War Of Media Deception

takbetak

Elite Member
Apr 27, 2006
2,658
1,428
#1
http://www.jkcook.net

Jonathan Cook: War of Media Deception

August 3, 2006
War of Media Deception
Israel, Not Hizbullah, is Putting Civilians in Danger on Both Sides of the
Border

By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.

Here are some interesting points raised this week by a leading commentator
and published in a respected daily newspaper: "The Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli communities, next to schools,
beside hospitals, close to welfare centres, ensuring that any Israeli
target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the UN's Jan
Egeland had in mind when he lambasted Israel's 'cowardly blending ...
among women and children'. It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it
also makes macabre sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a
shooting one, and in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side
represents a kind of victory."
You probably did not read far before realising that I had switched
"Israel" for "Hizbullah" and "Ehud Olmert" for "Hassan Nasrallah". The
paragraph was taken from an opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland published
in Britain's Guardian newspaper on 2 August. My attempt at deception was
futile because no one seems to seriously believe that criticisms of the
kind expressed above can be levelled against Israel.
Freedland, like most commentators in our media, assumes that Hizbullah is
using the Lebanese population as "human shields", hiding its fighters,
arsenals and rocket launchers inside civilian areas. "Cowardly" behaviour
rather than the nature of Israel's air strikes, in his view, explains the
spiralling death toll among Lebanese civilians. This perception of
Hizbullah's tactics grows more common by the day, even though it flies in
the face of the research of independent observers in Lebanon such as Human
Rights Watch.
Explaining the findings of its latest report, HRW's executive director,
Kenneth Roth, blames Israel for targeting civilians indiscriminately in
Lebanon. "The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military's disturbing
disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians. Our research shows that
Israel's claim that Hezbollah [sic] fighters are hiding among civilians
does not explain, let alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare."
HRW has analysed the casualty figures from two dozen Israeli air strikes
and found that more than 40 per cent of the dead are children: 63 out of
153 fatalities. Conservatively, HRW puts the civilian death toll so far at
over 500. Lebanese hospital records suggest the figure is now well over
750, with potentially many more bodies yet to be excavated from the rubble
of buildings obliterated by Israeli attacks.
Giving the lie to the "human shields" theory, HRW says its researchers
"found numerous cases in which the IDF [Israeli army] launched artillery
and air attacks with limited or dubious military objectives but excessive
civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli forces struck an area with no
apparent military target. In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have
deliberately targeted civilians."
In fact, of the 24 incidents they document, HRW researchers could find no
evidence that Hizbullah was operating in or near the areas that were
attacked by the Israeli air force. Roth states: "The image that Israel has
promoted of such [human] shielding as the cause of so high a civilian
death toll is wrong. In the many cases of civilian deaths examined by
Human Rights Watch, the location of Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing
to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around."
The impression that Hizbullah is using civilians as human shields has been
reinforced, according to HRW, by official Israeli statements that have
"blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, arguing that
only people associated with Hezbollah remain in southern Lebanon, so all
are legitimate targets of attack."
Freedland makes a similar point. Echoing comments by the UN's Jan Egeland,
he says Hizbullah fighters are "cowardly blending" with Lebanon's civilian
population. It is difficult to know what to make of this observation. If
Freedland means that Hizbullah fighters come from Lebanese towns and
villages and have families living there whom they visit and live among, he
is right. But exactly the same can be said of Israel and its soldiers, who
return from the battlefront (in this case inside Lebanon, as they are now
an invading army) to live with parents or spouses in Israeli communities.
Armed and uniformed soldiers can be seen all over Israel, sitting in
trains, queuing in banks, waiting with civilians at bus stops. Does that
mean they are "cowardly blending' with Israel's civilian population?
Egeland and Freedland's criticism seems to amount to little more than
blaming Hizbullah fighters for not standing in open fields waiting to be
picked off by Israeli tanks and war planes. That, presumably, would be
brave. But in reality no army fights in this way, and Hizbullah can hardly
be criticised for using the only strategic defences it has: its
underground bunkers and the crumbling fortifications of Lebanese villages
ruined by Israeli pounding. An army defending itself from invasion has to
make the most of whatever protection it can find: as long as it does not
intentionally put civilians at risk. But HRW's research shows convincingly
that Hizbullah is not doing this.
So if Israeli officials have been deceiving us about what has been
occurring inside Lebanon, have they also been misleading us about
Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Israel? Should we take at face value
government and army statements that Hizbullah's strikes into Israel are
targeting civilians indiscriminately, or do they need more serious
investigation?
Although we should not romanticise Hizbullah, equally we should not be
quick to demonise it either: unless there is convincing evidence
suggesting it has been firing on civilian targets. The problem is that
Israel has been abusing very successfully its military censorship rules
governing both its domestic media and visiting foreign journalists to
prevent meaningful discussion of what Hizbullah has been trying to hit
inside Israel.
I live in northern Israel in the Arab city of Nazareth. A week into the
war we were hit by Hizbullah rockets that killed two young brothers. The
attack, it was widely claimed, was proof either that Hizbullah was
indiscriminately targeting civilians (so indiscriminately, the argument
went, that it was hitting fellow Arabs) or that the Shiite militia was so
committed to a fanatical war against the Judeo-Christian world that it was
happy to kill Nazareth's Christian Arabs too. The latter claim could be
easily dismissed: it depended both on a "clash of civilisations"
philosophy not shared by Hizbullah and on the mistaken assumption that
Nazareth is a Christian city, when in fact, as is well-known to Hizbullah,
Nazareth has a convincing Muslim majority.
But to anyone living in Nazareth, it was clear the rocket attack on the
city was not indiscriminate either. It was a mistake -- something
Nasrallah quickly confirmed in one of his televised speeches. The real
target of the strike was known to Nazarenes: close by the city are a
military weapons factory and a large military camp. Hizbullah knows the
locations of these military targets because this year, as was widely
reported in the Israeli media at the time, it managed to fly an unmanned
drone over the Galilee photographing the area in detail -- employing the
same spying techniques used for many years by Israel against Lebanon.
One of Hizbullah's first rocket attacks after the outbreak of hostilities
-- after Israel went on the bombing offensive by blitzing targets across
Lebanon -- was on a kibbutz overlooking the border with Lebanon. Some
foreign correspondents noted at the time (though given Israel's press
censorship laws I cannot confirm) that the rocket strike targeted a
top-secret military traffic control centre built into the Galilee's hills.
There are hundreds of similar military installations next to or inside
Israel's northern communities. Some distance from Nazareth, for example,
Israel has built a large weapons factory virtually on top of an Arab town
-- so close to it, in fact, that the factory's perimeter fence is only a
few metres from the main building of the local junior school. There have
been reports of rockets landing close to that Arab community.
How these kind of attacks are being unfairly presented in the Israeli and
foreign media was highlighted recently when it was widely reported that a
Hizbullah rocket had landed "near a hospital" in a named Israeli city, not
the first time that such a claim has been made over the past few weeks. I
cannot name the city, again because of Israel's press censorship laws and
because I also want to point out that very "near" that hospital is an army
camp. The media suggested that Hizbullah was trying to hit the hospital,
but it is also more than possible it was trying to strike -- and may have
struck -- the army camp.
Israel's military censorship laws are therefore allowing officials to
misrepresent, unchallenged, any attack by Hizbullah as an indiscriminate
strike against civilian targets.
Audiences ought to be alerted to this danger by their media. Any reports
touching on "security matters" are supposed to be submitted to the
country's military censor, but few media are pointing this out in their
reporting. Most justify this deception to themselves on the grounds that
in practice they never run their reports by the censor as it would delay
publication.
Instead, they avoid problems with the military censor either by
self-censoring their reporting on security issues or by relying on what
has already been published in the Israeli media on the assumption that in
these ways they are unlikely to contravene the rules.
An email memo, written by a senior BBC editor and leaked more than a week
ago, discusses the growing restrictions being placed on the organisation's
reporters in Israel. It hints at some of the problems noted above,
observing that "the more general we are, the free-er hand we have; more
specific and it becomes increasingly tricky." The editor says the channel
will notify viewers of these restrictions in "the narrative of the story".
"The teams on the ground will make clear what they can and cannot say --
and if necessary make clear that we're operating under reporting
restrictions." In practice, however, BBC correspondents, like most of
their media colleagues, rarely alert us to the fact they are operating
under censorship, and self-censorship, or that they cannot give us the
full picture of what is happening.
Because of this, commentators like Freedland are drawing conclusions that
cannot be sustained by the available evidence. He notes in his article
that "this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one". He is right,
but does not seem to know who is really winning the propaganda offensive.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is
the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the
Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in
the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net
 

