the BBC -- and the institutional biases that are the result.
They know that the Israel lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without suffering flak; that the charge of anti-semitism might be terminally damaging to the BBC’s reputation; that the BBC is expected broadly to reflect the positions of the British governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators; that to remain credible it should not stray too far from the line of its mainly American rivals, who have their own more intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.
This distortion of news priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives -- in the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in both Israel and Lebanon. As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a regional war -- a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army -- is likely to become inevitable.
So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you.
Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects
are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider
god-fearing and pious: Aristotle
Viva Zapatista!
are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider
god-fearing and pious: Aristotle
Viva Zapatista!
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
One manms militant political orgainisation is anothers democratically elected servant of the people.
One mans collateral is anothers daughter, son, mother or father.
One mans restraint is anothers right to self defense.
I say that each news report should simpy open with the number of deaths on each side.
Then the sheep of the 'electorate' will have perspective as to who is the oppressor, the real terrorist in this war; the state of Israel, and the United States of America.
are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider
god-fearing and pious: Aristotle
Viva Zapatista!
yeah well israel needs to defend itself...didn't an israeli official say the other day 'not all muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are muslim'?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Pretty close to the truth.
Strange then the U.S is the only country in the world to have ever been charged with state terrorism by the World Court for it's actions against Nicaragua.
And if what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians isn't terrorism then what is it?
If missiles being fired into a crowd of civilians, or soldiers shooting children dead for throwing stones isn't terror than maybe I need to re-evaluate the meaning of the word.
And you're an expert on the demographics of the mulsim world in what sense?
If the Israeli official said that, and i'm sure i've heard it spouted before, elsewhere, then that sums up the blinkered, racist, genocidal view the IDF and its masters have of the 'vermin' they see as the Palestinians and Arabs.
Sounds like something Goebbels said when referring to Jews and bankers in 1934.
Both statements are obviously erroneous and nefarious in their conception, and are meant to do only thing. Stir up hatred against that particular group of peoples.
are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider
god-fearing and pious: Aristotle
Viva Zapatista!
you question his credentials? What are YOURS. Besides the ability to cut and paste, and summarize articles you read, in what sense are you an expert in Middle Eastern affairs?
www.myspace.com/jensvad
I agree with this take, in that the more Isrealis die, the more intense the IDF's campaign is likely to be, and the LESS likely it is that Isreal lets up anytime soon. I don't think the writer of this piece did enough to prove his point that BBC journalists are horribly biased.
Folks, just come out and say you hate Israel. Make a thread where you can just bash them as much as you want. That's what you want to do. Quit hiding behind articles and other peoples' words.
Why shouldn't Israel view Palestians and Arabs as vermin when the Palestians and Arabs want the distruction of Israel? I think most people with a brain are smart enough to know that not all Palestians and Arabs want to get rid of Israel, but their governments do.
Hell, you're from England. You are known to not like the French. Not what if France was right next to you threatening to destroy you, you may not like the French too much.
Accusing the BBC in being pro-Israeli is ridiculous.
b/c it's the same line of thinking ppl like hamas and hezbollah use and does nothing but further the divide.
also, didn't an israeli politician call for the ethnic cleansing of palestinians and say many israelis are behind hte idea?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
now, i don't really know this person - just passing it along
An Arab leader calling for the destruction of Israel is just as wrong as an Israeli leader calling for the destruction of an Arab state.
This does not change the fact that many Arab countries want to distroy and would distroy Israel if given the opportunity. Israel seems to act only when provoked, as it should be. I don't think Israel would want to destroy Iran if Iran was a peaceful country, but Iran would want to destroy Israel regardless of whether or not Israel was a peaceful nation.
It's not true. I live in Haifa, we're getting bombed here and nothing is wrong with the local or foreign media (which we catch via cable or satellite TV). Maybe that person had some technical problems.
"Israel seems to act only when provoked"?
Are you serious?
Maybe, but a lot of this sentiment probably has to do with the effects of being attacked by Arab countries over the past decade and the suicide bombings ... The same way Isreali reprisals and oppression have fueled hatred to the point where some people decide to become terrorists.
Yes, I am.
You need to re-evaluate a lot of things...
Why is it that Israel sponsor's terror when they engage Hamas or Hezbollah militants, but the actual "terrorists" aren't condemed by you?
There isn't a serious or resonable person in this world who believes Hezbollah and Hamas don't call for the destruction of Israel. Just look at their web sites to see what their all about. They are not interested in peace, they only want to murder Jews.
The reason there can be no peace in this region is becuase of radical Muslim religous bigots that cannot be controled by a government. The jew bigots are for the most part confined and restrained by the Israeli government.
When Hezbollah lobs a few rockets into Israel, the Lebonese government does nothing. When the Jew bigots in Gaza refused to leave, the Israeli government went in and dragged their asses out.
Do you see the difference? Why do you only point your finger at the Israeli's??? Have you ever heard of cause and effect? Without a cause there will be no effect. Without Muslim bigots pissing in the wind with their attempt to destroy Israel, there would be no attacks by Israel. There would be no "collateral damage" or "civillian deaths".
Although in this case Israel has instigated the conflict...as is well know if you don't watch tv all that often but actually get information from legitimate sources.
Israel abducted a palestinian doctor and a few others-to this day no one knows where they are. Hezbollah then captured Israeli soldiers-to make an exchangel, and now we have a full scale war. Apparently Israel are the only ones allowed to take prisoners-and they can take military or civilian.
