Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Ever since Israel launched its current invasion of Lebanon, generous assistance from the world’s leading english-language media has contributed to the diffusion of three prevailing myths. In its various invasions of Lebanon (and the frequent aggression inside the Occupied Palesitnian Territories), Israel’s victims have overwhelmingly been civilians. The justification has always been 1) Its the Arabs that provoke Israel 2) the Arabs use civilians as human shields, 3) they fire their rockets from civilian homes or UN buildings, thus drawing Israel’s retaliation. No serious observers of the conflict had given credence to this nonsense, but the credulous Western media, as always, has suspended its judgement and deferred to the official Israeli spokesman’s authority. Some, however, have finally broken ranks with the Fox-CNN-BBC axis, and have chosen to describe the reality instead. First it was Mitch Prothero in Salon, who debunked the “hiding among civilians” myth. Human Rights Watch added “our investigations have not found evidence to support Israeli allegations that Hizbullah are intentionally endangering Lebanese civilians by systematically fighting from civilian positions. We can’t exclude the possibility that it happens – but time and again villagers tell us that Hizbullah is fighting from the hills. Meanwhile, the homes hit by Israel have only civilians in them.” The Irish Times next laid to rest the tales of UN facilities or civilians homes being used by Hizbullah to launch its rockets and finally today, the Christian Science Monitor has despatched the most enduring one of the myths (sadly repeated among others, by Robert Fisk), that the conflicts began with Hizbullah’s capture of Israeli soldiers. Anders Strindberg finally states the obvious, “Hizbullah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 was a direct result of Israel’s silent but unrelenting aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of a six-decades long Arab-Israeli conflict.”