There were no Hezbollah missile launchers or fighters in or around the building that the Israeli Air Force destroyed in Qana on Sunday.

August 1, 2006

In its lead story [1] today (August 1), the Hebrew edition of Ha’aretz Online reported that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) claim that Hezbollah missile launchers and Hezbollah fighters were in and around the building in Qana which they shelled early Sunday morning was false.

Oddly, this article which points to Israeli culpability and recklessness in what some are calling the IDF's second massacre in Qana (the first was in 1996), has been largely ignored in the international press.

According to the newspaper, the IDF “decided to attack houses in a specific radius of a place that was used in the past to launch missiles.” The article states that the tactic of choosing buildings as targets that are near areas from which rockets were launched in the past has been used before.

Initially, Israeli military sources had reported [2] that the deaths in Qana where caused not by the Israeli air attack early Sunday morning, but by an accidental explosion, many hours later, of Hezbollah ordinance which was stored inside the building. According to the Ha’aretz article, this is not true. Israeli Air Force sources have admitted, according to Ha'aretz that the deaths in Qana where caused by the Israeli shelling. Between 30 and 60 deaths were reported as a result of the building collapse. Many bodies are still believed to be buried beneath the rubble.

Additionally, the claim of the IDF that leaflets were dropped on the weekend which warned of an attack were also untrue. The leaflets were actually delivered "some days" before the weekend, according to military sources.

[1] Ha'aretz Online, August 1, 2006, "Call For A Official Commission to Investigate the Explosion at Qana" http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/745130.html

[2] Jerusalem Post, July 30, 2006, "Kana Collapse Was Hours After Attack," http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1153292036218&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

And besides, they said they were "Sorry" and prmised to investigate themselves.

OLMERT THE BUSH OIL NAZI / BROWNSHIRT: "Sorry to Oil the Intentional Targeting of Lebanese Civilians by IDF IAF Nazis / Likud Brownshirts / Irgun Zvai Leumi Terror Cells and the Annexation of Lebanon to IsraOil but Oil comes First. Fill her Up ???????"

A woman called up the Stephanie Miller Show on LA's KTLK this morning and denounced all criticisms of Israel as anti-semitic. An anti-semite, she explained, is someone who does not accept Israel's explanation for things like the bombing of Lebanese civilians. She wasn't kidding, either.

I fail to see how her statement is worse than your own, being that you're a Hizbollah apologist who branded them "freedom fighters" shortly after the unprovoked killing and capture of Israeli soldiers in a cross-border infiltration "freedom fighters" and after the sporadic rocketing of Israel during the past 6+ years and the other unprovoked cross-border raid in which 3 Israeli soldiers were captured in late 2000.

"Hizbollah positioned one of their rocket launchers directly adjacent to the building that collapsed. The Israeli air force released videos of this rocket launcher repeatedly firing at Israel. What would you do?"

I would shoot the rocket launcher

There was a massacre at Qana"

Rasha Salti writing from Beirut, Live from Lebanon, 2 August 2006

A general view of devastated Qana, 31 July 2006. MaanImages/Raoul (MaanImages/Raoul Kramer)

The history of earlier drives into Lebanon shows that even as the Israeli war machine gains momentum, so do the chances of terrible accidents and atrocities. In 1982, under the protection of Israeli forces, Christian Lebanese militias carried out the now infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Ten years ago, during a campaign against Hizbullah similar to the one now underway, Israeli gunners blasted a United Nations monitoring post at the South Lebanese town of Qana, where terrified locals had taken refuge. More than 100 civilians were killed in a barrage that lasted only a few ghastly seconds. International outrage quickly forced Israel to end its offensive.

The Israelis say they are being more careful this time around, not least because they don't want to be forced to stop. "The presidential approval by Bush, the surprising level of support he's giving Israel, the patience he's giving Israel -- it looks as if there's a great amount of slack being cut to us," says a senior Israeli security source, who did not want to be identified by name because he is not authorized to speak on the record. "Absent a Qana, it might go on."

-from the article "Torn to Shreds" in last week's Newsweek.

