War On Lebanon

<p>I wanted to repeat my last post and add a little more on : Israel isnt enemies with Lebanon. It is enemies with the terrorist in Lebanon. The lebanese were grateful to Israel for kicking the PLO out. From 1985-2000 Israel really just stayed in a small strip of land ust north of the Israeli border. I dont understadn Alexandre, I answered your question why Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and you ignored that. Israel neverr fought the Lebanese government in 82 it only fought the PLO and then Hezbullah. Whats is your definition of a terrorist orginization Alexandre because to me Hezzbullah fits any def. of terrorists.
You keep saying Israel attack Lebanon. Yes, Israel did attack Lebanon. Israeli soldiers went into Lebanon and fought not against the Lebanese government, but against PLO. The Israelis even gave weapons and gave intelligence to the Lebanese government. The gov't wanted Israel there. The Southern Lebanese Army was supported by the Israeli government. What do you not understand about that. Also how is Israel a facist nation for attacking the PLO in Lebanon in self-defense. Is America a facist nation now? Was America a fasict nation in WWII for attacking Germany.In that case Germany had done nothing to America. And how is Israel an imperialist nation for invading Lebanon in 1982. They did not retain any piece of Lebanon and never even had the intention. You have said three times that Israel invaded lebanon 3 times i have explained to you the history and facts behind it. You have not once challenged me on that rather u have just repeated the same phrase. I am confused. Please explain yourself more clearly. I would also like you to respond to Hzbullahs mission the past 6 yrs. I am gonna restate my question:</p>

<p>Say Hezbullah was in the right while Israel was in Lebanon. So in 2000 when Israel left, Hezbullahs goal of kicking Israel out of Lebanon was accomplished. Thus their orginization should have become obsolete. Yet for 6 yrs afterwards they did not disarm and they did continue their attacks on Israelis in Israel. So either Hezbullahs real goal is to kill all of the Jews and destroy Israel and they are fightingf for the freedom to do that or they are terrorists?</p>

<p>mex, you mentioned how you dont know anything at all about this conflicting and you are picking up as you go along. Thats fine. So shouldnt you be picking up information from media sources and you seem to be so anti-israeli and pro-arab that would mean the media where you get the info must be the same correct? Or let me put it this way. I challenge you to find me significant examples of bias against Hezbullah in this conflict. You show me this and explain to me why its biased or misinformation or just factually incorrect. And try to make sure the context remains in tact. You can challenge me to do the same for anti-israeli bias, and in fact you can pick the media outlets too and i promise you i will find either objecyivity or anti-israel bias? How does that sound?</p>

<p>What CNN does to Isreal is scrutiny...I hear it for about 2 hours in the gym. Fox news....not so much so</p>

<p>I have nothing to prove to you... People give a different perspective and they are quickly challenged, chastised, and bullied. I am not pro Lebanon nor am I pro Israel I am pro Peace... I havent heard of Hezbollah up until now why is that were they dormant? Why would Israel wake them up?</p>

<p>skisalomon you come off as this expert on Mideast politics albeit you are more informed than the average joe you r far from knowing everything...</p>

<p>They werent dormant, thats the whole thing. It was formed around the '82 invasion...and they fought for the '00 withdraw. Their whole thing was to drive out Israel, but when Isreal left in '00 Hezbollah's military arm kept kidnapping/murdering Isreali's. The Civilian sect of Hezbollah has never been dormant</p>

<p>What should happen is this:</p>

<p>The Lebanese Army needs to aid the Israeli army in driving out Hezbolla and insure the least collateral damage possible. Then, Israel pulls out and the region returns to Lebanese, not Hezbolla, control.</p>

<p>Really though, where is the Lebanese army in all this?</p>

<p>I do not understand you. You are posting your opinions and you are trying to back them up with what facts you know yet you say you are not trying to pove anything. So what ARE you trying to do?</p>

<p>Hezbullah was not dormant. Since Israel pulled out of lebanon in 2000 Hezbullah ahs been involved in scores of rocket attacks, kidnappings, and suicide bombings in Israel. Its just now that Israel has finally taken a strong stance. Look mex i am just trying to give you fact here on the israeli arab conflict. I am even trying t oget you took things up urself im giving you the chance to show me significant anti-arab bias in the media adn you do not want to do it. Just look at the facts i am presenting you instead of spewing the same lines over and over again. They are all true and you dont seem to believe me when i tell you that.</p>

