U.S. PUSHING U.N. TO
FIGHT FOR ISRAEL!
MER - MiddleEast.Org -
Washington - 3 August 2006:
Of course this headline is quite out of sync with the way the major
news media are reporting what's happening. Yet the headline is quite
on target.
The Americans have not only armed and fueled Israel's destruction
of both Lebanon and Palestine. The Americans have not only thrown up
great gobs of political smoke to obscure what is really happening and
to give the Israelis still more time to rain death and misery on the
peoples of the region.
Now the Christian Evangelical President, in tandem with the
Zionist Neocon 'cabal' and the Israel Lobby in Washington, is actually
attempting to manipulate the U.N. to send an armed 'multinational'
force -- NOT a blue-helmet 'peace keeper' force mind you --' to take
over the area of southern Lebanon nearest to Israel's northern
border!
The role of this 'United Nations' military force will be not to
keep a peace but in effect to impose a new political/military
arrangement on the Lebanese, and on the Arabs and Muslims throughout
the region -- to in effect get on the side of the Israelis and the
Americans. They will in effect occupy part of Lebanon. They will in
effect fight against Lebanese forces who remain at war with Israel.
They will try to prevent arms and support from coming to Lebanon. And
they will help train the Christians of Lebanon to control and oppose
the Muslims of Lebanon. They will overall help make possible a new
Lebanese geopolitical reality that the Israelis have been trying to
manipulate for a generation -- a Lebanon in the Israeli/U.S. orbit
rather than in the Arab/Muslim one.
Oh yes, there are also a list of things this thinly-disguised U.N.
fighting force will not do. They will not protect the Palestinians in
the occupied territories from the apartheid conditions and the military
assaults of Israeli army. They will not be able to come into any part
of Israel or occupied Palestine. They will not be authorized to fight
against the war crimes being perpetrated by the Israeli army or to do
anything at all about the occupation of the Palestinian people -- the
root cause of the ongoing wars and hatreds in the Middle East which the
U.N. itself is complicitous in bringing about since 1947!.
Meanwhile the bigger stage is now set: Syria and Iran are in the U.S.-Israeli target sites.
It's like watching two different wars
Julian Borger
2 August: The US and European media have always covered the Middle East
from different perspectives, but flying back to Washington from a stay
in London at the height of the Lebanese conflict made it clear to me
how wide the gulf has become. Britons and Americans are watching two
different wars.
The overwhelming emphasis of television and press coverage in the UK
was the civilian casualties in Lebanon. Day after day, those were the
"splash" stories. The smaller number of civilian casualties from
Hizbullah rockets in northern Israel was also covered but rarely made
the top headlines or front pages.
Back in DC, watching Lebanon through American camera lenses, the
centre of the action seemed to be Haifa. CNN, for example, sent two of
its top anchors, Miles O'Brien and Wolf Blitzer, to the Israeli port
city. Much of the morning news was devoted to showing O'Brien scurrying
in and out of shelters when the air raid sirens sounded. Another
correspondent was sent on patrol with a Haifa ambulance crew to look
for casualties. On the morning I was watching, the crew only came
across a man who had a fatal heart attack as a result of the rockets.
The paramedics' attempts to save him were shown.
This emphasis on Israeli casualties
relative to Lebanese was taken to its breathtaking extreme by Charles
Krauthammer, a conservative columnist on the Washington Post, who
described the Hizbullah rocket attacks as "perhaps the most blatant
terror campaign from the air since the London blitz."
From Haifa, the television news typically shifts to the border and
to correspondents covering the Israeli army (CNN has another of its
leading men, John Roberts, stationed there), who have supplied most of
the news on the fighting in south Lebanon.
There have been reports out of Lebanon itself, but they have usually
come further down the running order, and reports on civilian casualties
there are almost always contextualised, emphasising the Hizbullah
tactic of launching rockets from populated areas; in British reporting,
that context has often been either missing or weighed separately in
analytical pieces.
British journalism generally celebrates eyewitness accounts with a
consistency in emotional tone that discourages cool asides to discuss
mitigating circumstances; US television reporting out of Lebanon, by
contrast, has occasionally been in danger of becoming all context,
focusing on Hizbullah tactics to the exclusion of the humanitarian
tragedy. Fox News, in particular, has sought to bolster Israeli public
relations. An anchor at one point asked Ehud Barak what he would like
the world to know about Hizbullah and Hamas.
Qana
has changed the tone, at least for the time being. The account of
families huddled together in a building in a doomed bid to keep their
children safe and the sight of the small bodies being carried out of
the rubble has had the emotional force to break through the usual rules
of the game, and has mostly been given comprehensive coverage. But one
Fox anchor still expressed concern that any pause in the Israeli
offensive would allow Hizbullah to regroup.
There is a circular relationship between media coverage of the
Middle East and public opinion. Correspondents and editors are often
fearful of the avalanches of hate mail that can descend in a heartbeat
on matters Middle Eastern, and their reports consequently serve to
deepen entrenched points of view.
The difference between British and US polls on the current conflict
are striking. Just over a fifth of Britons polled pre-Qana, compared
with nearly half of the Americans questioned at about the same time,
said they thought the Israeli use of force was proportionate; and
another 9% of American respondents thought the Israelis were not being
tough enough.
Some of that extraordinary divide must be attributable to the very
different realities on British and American television screens.
Meanwhile, more Iraqi civilians are dying every day than Lebanese,
but the horror of that war barely appears on television screens in
either country any more. Lebanon is newer and much safer to cover.
Anyway, Iraq fatigue set in long ago.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julian_borger/2006/08/post_279.html
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