Bearing witness to a massacre only a few kilometers removed from one's being (or home)

Coming into consciousness of, or bearing witness to, a massacre only a few kilometers removed from one's being (or home), feels very much like the experience of being in the proximity of a very powerful explosion only at an extremely, extremely slowed motion. Taking stock of the information on time, place, and the toll of victims, watching televised transmission of rescue workers piling a kindergarden in rigor mortis, is identical to the astounding sensation of the air being sucked from all around, that typically precedes the explosion. And at some point, it all sinks in, the information processes into information, and the images breakdown into their compositional elements (rescue worker carrying four year old with hand stretched to the sky and fingers wide spread), and you explode, or implode, with some sort of a system shut down. For a split second your heart does not beat the way it is used to, and your lungs don't quite inhale or exhale according to the book.

9:00 am, or somewhere around there. I am zapping between al-Jazeera, LBC, BBC, Future TV, and my new discovery of this war, Sky News. I have to finish some proposal text to send to funders to collect desperately needed funds to support the army of volunteers and the programs for displaced kids. I cannot disappoint "Nouna", I have to be at the library at 10:00 am with the text in English.

9:05 am, or somewhere around there. Yasser Abou Halileh, who just landed in Lebanon from Jordan is catching his breath on al-Jazeera. He arrived to Qana and just reached the shattered shelter site. Qana was carpet-bombed throughout the night. The air-bombing was not a "surprise" to anyone, because the Israeli army dropped flyers advising residents to leave. The bodies piled in the shelter ravaged to rubble were of people too poor to afford the ride from Qana to Sidon or Beirut, or people with disabilities.

Qana, besides being an extremely poor village in the anemic economic orbit of Tyre, was also the site of one of Christ's miracles, then a little short of two thousand years later it housed a UNIFIL base (UN peacekeeping force), and a notorious Israeli massacre of fleeing hapless southern Lebanese villagers at said UNIFIL base. Yasser and his team headed for Qana because rescue workers alerted the media to the possibility of another massacre. The shelling did not stop as rescue workers lifted bodies from under rubble.

You know the rest of the story. And Yasser's story as well; it is no different from any correspondent that suddenly becomes a human being, a father, a brother, a son and Yasser was looking for words to put together into sentences to report the first report of the massacre. When he and his camera arrived, rescue workers were on site, slowly pulling bodies from under the rubble. Yasser is catching his breath and slowly, you can feel the air being sucked from all around him, children of all sizes, mostly small and extra small (some are barely a few months old), piled next to him, covered in ashen powdered concrete.

I realized that a vacuum cloaked me. I heard myself speak, I saw myself put my shoes on, pack my bag, feel tightness in my chest, say goodbye to my parents, walk out into the street. Walk out into the street. Flash of the voice of Yasser hiccuping wiith emotion. Nothing unusual about this Sunday morning.

Yasser must have been experiencing "the explosion" of "implosion" -- that's when I felt the air being sucked from all around me. I jumped from my bed and ran hysterically in the house looking for someone in my family to tell the news to. And when I did, I realized that a vacuum cloaked me. I heard myself speak, I saw myself put my shoes on, pack my bag, feel tightness in my chest, say goodbye to my parents, walk out into the street. Walk out into the street. Flash of the voice of Yasser hiccuping wiith emotion. Nothing unusual about this Sunday morning. Forgot the laptop. Forgot what I owed Nouna. Flash of the image of the rescue workers leaning in half to be able to go into the ravaged building. Back up. Back upstairs. Flash of baby lying on rubble, her cutie derriere dripping a pool of blood and powdered concrete. Al-Jazeera's screen. Zap, maybe it's a mistake. An exageration. Text message from Rula: "Are you watching al-Jazeera?" I grab my purse again, leave. Come back: the laptop. On the street, as I wait to hail a cab, I wonder why there is not a trace of powdered concrete in the air. I could taste it in my mouth.

10:15 am, or somewhere around there. Municipal building, 3rd floor, Beirut's Municipal Librairy. Elevator working. Flash of rescue worker carrying a baby girl, barefoot, covered in powdered concrete. Her arm sticking out, upright in rigor mortis, her palm wide and fingers stretched as if she were trying to reach out. At the municipal library that morning, there was a training workshop for the volunteers from the NGOs that are in charge of overseeing the settlement of the displaced in the schools around Beirut. A training workshop for educational games and activities around the book and storytelling. I walked in, greeted Nouna and another lady, I know I was not very present, the vacuum still cloaked me. I just said to them, as best as I could make coherent sentences "there was a massacre in Qana". Most of the volunteers had woken up and rushed to the workshop without hearing news.

I put my laptop in the office, and sat, stood up and started calling people. Everyone was choking in shock, rage and horror. Rula was out of her mind, zapping frantically. Only al-Jazeera showed images, BBC and CNN had a very down-played report. She beckoned me to make phone calls. Who could I call? I am nobody. I called friends, and more friends, people in the know and out of the know. Then a text message came: Protest in front of the ESCWA building at noon. I was beginning to breathe again. Condoleezza Rice was supposed to land in Beirut sometime around noon.

11:00 am, or somewhere around there. I was still sucked into the vacuum. Things moving around me were confusing, I could not quite mediate with reality. My mind was racing. The flashes of dead bodies were still coming. I needed to describe them, in gruesome detail to someone. Whoever I called, described them to me, in their gruesomeness: "Did you see that baby girl with her buttocks drenched in blood?" She was there in front of my eyes, off course I had seen her.

I typed something in English on the laptop. I called Nouna. We discussed it. I repeated the things she said to me so they would sink in. One of the attending volunteers could not hold still, who smoked outside, paced, and checked her cell phone about ten times, walked over to us and said she was going to the protest.

12:00 pm, sharp. I was back on the street. I walked towards the ESCWA (basically the offices of he UN and UN-related institutions) building. The street was filled with people, men, women, children carrying flags, Lebanese, Hezbollah, and Amal, walked decidedly, almost angrily in the direction of the ESCWA building. By the time I got there, there was a mob scene in front of the building. Young men (and a few women) were banging on the gates, throwing rocks to the windows that were bouncing against the glass and falling back on them. The release of rage was collective.

The sheath of vacuum around me, inside me, dissipated. The explosion/implosion was now happening to me. I felt myself transform into a magma of anger and sorrow at once. I felt my own rage channel to the crowd, I stood on the sidewalk, sucked into the magnetism of the mob, my body totally merged with theirs.

The sheath of vacuum around me, inside me, dissipated. The explosion/implosion was now happening to me. I felt myself transform into a magma of anger and sorrow at once. I felt my own rage channel to the crowd, I stood on the sidewalk, sucked into the magnetism of the mob, my body totally merged with theirs. The flashes from the al-Jazeera broadcast were no longer caged inside me. They were wafting away. The flags were pulled down and instead the masts in front of the fancy structure were now flagging Hezbollah, Amal flags and portraits of Hassan Nasrallah.

(When people later criticized the mob scene for "attacking" the ESCWA building - "Was it necessary?" - I was surprised they did not have that rage, or that they could not comprehend it.)

The crowd that unloaded into downtown Beirut was at that point mostly comprised of the displaced from the southern suburb. They shouted: "Hezbollah, Nasrallah, wel Dahiyah killa" (Hezbollah, Nasrallah, and the whole of the southern suburb).

On the other side of the street, at the foot of the Media Center building where newsmedia post their cameras and microphones and their anchors shoot their live shots, people were screaming at cameras.

The crowd was growing fatter and fatter, now people were coming more prepared, they had signs and banners, in Arabic and English.

I came across Mohammad, a friend, and finally, finally I could cry. I burried my head in his shoulders and wept helpless.

Mohammad led me to the Media Center building. I sat in one of the offices with windows onto the street. More and more people were coming. Army and internal security personel were also arriving. They stood by and watched. At some point a truck carrying some sort of a load of something parked in the lot across the street from the ESCWA building. It became a stage atop which various spokespersons stood and delivered speeches. I guess someone brought a voice magnifier, and someone else brought a tape and a tape player because soon there were also chants blaring. The flags flying on top of the crowd were now of several political parties: the "Free Movement", the Communists, the Syrian Nationalist (the most overt supporters of Hezbollah). The most touching scene was of Sunni and Shi'i sheikhs huddled together, hand in hand, almost talking and then delivering speeches. From the window of the sixth floor, I could see their round head coiffe and robes.