<p>"I havent heard of Hezbollah up until now why is that were they dormant? Why would Israel wake them up?"</p>

<p>Wrong way around. Hezbolla woke Israel up. Hezbolla snuck across the border and kidnapped Israeli soldiers who have not been heard from since.</p>

<p>And also, as for what Hezbolla is, they were the group that killed 240+ U.S. Marines in the bombing of a barraks in 1982. Trust me, you've heard of hezbolla, you just forgot. And if you wern't alive in 1982, that's no excuse.</p>

<p>The lebanese army does nto want to get involved because it fears a reprisal from Hezbullah on them if it goes on the side of Israel, which is what happened to the Lebanese in the 1982 war, and it wont go on the Hezbullah side for a few reasons. 1. Israel would crush them. 2. They really do not want Hezbullah their either, yet they are to afraid/weak to take care of that. What needs to be done is what happened in 1982 with the PLO. Hezbullah must be eradicated and whats left can limp around the arab world until they ifnd a nice home in exile somewhere in africa like arafat did.</p>

<p>the lebanese army should fight hezbolla in this situation though, don't you think? Lebanese nationalism worked well in the Cedar revolution. maybe it would work in pushing hezbolla out like it did with syria</p>

<p>It would only work with Israeli backing. And Israel is afraid of getting involved openly in internal affairs of arab countries. Because when they do something stupid like sabra and shatila, Israel gets blamed.</p>

<p>"show me significant anti-arab bias in the media adn you do not want to do it. Just look at the facts i am presenting you instead of spewing the same lines over and over again. They are all true and you dont seem to believe me when i tell you that."</p>

<p>Dude show yourself... just turn on you rtelevision I'm assuming you have one and listen to the rhetoric listen who is being called a terrorist and who is called brave for their actions. are you deaf?</p>

<p>Ofcourse I'm not going to believe YOU to give me an unbiased account of things there is a conflict of interest in that regard.</p>

<p>Depends on your news</p>

<p>Yeah, news hasn't been news for a long time now</p>

<p>Tell me this Mex. Find one, just one innacuracy in everything I have said. You seem so confident I am wrong that it should not be difficult at all for you. Look I have watched the news extensively, I have read books on this topic and really studied it. When I turn on the news I do not see pro-Israeli bias. However since it exists in such mass quantities I am sure you can point me in the right direction. Howbout this lets take the BBC for example. That is the most popular news program in Europe. Its shows influence MILLIONS of people. Show me from a BBC broadcast pro-israeli reporting.</p>

<p>I felt this was a interesting article about media and Hezbullah. It has some itneresting quotes and testimonials made by jouranlist reporting from Hezbullah areas. I would suggest reading up until the end of the discussion on CNN.</p>

<p>Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the current conflict in Lebanon. They are also actively fanning the flames.</p>

<p>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 Hizbullah. And as it desperately 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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>But if anything is going to win new recruits for the likes of Osama bin Laden, 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 hopelessly one-sided way in which they are being reported by those very same news organizations.</p>

<p>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 World War II 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.</p>

<p>A careful look at aerial satellite photos of the areas targeted by Israel in Beirut shows that certain specific buildings housing Hizbullah command centers in the city’s southern suburbs have been singled out. Most of the rest of Beirut, apart from strategic sites like airport runways used to ferry Hizbullah men and weapons in and out of Lebanon, has been left pretty much untouched.</p>

<p>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 a 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.</p>

<p>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 Hizbullah, 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.</p>

<p>A CNN MAN LETS SLIP</p>

<p>The BBC, which courtesy of the British tax payer is the world’s biggest and most lavishly funded news organization, would of course never reveal how selective their reports are, since such a disclosure might spoil their campaign to demonize Israel and those who support her. But one senior British journalist, working for another company, last week let slip how the news media allows its Mideast coverage to be distorted.</p>

<p>“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 Hizbullah. He revealed that his story was heavily influenced by Hizbullah’s “press officer” and that Hizbullah have “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations.”</p>

<p>When pressed a few days later about his reporting on the CNN program “Reliable Sources,” Robertson acknowledged that Hizbullah militants had instructed the CNN camera team where and what to film. Hizbullah “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.”</p>