Sadly, many people here will excuse Israel even if they know they did start this. It doesn't matter how fierce and unjustified their strikes are, somehow Israel will always be the good guy fighting for existance and the Arabs are the pesky, bad guys who just won't give up easily enough for them. It's brainwashed mentality...hate one group, provide unwaivering support for the other. I don't support either groups but I do call to attention the amount of unjustified violence inflicted on an almost helpless group of people. Everyone treats them like they are scum and turn to look the other way while they are massacred. It is this very reason why Hamas and Hezbollah exist in the first place...the Arabs have no where else to turn for protection and like anyone else...they don't want to die.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
Quite frankly, I don't care who started it…and for anyone to act like they do know who started it, I think, is quite absurd. This is hardly the type of relationship where you can point a finger at either side for just one act. Quite a multitude of things have led up to this, and they always have in these Middle East conflicts. Hezbollah and Hamas are just lucky that Israel didn't choose to end this bullshit quite a long time ago, because as we all know, they have the resources and capability to do so if they choose.
How can you even act like Israel ISN'T fighting for it's existence when people like the leader of Iran come right out and SAY that they want Israel wiped off the map!?!? And you know groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are funded by Iran, and that the Lebonese government doesn't do anything to stop them, yet you act like Israel is the bad guy on the block just beating up on whomever they choose. I mean, let's forget about Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon all working against Israel over the years, right? And the way the U.N., France, Russia and China talk…I'm wondering who really has an unjustified amount of violence and intolerance inflicted upon them?!
If it's all about unjustified violence, where was your support of the U.S. going into Iraq to overthrow Saddam and his cronies? What about the unjustified violence inflicted on those people for the past two decades? You act like the Lebonese need Hamas and Hezbollah in order to keep from getting killed, starved and slaughtered…but if the U.S. does the same for some other country, it's considered high treason, rape, murder, plunder and pillage.
High Traffic ART EZI FTJ JSR KPA PCD SYN ULX VLB YHF
Low Traffic CIO MIW
Non Traffic ABC BAY FDU GBZ HNC NDP OEM ROV TMS ZWL
I just spoke with a Lebonese person that confirmed Al-Manar is an arm of the Hezbollah. He suggested to me Al-Jazeera above all and http://www.lbcgroup.tv
The US claimed to invade Iraq over WMDs. They never have cared about any countries human rights violations, those are the ones we usually fund.
Go ahead and admit you just want the arabs to roll over and play dead to make for MORE Israeli expansion. Yes, I stand by my statement the arabs have waaay more terror inflicted upon them. It doesn't matter how many of their neighbors or other countries support them...what matters is who has the power and who is using it unjustly.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
Aren't you completely bypassing the fact that, in forming Israel, the existing population of Muslims in the area were essentially rounded up and forced out of what they had felt was their home? Is this not essentially the equivalent of concentration camps? Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank... sounds a lot like US Indian Reservations if you ask me. Why do you think the Muslim community initiates attacks on Israel to begin with? They don't simply attack Israel because they don't like dradels or the Star of David - they do it because they feel they have no other option after being forced out of their homelands and rounded up into ever shrinking "territories".
To me, the simple fact is this - Hezbollah and Hamas attack Israelites, NOT Jews. Israelites are not just some folks that decided to settle in a new area and learn to live there - they are a group as guilty of rounding up non-compliant people (i.e. different religion) and forcing them into concentration camps. If Muslims hated Jews simply because they are Jewish, you'd see other Jewish sections of the world being "terrorized" by Hezbollah & Hamas... but this isn't the case, is it? Who did the provoking, the Jews who forced the Muslims out, or the Muslims who want to regain what they feel is theirs?
Do I agree with the killing of innocent civilians? Nope. Do I think terrorism is a good thing? Nope. Do I think the Israels are guilt-free and are being provoked by Hezbollah and the Palestinians? Hell no.
Yes, we went in because of WMD…WMD that Saddam had used in the past to kill his own people, nonetheless. WMD that could have easily been sold on the black market to other organizations who may have wanted to use them in a violent, unjustified way. WMD that could have been launched against Israel, unjustly and in a provoking manner, much as the scud missles were launched at Tel Aviv, unproked, in the first Gulf War.
Go ahead and admit that you actually support the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah because you favor and pity them as an underdog who are being picked on by the "imperialistic terrorists" known as the U.S. and Israel who suppossedly do nothing but run roughshod over little helpless countries with their giant military industrial complex fueled by the tax dollars of elitist white men who crave power and sainthood via a corporate controlled capitalist system.
I can play that game too.
I've never said that I want expansion for Israel. Never. All I ever talk about is how these other countries want to wipe them off the map, and that they have the right to defend themselves when provoked. It DOES matter how those other countries support and fund them, because those other countries, like China, Russia, Iran, etc. just so happen to have plenty of power, money and influence in world affairs. Yet, somehow, you again conveniently ignore their influence and meddling in all of this, and only focus on what your perceive to be the ills of the United States and Israel. Nevermind the human rights violations funded by Iran, or Syria, or Egypt, or Russia, or China…afterall…what does it matter…you live here in the U.S, right?
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perhaps it would be a good idea not to sell them to these kind of guys in the first place. oh, that's right...it's only a concern of the US when it's convenient for them. US of A!! The great human rights protector! Riiiight.
I pity the Arab people and support their right to survive and live in peace.
The problem is they keep expanding and that's provoking a defense. You never answer how it would feel if it were your home being bulldozed over. Israel has no right to the land they continuously take. What do you suggest they do? I imagine you would defend your home.
So the arabs deserve no allies? Should the whole world take the stance of violence and over aggression towards them? And just look at the huge army and arsenal China and Russia have provided them with.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde