The US Media's "Special Relationship"

Out to Lunch

By REMI KANAZI

The US media's biased coverage of the crisis in Lebanon should come as no surprise. While the White House and Congress claim a "special relationship" with Israel, our news outlets are not supposed to have a "special relationship" with anyone. Their job is to fairly reports on matters; anything less is a disservice to those watching their news programs and reading their newspapers.

Shockingly, Larry King Live has been "fair" in its coverage of the conflict consuming Lebanon in contrast to Fox News' O'Reilly Factor, MSNBC's Scarborough Country and yes, CNN's darling Anderson Cooper 360. There is, however, much criticism to be doled out to CNN's "longest-running interview program." One need look no further than Larry King Live's first two guests, Republican Senator George Allen and Democratic Senator Evan Bayh. It was nice to see-in this nine minute segment-two senators putting their congressional partisan politics aside to stand together in solidarity with the state of Israel. When Larry King asked Senator Allen if the US should be a true broker in the region, Allen replied, "We support Israel, you're right Larry. Israel is a wellspring in the wilderness in the Middle East and we do support them and their right to protect themselves."

The next guest on the show was positioned as the "Lebanese side." Larry King Live passed off the nearly four minute interview with Chibli Mallat-one of the leaders of the Cedar Revolution, deep critic of Hezbollah and candidate for President-as the voice of the Lebanese people. When Larry King asked Mallat about Nassrallah's remark that the conflict is an Israeli/American plot to control the Middle East, Mallat responded, "I'm afraid that I do agree with the senators. He [Nassrallah] initiated the conflict, and all this talk about a great plot between Israel and America is out of place. The conflict was initiatedby [Hezbollah's] reckless action through the Blue Line that separates Lebanon from Israel. That was a grave violation of international law and I think also a grave violation of Lebanese law." Like a true patriot, Mallat later urged "restraint" from Israel, echoing comments made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weeks earlier.

Now that the "Lebanese people" were heard, it was necessary to bring on the Israeli side, Israeli Consul General Ehud Danoch, to counter any "Lebanese" propaganda. For nearly four minutes, Danoch defended Israel and extensively illustrated its commitment to root out "terrorism." As icing on the cake, Danoch took softball emails from viewers and general questions from Larry King such as, "Why do you oppose a cease-fire now?" and "Are you optimistic?"

One would think that after Larry King Live came back from break, the show would cut to the carnage in Lebanon, the destruction of its infrastructure, or an analyst discussing the humanitarian implications the siege on Lebanon presents. Not exactly. When the program returned from the break, Larry King cut to Anderson Cooper in Northern Israel, who-given the amount of reporting he's doing in the North-may as well be looking for a second home. Larry King then cut to Dr. Sanjay Gupta in Haifa. While Gupta spoke of the horror Katyusha rockets exact (thousands have been fired, inflicting very little damage relative to Israel's 500 pound bombs and artillery shells), pictures crossed the screen of injured Israeli women and children. The producers, however, were still unsatisfied. Before going to commercial, Anderson Cooper needed another six minutes explaining that the "terrorist group," Hezbollah, is hiding within the civilian population. Cooper makes no mention of the fact that Hezbollah formed as a resistance group to fight off an Israeli military that slaughtered nearly twenty thousand innocent Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in 1982. To justify the mass murder of the Lebanese population today, Cooper makes clear to the viewer that while Israel is trying to be as accurate as possible, even "the most moral military in the world" can only be so precise. It's ironic that Cooper always has the exact number of Katushya rockets fired on Israel, but the exact number of cluster bombs, artillery shells, and missiles used against the civilian population of Lebanon seems to evade his statistical charts.

A simple cut to commercial would not suffice; the producers of program realized that any decent show must have a good outro. Larry King Live eased into commercial with a "balanced" set of pictures: first, a young Muslim girl holding a picture of Hassan Nassrallah, followed by what is assumed to be a group of Lebanese burning American and Israeli flags, followed by a man carrying a blanket-covered lifeless body, succeeded by two young covered Muslim girls (one of them is in tears), and the sequence ended with three injured Lebanese boys (one of the boys is in tears). Apparently, when showing pictures of injured Israelis (they'd show dead ones, but it doesn't happen often) and "heroic" Israelis, the producers of Larry King Live misplaced the Associated Press pictures of little Israeli girls writing messages on missiles that were about to be fired on the civilian population of Lebanon. Ironically, the only person killed the day of this particular episode was a Palestinian-Israeli girl.

Estimates of dead Lebanese civilians surpassed 900, while the Israeli civilian death toll is at 27. Although thirty three Lebanese civilians die for every one Israeli, the US media deems it necessary to give the Israeli agenda ten minutes of airtime for every minute allotted to the Lebanese voice. The war crimes being carried out against the Lebanese and the Palestinian people by Israel should be newsworthy enough to receive proper coverage. As the conflict drags on, thanks to the US administration's "green light," the coverage is becoming ever more skewed, compounded with additional justifications for Israel's actions, the further villainizing of Hezbollah and now that the Lebanese-American community has been evacuated, the silence of the Lebanese voice. One civilian is one death too many; yet it looks as though thousands more will perish at the hands of Israeli forces, and once again, the US media will be out to lunch.

Remi Kanazi is the primary writer for the political website www.PoeticInjustice.net He lives in New York City as a Palestinian American freelance writer, poet and performer and can reached via email at remroum@gmail.com

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