Randa sent a text message from Cairo. I asked her to call me. She was weeping and I begged her to call her activist friends and organize a mobilization in Cairo. I wanted to weep, and hated myself for stiffening my upper lip. I borrowed Mohammad's phone and started to call friends across the world, hysterically, begging them to organize protests. I was nonsensical. I woke my sister in New Jersey. My tears were now flowing silently.

I felt I was going to collapse. I had to leave and be quiet for a while.

I walked home, a long, long meditative walk in the punishing heat of a late July afternoon. It was 2:00 pm. Everyone urged me to write something, a "siege note" for Qana. I could not.

Instead I slept. My eyelids felt heavy from crying.

Unscathed

Maher called. I woke up. He said he was leaving with a team of journalists to Tyre. Did I want to come? (I did not know.) I should be ready in ten minutes if I wanted to come. I said no, I was not thinking and I regretted it for the rest of the day. Until now, when I write, I regret it.

Maher is a filmmaker. When this war started he was in Paris. He went nuts after a few days and decided to return. He wanted to be here for the war. He came on one of the ships that the French sent to evacuate French passport holders. His voyage was surreal, but that's another story.

He has a project to establish a website to collect and disseminate the record of the lived experience of this war, lest it should lapse from the collective record again. He has started to distribute cameras to young filmmakers, artists, even volunteers to record, film, transcribe the mundane and the non-sensational everyday of surviving this war. The website is not ready yet, but as soon as it s, I will publicize it.

Maher had been itching to go to Tyre, closest to one of the sites of battle. He went with the convoy of journalists and humanitarian aid workers. If my rage took me to the street and the mob scene, his would drive him to the front, to the site where the hurt is most poignant. He told me he was going to Qana, and I was not surprised.

I called him the next day in the afternoon. He had indeed been to Qana, and visited the site, and smelled death. From his voice, I felt that something had happened, something that still impressed him greatly.

I called him the next day in the afternoon. He had indeed been to Qana, and visited the site, and smelled death. From his voice, I felt that something had happened, something that still impressed him greatly. His locution was more sullen than lazy, but I could barely make out what he said, and I kept asking him to repeat himself. He did not get exasperated, his voice was detached. He was speaking to me from a different world.

My heart sank. He said Qana was exactly what I saw on TV. He kept referring to going through Srifa as being very difficult. "Very difficult," he kept saying. Nearly all of Srifa is destroyed. Limbs covered in powdered concrete emerge from between the ravages of collapsed buildings. No one has had the energy or courage to pull out the dead. The Red Cross and Civil Defense ambulances have been targetted relentlessly by Israel. When the guns will quiet, we will discover that Qana is small-time compared to Srifa. There is a pattern emerging now: Marwaheen, Srifa, Blida and Qana: terror to induce forced displacement (or pardon my French, "deportation"). Scorched earth and mass graves, this is how we achieve the New Middle East.

Maher said nearly 60 percent of Bint Jbeil has now become flat rubble. Most of its central area. There two limbs stick out of collapsed buildings, and the smell of death is everywhere. While rescue workers pulled out the dead from that shelter in Qana, the IDF was shelling the only functioning hospital in Bint Jbeil, a day prior to Maher's visit. That's how battered Bint Jbeil was, even its hospital the IDF decided was a Hezbollah stronghold and posed a grave security threat on the well-being of the children of Kiryat Shmona who prefer to go to school and not dwell in shelters after they have kissed the shells that their army will shower on Lebanon to implement UN Resolution 1559 and eradicate terror.

In the convoy to Bint Jbeil, journalists outnumbered the rescue workers, and they found a group of elderly men and women who were trapped in a shelter. They could not ambulate without assistance and had not eaten for four or five days. They were carried out and given some water and driven to places where they could receive the care they needed.

The BBC produced a number of excellent reports from Bint Jbeil, in their backdrop, I saw Maher's face. His demeanor confirmed the impression I had after speaking to him on the phone. Maher had seen the face of death. Not death as in the sorrowful but inevitable expiring of everyday life, and not the death of a soldier on the battlefield. He had seen the face of organized, carefully orchestrated, mass-scale death, the planned death of hundreds and thousands as a solution to restoring power hegemony in a region.

