{"id":295823,"date":"2024-10-01T06:24:05","date_gmt":"2024-10-01T06:24:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=295823"},"modified":"2024-10-03T06:44:32","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T06:44:32","slug":"the-bbc-is-weaponising-its-lebanon-reporting-to-help-disguise-israels-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=295823","title":{"rendered":"The BBC Is Weaponising Its Lebanon Reporting to Help Disguise Israel\u2019s Crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Cook \u2013 The Unz Review Sept 29, 2024<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Western publics are being subjected to an unprecedented campaign of media propaganda to conceal Israel\u2019s true goals as it expands the slaughter<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The more Israel expands its war across the Middle East, the more the western media intensifies its war on our minds.<\/p>\n

Establishment media outlets like the BBC are weaponising the language of their reporting against audiences no less effectively than Israel weaponised primitive pieces of technology against the people of Lebanon.<\/p>\n

Thousands of Lebanese were maimed<\/a> by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies last week. Likewise, the media coverage is mangling the ability of western publics to understand how and why Israel is dangerously stoking fires across the region.<\/p>\n

Words like \u201caudacious\u201d, \u201cescalation\u201d and \u201ctargets\u201d have become tools to conceal meaning, not to illuminate \u2013 and for good reason. Because Israel\u2019s actions are so obviously criminal, so obviously horrifying, so obviously genocidal. Language becomes a weapon to hide the truth.<\/p>\n

The media chorus goes like this: Israel is attacking Lebanon to stop Hezbollah rocket fire and allow the residents of Israel\u2019s most northerly communities to return home. Or in the blunter, Orwellian language of Israeli officials framing this horror show: Israel must \u201cescalate to de-escalate\u201d.<\/p>\n

Lebanese civilians are paying the heaviest price: some 550 of them were killed in the first day of Israel\u2019s bombing campaign alone. Many tens of thousands have been driven \u2013 ethnically cleansed \u2013 from the territory of south Lebanon.<\/p>\n

Why? Because, says Israel, Hezbollah has hidden its cache of rockets in their homes. Those homes must therefore be destroyed. Strangely, Hezbollah seems to have forgotten that it has extensive rocky terrain across south Lebanon where it could more safely and wisely hide its arsenal.<\/p>\n

If this story sounds familiar, that\u2019s because it is. It is the same script used to justify the slaughter in Gaza. Then, the media mindlessly reheated Israeli talking points about Israel destroying Gaza to \u201celiminate Hamas\u201d.<\/p>\n

Some 2.3 million Palestinians needed to be forced out of their homes for their own safety, even as Israel killed them in those very \u201csafe zones\u201d.<\/p>\n

Then, as now, the media subjected us to Israeli CGI-generated propaganda videos of underground \u201ccontrol and command centres\u201d supposedly under hospitals and other vital infrastructure Israel wanted destroyed.<\/p>\n

This time the media are uncritically broadcasting no less ridiculous Israeli propaganda videos of Hezbollah rockets stashed in Lebanese living rooms.<\/p>\n

Whose right to defend?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In fact, graphs showing \u201ccross-border attacks\u201d since 7 October last year \u2013 when Hamas broke out for one day from the concentration camp<\/a> Israel had made of Gaza over decades \u2013 suggest how entirely bogus Israel\u2019s narrative of its bombing Lebanon to \u201cstop the Hezbollah rocket fire\u201d really is.<\/p>\n

Of the 9,600 cross-border attacks, Israel committed 7,845 <\/a>of them \u2013 or four-fifths \u2013 and began doing so on 7 October itself. Israel actually stepped up<\/a> its attacks on Lebanon in early September, just as Hezbollah was dramatically reducing its rocket fire.<\/p>\n

What the graphs cannot convey is the asymmetrical nature of those exchanges.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah rockets caused far less damage to Israel than Israel\u2019s far larger number of, and far more powerful, bombs and missiles.<\/p>\n

By the third week of September, Israel had killed more than 750 Lebanese, compared to 33 Israelis<\/a>. The differential is even starker now.<\/p>\n

And yet the western media has not framed Hezbollah\u2019s attacks as its \u201cright to defend itself\u201d \u2013 a right we are continuously reminded Israel has.<\/p>\n

Why has the priority been Israel\u2019s need to \u201cstop\u201d Hezbollah\u2019s fewer and mostly non-lethal rockets, rather than Lebanon\u2019s need to stop Israel\u2019s more plentiful and far more lethal Israeli bombs?<\/p>\n

But more importantly, Israel does not want western publics to be exposed to other, more plausible reasons why<\/a> Hezbollah has been firing rockets for the past year \u2013 or what it would take to make it stop. And the western media are ably assisting Israel in keeping those reasons shielded from view.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah has repeatedly<\/a> noted that its rocket fire would stop if Israel withdraws from Gaza and ends the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians there, as it is required to do under international law.<\/p>\n

In two separate decisions, the International Court of Justice (ICC) has ruled<\/a> that Israel\u2019s decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and an act of aggression against the Palestinian people that must end, and that a \u201cplausible\u201d case has been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Though no one at the BBC or elsewhere would ever admit it, Hezbollah is actually much closer to upholding international law than western states like the United States, Germany and Britain, all of whom are helping to arm and sustain Israel\u2019s \u201cplausible\u201d genocide.<\/p>\n

Filling the vacuum<\/strong><\/h2>\n

With western media refusing to provide any meaningful context for Hezbollah\u2019s actions, Israel\u2019s self-serving narrative fills the vacuum: the assumption is that Hezbollah \u2013 and possibly all \u201cArabs\u201d \u2013 are driven only by an irrational, antisemitic desire to murder Jews in Israel.<\/p>\n