<p>Robertson added that Hizbullah has “very, very good control over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny journalists access into 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 Hizbullah fighter by night.”</p>

<p>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 from CNN’s “Senior international correspondent” that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hizbullah.</p>

<p>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 loathe 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.”</p>

<p>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 Hizbullah minders. Palmer commented on her report that “Hizbullah is also determined that outsiders will only see what it wants them to see.”</p>

<p>Palmer’s honesty is helpful. But it doesn’t prevent the damage being done by organizations such as the BBC. First the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lop-sided coverage, its website 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 for a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.</p>

<p>IN AZERI AND UZBEK, PASHTO AND PERSIAN</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>If the BBC were just a British problem that would be one thing, but it is not. No other station broadcasts so extensively in dozens of languages, on TV, radio and online.</p>

<p>Its radio service alone attracts over 163 million listeners. It pours forth its worldview 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 doesn’t broadcast in Kurdish either; but then the BBC doesn’t concern itself with Kurdish rights or aspirations since they are persecuted by Moslem-majority states like Syria and Iran. We didn’t hear much on the BBC, for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and injured in March 2004 by President Assad’s regime.)</p>

<p>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 Hizbullah) 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 during a Friday night Sabbath dinner; that several other Israeli children have died.</p>

<p>You wouldn’t have any real understanding of what it is like to have over 2000 Iranian and Syrian rockets rain down indiscriminately on towns, villages and farms across one third of your country, aimed at killing civilians.</p>

<p>You wouldn’t really appreciate that Hizbullah, far from being some rag-tag militia, is in effect a division in the Iranian revolutionary guards, with relatively advanced weapons (UAVs 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.</p>

<p>THIS IS THE 2nd PART OF THE ARTICLE</p>

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

<p>ET TU, TELEGRAPH?</p>

<p>The relentless broadcast attacks on Israel have led to some in the print media indulging in explicit anti-Semitism.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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 labeled: “Warsaw 1943”; the other: “Tyre, 2006.”</p>

<p>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.”</p>

<p>Of course, there was no “Jewish quarter” of Warsaw. In case anyone need 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 percent 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.</p>

<p>Skisaloman, you do not speak innacuracies so much as conveniently leave out facts. But you do speak innacuracies nonetheless. At any rate, Hezbollah is a creation of Israel. You must at least own up to that. Israel flew dozens of military planes over Lebanon daily since 2000. Israel is holding several Lebanon citizens captive...many of which are innocent. Hazbollah actions are justified. I do not condone them, but how can I condemn them when they suffered under the oppressive occupuying force of a fascist regime like Israel.</p>

<p>"Hazbollah actions are justified. I do not condone them, but how can I condemn them when they suffered under the oppressive occupuying force of a fascist regime like Israel."</p>

<p>What the ****...yes Hezbollah was formed b/c of Isreal to fight the occupation. But Hezbollah's military arm was supposed to dissipate after Isreal left Lebanon back in 2000. Do you think since countries like the US flies drones over other countries, that terrorist factions inside those countries should take our soldiers captive, and kill them? Isreal didnt touch Hezbollah...but they just had to go across that border and snatch a few soldiers for some reason. And where do you get that Isreal has a fascist regime? The only fascist regime's closely involved are the ones in Iran and Syria (though they're not as open about it as Iran) that are giving aid and support to Hezbollah</p>

<p>How did Hezbullah suffer? Israel went in to root out the PLO, mission accomplished. I agree Israel's failure to properly help the Southern Lebanese Army and Christian Arab groups led to the creation of Hezbullah. Israel did fly planes over south lebanon. Do you ever wonder why it did so? Since the UN would not properly report on Hezbullahs actions israel had to gather intelligence somehow. Plus they were still trying to find MIA's such a Ron Arad. </p>

<p>"you do not speak innacuracies so much as conveniently leave out facts. But you do speak innacuracies nonetheless."</p>

<p>What does that mean.</p>

<p>What innocent Lebanese civillians? Is it the one who broke into an israeli home and smashed a baby against a wall? Or were they the ones who hang glided into Israel and killed several soldiers? Hezbullah is a terror orginization their stated mission is to destroy Israel.</p>