You never leave a mass grave unscathed. Maher had seen several that day. Even if helping survivors seems like a life-affirming release, it will not alleviate the burden, the imprint of the face of death. I know he has been branded for ever now and there is not much anything that can be done about it. My forever beloved Marwan worked on collecting the bodies of victims in Sabra and Chatila after the massacre. Seeing the face of death was so overwhelming he left the country shortly thereafter. He moved to London and did not return to Lebanon for decades. You can still feel the brand of that mass grave in the lining of the timbre of his voice, in the lining to his gaze, there is a mute inconsolable sorrow.

I don't know if Maher will leave Lebanon, but I know he will return to Beirut markedly changed. For the time being, the pull of the mass graves, of the people trapped in shelters, of bodies surging through rubble is too powerful -- he wants to be near them. While the journalists he drove down with have left Tyre, he called last night to say he is tempted to stay. His voice felt as though he was called from a netherworld, Israel is now engaged in a massive ground offensive in the south.

This siege note took a couple of days to write. I could not find my words or sense of self after news of the massacre on Sunday. This siege note I wish to dedicate to Maher.

Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the

current conflict in Lebanon. They are also 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 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.

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 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.



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.

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.



>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.



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.

A CNN MAN LETS SLIP



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.

"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."

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."

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."

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.

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."

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."



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.



IN AZERI AND UZBEK, PASHTO AND PERSIAN



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. No other station broadcasts so extensively in dozens of

languages, on TV, radio and online.

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.)

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.



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.

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.

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.

ET TU, TELEGRAPH?

The relentless broadcast attacks on Israel have led to some in the print

media indulging in explicit anti-Semitism.

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

labeled: "Warsaw 1943"; the other: "Tyre, 2006."

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 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.

ECHOING SCHINDLER'S LIST

The picture isn't entirely bleak. Some British and European politicians,

on both 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 - incredibly - 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 Hizbullah, who he presumably thinks should not be

stopped from killing Israelis.



THE ASHES OF AUSCHWITZ

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 center 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.



Others Jews continued 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 Hizbullah is part of a

worldwide radical Islamist movement that has plans, and not pleasant

ones, for all those - Moslem, Christian, Hindu and Jew - who don't abide

by its wishes.

I called them resistance fighters. Please quote me correctly. Resistance fighters is indeed what they are.

There is a reason why the media of virtually every nation but that of the US is correctly pointing out that Israel is the aggressor in Lebanon and is committing vicious war crimes. The reason is that this is the truth. The US media, with very few exceptions, know that their appointed role is to program the US population into supporting the massively expensive subsidies needed for Israeli military aggression.

The number if Israeli incursions into Lebanon is astronomically out of proportion to Lebanese incursions into Israel - if indeed the Israeli soldiers were captured in Israel, and not in Lebanon itself, where they feel free to cross the border and kidnap people at will. The number if civilian casualties in the current conflict in Lebanon is also vastly out of proportion to the number if Israelis killed in Israel. And please remember that the guerilla fighters in Lebanon are not equipped with guided missles or laser bombs - because they are not bankrolled by the United States, as Israel is.

"[the press] seeks to minimize Israeli suffering"

Paranoid schizophrenia, anyone? US mass media has given grossly disproportional attention to Israel's side of the story for YEARS

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2005/03/12/17265471.php

(Thanks to the pathetic wrigglings of our old friend Sefarad, the comment thread here is an excellent window into the guts of the pro-Israel media psy-ops network)

The zio-psychos' ultimate rhetorical weapon against the Stupid Cattle is of course the Holocaust. At times like the present, when they've been caught naked in broad daylight looking like total assholes and they have nothing resembling a sane argument to use as a fig-leaf, they'll start flinging around the Holocaust guilt-trip even though it's contextually ridiculous. That's what Tom Gross does in his grotesque Israel Insider opinion piece http://web.israelinsider.com/Views/9028.htm

"...ECHOING SCHINDLER'S LIST..."

"...THE ASHES OF AUSCHWITZ..."