The implication is that Lebanon deserves whatever it gets from Israel.<\/p>\n

The BBC\u2019s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen<\/a> helpfully oiled that particular wheel on Monday\u2019s evening news this week by describing Hezbollah in the following terms: \u201cFighting Israel is in their DNA, why they exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s ignore Bowen\u2019s conflation of the military wing of Hezbollah and its political and welfare arms \u2013 precisely the Israel-centric view of Hezbollah imposed by the British government in designating the entire movement as \u201ca terrorist organisation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Do Hezbollah\u2019s politicians, and the civil servants, police officers, doctors, teachers and adminstrators it employs to run Lebanon\u2019s institutions \u2013 the \u201cstate within a state\u201d, as media outlets call it \u2013 exist only to \u201cfight Israel?\u201d Is that really the sole reason they exist?<\/p>\n

But even if we ignore all the civilians involved with Hezbollah and focus exclusively on its military wing, is Bowen\u2019s characterisation impartial, fair, or even accurate.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah isn\u2019t driven by a simple bloodlust to \u201cfight Israel\u201d, as the BBC\u2019s Middle East expert suggests. For many Lebanese citizens, it is there to protect their country from an Israeli military that has aggressively interfered in its affairs for decades, long before Hezbollah even existed.<\/p>\n

Israel has invaded Lebanon repeatedly, overseen horrifying massacres such as those at Sabra and Shatilla<\/a>, occupied Lebanon\u2019s southern lands for nearly two decades, bombed its infrastructure, meddled in its politics, littered its territory with cluster bombs, and carried out aggressive flights by fighter jets over its territory, violating<\/a> Lebanese airspace, non-stop all that time.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah exists because Lebanon needed a credible military fighting force to push out Israel\u2019s occupation army \u2013 as it eventually managed to do in 2000 \u2013 and prevent any reoccurence.<\/p>\n

It exists to deter Israel from continuing to meddle in Lebanon \u2013 just as Hamas exists to try to exact a price for Israel\u2019s otherwise profitable brutalisation of Palestinians under occupation.<\/p>\n

But if Bowen really imagines this kind of reductive reasoning about Hezbollah is fair, he should be consistent and describe Israel\u2019s military similarly. Does the so-called Israel Defence Forces exist only to \u201cfight its Arab neighbours?\u201d<\/p>\n

War of aggression<\/strong><\/h2>\n

There are many probable reasons why Israel is attacking Lebanon that have nothing to do with \u201cending the rocket fire\u201d \u2013 and yet they all go unmentioned by the BBC and other western outlets.<\/p>\n

Israel has much to gain from expanding its genocidal war on Gaza to the wider region.<\/p>\n

The new war is usefully deflecting attention from Israel\u2019s failure to realise its professed goal of \u201celiminating Hamas\u201d in Gaza, and its war crimes, and at the very moment when the ICC is reported<\/a> to be preparing to approve an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity. In the current climate of war fever, those warrants may barely register.<\/p>\n

Gaza\u2019s immense and ever-deepening suffering has entirely dropped off the news radar.<\/p>\n

The regional war is usefully lifting the \u2013 admittedly minimal \u2013 pressure on Netanyahu from western allies to end the slaughter in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu cannot afford to ease up on his war-mongering, because any moves towards a ceasefire would put his coalition in danger of collapse, potentially oust him from power, and accelerate his corruption trial and the likelihood of his being jailed.<\/p>\n

The widening war has already revived support for Netanyahu and his government at a time when it was coming under growing strain domestically, led by the families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza, to reach a ceasefire.<\/p>\n

Now talk of a ceasefire in Gaza has been swamped by cheerleading for a second campaign of mass slaughter, this time in Lebanon.<\/p>\n

And most importantly of all, a regional war provoked by Israel, one that drags in not just Hezbollah but also Iran, would force Washington to become even more actively involved in a region in which it was gradually trying to outsource its massive military footprint to other actors, especially in the Gulf.<\/p>\n

The US would have to not just step up its arming of Israel\u2019s slaughter but join the slaughter directly.<\/p>\n

Israel wants its war to become a US war, and hopes US muscle will force other regional players, not least the Gulf states, to join Israel\u2019s fight too.<\/p>\n

Unlike the pretext of \u201cstopping the rockets\u201d supplied by Israel and echoed by the western media, all of these other reasons are transparently not defensive. They suggest Israel is waging a war of aggression. Which is precisely why they are unmentioned and unmentionable by the western media.<\/p>\n

\u2018Audacious\u2019 terrorism<\/strong><\/h2>\n

That was the context missing as Israel began raising the temperature dramatically in Lebanon by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, killing dozens of people, including two children, and maiming thousands.<\/p>\n

As Alistair Crooke, a former British diplomat based in Beirut, has observed<\/a>, those using these old-tech devices were not elite Hezbollah fighters, as the western media has followed Israel in suggesting.<\/p>\n

Many of those who lost hands and eyes were likely to be civilians working in emergency and civil service roles for Hezbollah\u2019s \u201cstate within a state\u201d: administrators, medical staff, teachers and police officers.<\/p>\n

Booby-trapping mobile devices is in clear breach of international law \u2013 that is, it is a war crime. That is so obvious that even a former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, readily conceded<\/a> of Israel\u2019s pager attacks: \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any question it\u2019s a form of terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n