takbetak

Elite Member
Apr 27, 2006
2,658
1,428
#3
Zaagros said:
Thank you for this and Kenneth Roth is right on target.
check out his other articles on his website.interesting insight into how the Israeli media works.here is one:

http://www.jkcook.net



The Lies Israel Tells Itself (And We Tell On Its Behalf)
How the "Deliberate" Became Only "Apparent"

By JONATHAN COOK

July 28, 2006

When journalists use the word "apparently", or another favorite
"reportedly", they are usually distancing themselves from an event or an
interpretation in the supposed interests of "balance". But I think we
should read the "apparently" contained in a statement from the head of the
United Nations, Kofi Annan -- relating to the killing this week of four
unarmed UN monitors by the Israeli army -- in its other sense.

When Annan says that those four deaths were "apparently deliberate", I
take him to mean that the evidence shows that the killings were
deliberate. And who can disagree with him? At least 10 phone calls were
made to Israeli commanders over a period of six hours warning that
artillery and aerial bombardments were either dangerously close to or
hitting the monitors' building.

The UN post, in Khiam just inside south Lebanon, was clearly marked and
well-known to the army, but nonetheless it was hit directly four times in
the last hour before an Israeli helicopter fired a precision-guided
missile that tore through the roof of an underground shelter, killing the
monitors inside. A UN convoy that arrived too late to rescue the
peacekeepers was also fired on. From the evidence, it does not get much
more deliberate than that.

The problem, however, is that western leaders, diplomats and the media
take the "apparently" in its first sense -- as a way to avoid holding
Israel to account for its actions. For "apparently deliberate", read
"almost certainly accidental". That was why the best the UN Security
Council could manage after a day and a half of deliberation was a weasely
statement of "shock and distress" at the killings, as though they were an
act of God.

Our media are no less responsible for this evasiveness. They make sure
"we" -- the publics of the West -- never countenance the thought that a
society like our own, one we are always being reminded is a democracy,
could sink to the depths of inhumanity required to murder unarmed
peacekeepers. Who can be taken seriously challenging the Israeli foreign
minister Tzipi Livni's assertion that "There will never be an [Israeli]
army commander that will intentionally aim at civilians or UN soldiers
[sic]"?

Even the minority in the West who have started to fear that Israel is
"apparently" slaughtering civilians across Lebanon or that it is
"apparently" intending to make refugees of a million Lebanese must
presumably shrink from the idea that Israel is also capable of killing
unarmed UN monitors.

After all, our media insinuate, the two cases are not comparable.

There may be good reasons why Lebanese civilians need to suffer. Let's not
forget that they belong to a people (or is it a race or, maybe, a
religion?) that gave birth to Hizbullah. "We" can cast aside our concerns
for the moment and take it on trust that Israel has cause to kill the
Lebanese or make them homeless. Doubtless the justifications will emerge
later, when we have lost interest in the "Lebanon crisis". We may never
hear what those reasons were, but who can doubt that they exist?

The "apparent" murder of four UN monitors, however, is a deeper challenge
to our faith in our moral superiority, which is why that "apparently" is
held on to as desperately as a talisman. No civilized country could kill
peacekeepers, especially ones drawn from our own societies, from Canada,
Finland and Austria? That is the moral separation line that divides us
from the terrorists. Were that line to be erased, we would be no different
from those whom we must fight.

An iconic image of this war that our media have managed to expunge from
the official record but which keeps popping up in email inboxes like a
guilty secret is of young Israeli girls, lipsticked and nailpolished as if
on their way to a party, drawing messages of death and hatred on the sides
of the missiles about to be loaded on to army trucks and tanks. In one, an
out-of-focus soldier stands on a tank paternally watching over the girls
as they address another death threat to Hizbullah's leader, Hassan
Nasrallah.
Is this the truer face of Israeli society, even if it is the one we are
never shown and refuse to believe in. And are "we" in the West hurtling
down the same path?

Driving through the Jewish city of Upper Nazareth this week, I realised
how inured I am becoming to this triumphal militarism -- and the racism
that feeds it. Nothing surprising about the posters of "We will win" on
every hoarding. But it takes me more than a few seconds to notice that the
Magen David ambulance in front of me is flying a little national flag, the
blue Star of David, from its window. I have heard that American fire
engines flew US flags after 9/11, but this somehow seems worse. How is it
possible for an ambulance, the embodiment of our neutral, civilized,
universal, "Western", humanitarian values, to fly a national flag, I think
to myself? And does it make a difference that only a few months ago Magen
David joined the International Committee of the Red Cross?

Only slowly do my thoughts grow more disturbed: how many hospital
administrators, doctors and nurses have seen that ambulance arrive at
their emergency departments and thought nothing of it? And is that the
only Israeli ambulance flying the flag, or are many others doing the same?
Later the BBC TV news answers my question. I see two ambulances with the
same flags going to the front line to collect casualties. Will others soon
cross over the border into southern Lebanon, after it is "secured", and
will no one mention those little flags fluttering from the window?