This is a delightful show of raw desperation coming from a slithery slimy underworld of incorrigible liars

The false parallel being peddled here is that major Western news outlets, by not giving Israel the grossly favorable exposure zionist fanatics insist upon, are actually CAUSING the violent incidents against jews abroad (Israel's belligerence has nothing to do with it, you see), and that the various media baddies picking on poo-ah undah-doggy Iswael are basically Nazis armed with press passes. From here, any stupid cow can make the tiny leap to "realize" that Israel's "media enemies" need to swing from the gallows at Nuremberg

The zio-psychos' ultimate rhetorical weapon against the Stupid Cattle is of course the Holocaust.

And Holocaust is defined by TW as:

Holocaust: 1. Any war started by Arabs in which more than 10 Arabs were killed. 2. Something Jews are supposed to forget about. 3. Something that never happened, yet Jews have manipulated the "theft" of "Arab land" by conning the world into believing it did happen.

Until the apartheid theocratic entity of Israel is dismantled and replaced by a secular regime in which all religions and ethnicities have equal rights, there will never, but never, be peace in the middle east. Israel's very existence is inevitably entwined with further bloodshed. The sooner it disappears the better off the world will be.

None of those other nations is built on stolen land. None of them leaves the rightful inhabitants of the cournty living in refugee camps outside its borders. None is a close ally of the United States, the leading imperialist nation on earth. None of them allies themselves with fundamentalist goofballs like James Dobson in order to induce the American people to cough up more money for missles, tanks, phospherous bombs, and other weapons. None of them was allied with apartheid South Africa. None of them uses vast amounts of US tax dollars that could be used for national health insurance, free college educations for all, or a guarantee against homelessness for every American.

Israel is an apartheid theocracy. Most of the other stuff I never even mentioned. You must be smoking too much dope you bought from the same people who regard Israel as the most profitable nation for the Natasha Trade - the forced prostitution of kidnapped Russian and eastern European women. I just can't imagine who in the Holy State would want to spend money on sexual slavery.

"None of those other nations is built on stolen land. "

Most of them are, e.g. the Magreb states in north Africa on stolen Berber land; Egypt on stolen Coptic land; Lebanon on stolen Maronite land; Iraq, Turkey, and Syria on stolen Christian nations' land, Sudan on stolen Christian and Animates' land; Indonesia on stolen Buddhist land.

"None of them leaves the rightful inhabitants of the cournty living in refugee camps outside its borders. "

No. Lebanon and Syria still do. The PA does that too. Israel doesn't, except for very few exceptions, .

"None is a close ally of the United States, the leading imperialist nation on earth."

Nope. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan certainly are.

"None of them allies themselves with fundamentalist goofballs like James Dobson in order to induce the American people to cough up more money for missles, tanks, phospherous bombs, and other weapons. "

States like Saudi Arabia and Egypt don't need to do this, because the State Department Arabists see to it that they receive lucrative arms deals.

"None of them was allied with apartheid South Africa. "

Only because S.A. was on the US' side during the Cold War. Moral considerations had nothing to do with it.

"None of them uses vast amounts of US tax dollars that could be used for national health insurance, free college educations for all, or a guarantee against homelessness for every American. "

Nice try. Egypt and Jordan certainly do.

"Israel is an apartheid theocracy."

Whatever helps you hold up your pen during the day and keep typing at night... proof be damned.

Israel is a democracy that just happens to bar people who were born there from setting foot in the country but gives immediate citizenship to religious loons from Brooklyn.

The money that Jordan and Egypt get (much less than what Israel gets) should really be considered further aid to Israel because its real purpose is to bribe those governments not to interfere with Israeli crimes against humanity like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon - or like the present invasion.

"Israel is a democracy that just happens to bar people who were born there from setting foot in the country but gives immediate citizenship to religious loons from Brooklyn. "

Even if this amusing presentation of things were the whole truth and nothing but, only deluded crackpots on crack imagine that this proves Israel to be a theocracy.



"The money that Jordan and Egypt get (much less than what Israel gets)"

Egypt ordinarily receives a bit less than $2 in aid whereas Israel ordinarily receives a bit under $3 billion in aid (notwithstanding persistant urban legends of an annual $6 or $10 billion total). Jordan receives about half that of Israel. Even if these sum totals were "much less", it still adds up to about the same Israel gets. So much for that exercize in semantic nibbling.