A psychologist tells me how upset she is about a meeting she attended a
few days ago of the northern coordinating committee of her profession.
They were discussing how best to treat the shock and trauma suffered by
Israeli children under the bombardment from Hizbullah. The meeting
concluded with an agreement that the psychologists would reassure the
children with the statement: "The army is there to protect us."

And so, the seeds of fascism are unthinkingly sown for another generation
of children, children like our own.

No one agreed with my friend when she dissented, arguing that this was not
the message to be telling impressionable minds, and that violence against
the Other is not a panacea for our problems. Parents, not soldiers, are
responsible for protecting their children, she pointed out. Tanks, planes
and guns bring only fear and more hatred, hatred that will one day return
to haunt us.

The slow, gentle indoctrination continues day in, day out, reinforcing the
idea among Israel's Jewish population that the army can do no wrong and
that it needs no oversight, not even from politicians (most of whom are
former generals anyway, or like the prime minister Ehud Olmert too
frightened to stand up to the chiefs of staff if they wanted to). "We will
win". How do we know we will win? Because "the army is there to protect
us." Add into the mix that faceless "Arab" enemy, those sub-beings, and
you have a recipe for fascism -- even if it is of the democratically
elected variety.

The Israeli media, of course, are the key to providing the second half of
that equation -- or rather not providing it. You can sit watching the main
Israeli channels all day, flicking between channels 1, 2 and 10, and not
see a Lebanese face, apart from that of Hassan Nasrallah, the new Hitler.
I don't mean the charred faces of corpses, or the bandaged babies, or the
amputees lying in hospital beds. I mean any Lebanese faces. Just as you
almost never see a Palestinian face on Israeli TV unless they are the mob,
disfigured with hatred as they hold aloft another martyr on his way to
burial.

Lebanon only swings in to view on Israeli television through the black and
white footage of an aerial gun sight, or through the long shot of a
distant urban landscape seconds before it is "pulverized" by a dropped
bomb. The buildings crumble, flames shoot up, clouds of dust billow into
the air. Another shot of arcade-game adrenalin.



The humanitarian stories exist but they do not concern Lebanon. Animal
welfare societies plead on behalf of the dogs and cats left alone to face
the rocket fire on deserted Kiryat Shemona, just as they did before for
foxes and deer when Israel began building its mammoth walls of concrete
and steel across their migration routes in the West Bank, walls that are
also imprisoning, unseen, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The rest of the coverage is dedicated to Israeli army spokespeople,
including the national heartthrob Miri Regev, and media "commentators" and
"analysts". Who are these people? They are from the same pool of former
military intelligence and security service officers who once did this job
in the closed rooms of army HQ but now wallow in the limelight. One
favored pundit is even subtitled "Expert on psychological warfare against
Hassan Nasrallah".

And who are the presenters and anchors who interview them? The other day
an ageing expert on Apache helicopters interrupted his interviewer
irritatedly to tell him his question was stupid. "We were in the army
together and both know the answer. Don't play dumb?" It was a rare
reminder that these anchors too are just soldiers in suits. One of the
most popular, Ehud Yaari of Channel 2, barely conceals his military
credentials as he condones yet more violence against the Lebanese or, if
he can be deflected for a moment, the people of Gaza.

That is what comes of having a "citizen army", where teenagers learn to
use a gun before they can drive and men do reserve duty until their late
40s. It means every male teacher, professor, psychologist and journalist
thinks as a soldier because that is what he has been for most of his
life.

Israel is not unique, far from it, though it is in a darker place, and has
been for some time, than "we" in the West can fully appreciate. It is a
mirror of what our own societies are capable of, despite our democratic
values. It shows how a cult of victimhood makes one heartless and cruel,
and how racism can be repackaged as civilised values.

Maybe those UN monitors, with their lookout post above the battlefield
where Israel wants to use any means it can to destroy Hizbullah and
Lebanese civilians who get in the way, had to be removed simply because
they are a nuisance, a restraint when Israel needs to get on with the job
of asserting "our" values. Maybe Israel does not want the scrutiny of
peacekeepers as it fights our war on terror for us. Maybe it feared that
the monitors' reports might help to give back to the Lebanese, even to
Hizbullah, their faces, their history, their suffering.

And, if we are honest, Israel is not alone. How many of us want the Arabs
to remain faceless so we can keep believing we are the victims of a new
ideology that wants only our evisceration, just as the "Red Indians" once
supposedly wanted our scalps? How many of us believe that our values
demand that we fall in behind a new world order in which Arab deaths are
not real deaths because "they" are not fully human?

And how many of us believe that deliberate barbarity, at least when we do
it, is only "apparently" a crime against humanity?

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is
the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the
Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in
the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net