"The money that Jordan and Egypt get (much less than what Israel gets) should really be considered further aid to Israel because its real purpose is to bribe those governments not to interfere with Israeli crimes against humanity like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon - or like the present invasion."

Hee hee hee!!! Anti-Zionists can't face the truth. London counts on his comrades' ignorance or short memories. What fault is it of Israel's that Egypt has been bribed since the 1979 Camp David peace treaty to keep it from attacking Israel? Blame your president! In Jordan's case you don't even have this excuse.

"Egypt ordinarily receives a bit less than $2 in aid whereas Israel ordinarily receives a bit under $3 billion in aid"

Well, that clinches it then. $2.00 to Egypt versus $3,000,000,000.00 to Israel hands Meyer match set and game. Way to go Meyer!

- Egypt ordinarily receives a bit less than $2 in aid whereas Israel ordinarily receives a bit under $3 billion in aid.

Truth Warper:

'Well, that clinches it then. $2.00 to Egypt versus $3,000,000,000.00 to Israel hands Meyer match set and game. Way to go Meyer!"

Thuh Warper can't argue on the strength of real facts, morality, logic and history, so he swoops on the catch of my forgetting to type "billion". Give him a trophy!

"The money that Jordan and Egypt get (much less than what Israel gets) should really be considered further aid to Israel because its real purpose is to bribe those governments not to interfere with Israeli crimes against humanity like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon - or like the present invasion."

Yes.

Also, Egypt has about 80 MILLION people, while Israel has about 5 million Jews (I don't count the Palestinians since the money certainy isn't for them). The population of Egypt is _16 times_ the Jewish population of Israel. So, per capita the at least 6-10 BILLION dollars per year in various forms of U.S. financial aid to Israel -- not including many BILLIONS in loan guarantees -- is actually MUCH MUCH higher than for Egypt, far beyond what the actual literal numbers at face value themselves show.

And, this number doesn' include tax deductions for Zionist (institutional and personal) contributions to Israel -- which is lost to our treasury and has to be made up (or lost in government services) by the American public. It also doesn't include pension funds which the Israel lobby politicians in this country have gotten American institutions (like AFL-CIO union and state pension funds) to invest in many further billions in IsraelI bonds. Do you think that those union and citizens' pension fund members got to vote on that? Israel, exceptionally to any other country, gets all sorts of financial aid, breaks and loan default forgiveness from the U.S.. Plus Israel _still_ has the chutzpah to send us the bill for anything outside their normal aid -- and _WHO oh WHO_ do you think will pay Israel for the losses they received in this latest war?

We are already paying. US transport planes are already refueling in Britain while flying to Israel to replace the bombs and rockets expended on killing Lebanese. The US could have brought about a cease-fire already by refusing to make these deliveries of replacement instruments of death - or even by threatening not to replace them.

I can't argue on the strength of real facts, morality, logic and history, so I swoop on anything to deflect that I can get my grubby little mitts on. Give me a trophy! (Please? I'll take my meds!)

I'm a Total Whacko in need of attention



Isn't it nice that most of my posts on every thread have been hidden? I'm venting my infantile frustration on all the antizionists who have superior mastery of the facts.

Truth and history are not on my side, neither is sanity. I'm a zionist fruit loop.

I post incessantly, 12 hours a day, here's just the hidden ones:

I should get a life, but I'm a rabid, bug-eyed frothing at the mouth zionist coward chickenhwak keyboard warrior.

See: That's pathetic.

http://la.indymedia.org/news/?keyword=&author=shetizdayen+indeebay&comments=yes&display=f&year=&month=&day=&medium=&language_id=&category=0&sort=&limit=30

Anti-Zionist:

"Egypt has about 80 MILLION people, while Israel has about 5 million Jews (I don't count the Palestinians since the money certainy isn't for them). The population of Egypt is _16 times_ the Jewish population of Israel. So, per capita the at least 6-10 BILLION dollars per year in various forms of U.S. financial aid to Israel -- not including many BILLIONS in loan guarantees -- is actually MUCH MUCH higher than for Egypt, far beyond what the actual literal numbers at face value themselves show."

A few wee problems in your analysis:

1. Israel proper includes more than 1 million Arab citizens. True, the Arab Israelis usually get the stick's shorter end in terms of budgetary allocation and such, but don't think you can fool everyone into believing they don't see a dime from US aid to Israel. Some folks know a few things beyond the "alternative news" here.

2. The Egyptian regime cares very little about its subjects and spends a paltry, if at all, of the aid funds they receive for the citizens' benefit. So the analogy isn't valid.

3. Also several Arab states enjoy billions of dollars per year in various forms of U.S. financial aid. Not only Israel.

4. Egypt and the other Arab beneficiaries of US foreign aid give virtually nothing in return whereas Israel spends most of the military aid in the US economy, let alone the technologies, military and otherwise, that Israel shares with the US and Arab countries never do.



Anti-Zionist:

"And, this number doesn' include tax deductions for Zionist (institutional and personal) contributions to Israel -- which is lost to our treasury and has to be made up (or lost in government services) by the American public. yadda yadda"

Let's not forget the tax deductions for Muslim "anti-Zionist" (institutional and personal) contributions to Arab countries. Etc. etc.



Anti-Zionist:

"Plus Israel _still_ has the chutzpah to send us the bill for anything outside their normal aid -- and _WHO oh WHO_ do you think will pay Israel for the losses they received in this latest war?"

That's what happens when your State Department strategists play both ends against the middle in the Arab-Israeli conflicts with an emphasis on whetting the aggression of Israel's Mideast neighbors.

Zionist: "Egypt and the other Arab beneficiaries of US foreign aid give virtually nothing in return whereas Israel spends most of the military aid in the US economy"

Like on F-16's, helicopter gunships, guided missiles (the better to massacre mothers and children and victims in ambulances), cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs, bunker busters, and semi-poison (so-called) "tear gas"?

Anti-Jewish anti-Zionist:

"So Israel massacring women, children & old men actually BENEFIT the U.S. economy? Wow!

by ISRAEL: "A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS" "

Racism is too much to dignify with a decent response. This is the stuff you should be posting on Stormfront and Marwen-Media.

P.S.: you forgot the Daisy Cutters. How come Israel hasn't acquired these from the US military-industrial complex? Never mind your lack of proof for the phosphorus bombs allegation.

>"So Israel massacring women, children & old men actually BENEFIT the U.S. economy? Wow!

by ISRAEL: "A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS" "

Zionist: "Racism is too much to dignify with a decent response. This is the stuff you should be posting on Stormfront"

Actually it was posted at the Human Rights Watch website (Israel's massacres, that is).

Maybe the zionist can explain how its "racism" to point out what Israel is doing. I guess to a zionist it's "racist" (doesn't he mean "anti-Semitic"?) to point out that Israel targets women and children -- or that Israel does *anything* immoral.

I guess that Human Rights Watch is racist too:

Democracy Now radio program --

Thursday, August 3rd, 2006

Human Rights Watch Accuses Israel of War Crimes For Indiscriminately Targeting Lebanese Civilians

Last night Human Rights Watch issued a major new report titled "Fatal Strikes: Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon."

Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/03/1344244

Juif Antagoniste:

"A _ZIONIST_ complaining about anti-Jewish puke belch"

You've got a lot of explaning and apologzing to do for your long track of anti-Jewish racism to treat your inane scoffing remark with anything but contempt.



Juif Antagoniste:

"I guess that Human Rights Watch is racist too"

Maybe they're too naive and foolish to tell a massacre (which didn't happen) from inadvertant killing of civilians that Hizbollah had used as human shields anyway.



Juif Antagoniste:

"Maybe the zionist can explain how its "racism" to point out what Israel is doing. I guess to a zionist it's "racist" belch puke fart snarl"

There's a significant difference between legitimately pointing out a massacre when impartial objective evidence merits such an accusation and sounding a massacre charge wthout hard evidence to support this charge. Anti-Zionists are Pavlovian at doing the latter. This has happened all along in this site and all evidence to the contrary is being suppressed. Hmmm... why would anti-Zionists suppress the evidence disproving massacre charges or shout it down unless they're racist?

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