US
Media Alibis For Qana Massacre
By David Walsh
31 July 2006
World
Socialist Web
As
the news broke Sunday morning of the Israeli massacre in the southern
Lebanese village of Qana, the American media swung into action to provide
alibis and excuses for the horrific war crime.
The basic modus operandi
of the US media has been well established over the past two-and-a-half
weeks. The war cannot be mentioned without claiming that Hezbollah,
always referred to as a terrorist organization, ignited the Israeli
onslaught by seizing two soldiers.
Journalists worthy of the
name have a responsibility to probe beneath the official version of
events, to question the government’s claims, to hint at possibilities
that the powers-that-be would prefer not be discussed. In the present
conflict that would mean at least raising the possibility that the US
and Israel have definite geopolitical ambitions.
The American media investigates
none of this. It simply repeats the trite formulae of the Bush administration
(a “sustainable ceasefire,” a “robust” mandate
to disarm Hezbollah, and the deployment of an equally “robust”
international peacekeeping force, etc.) ad infinitum.
The efforts of Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, who has given Israel the green light to carry
out its attacks, are inevitably referred to as a “peacekeeping
mission.” Israel’s wanton violence is described as “self-defense.”
In the morning following
the massacre at Qana, the US media scrambled to provide explanations
for the horrible event. In the first place, American television refused
to show images of the mangled, bloody bodies that television audiences
in the rest of the world were seeing. “We cannot show this,”
they said.
Why not? The level of US
government censorship is staggering. A decision was reached during the
night that the American public simply could not be allowed to see the
reality of the Qana massacre.
Reports of the deaths of
dozens of women and children were immediately followed by “Israeli
officials say ...,” “the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) points
out ...,” “the government in Tel Aviv explains that ...”
A mass murder is committed,
and the US media rushes first to interview the murderer and get his
side of the story.
The Israelis obligingly made
a series of officials available for the American networks to interview.
Every news program routinely begins and ends with the Israeli positions.
Arab and Lebanese voices are squeezed in here and there, the more respectable
and ‘pro-Western’ the better, without the slightest concern
for a balanced presentation of a complex political situation, much less
its historical background.
In this, the American media
simply deludes itself and the public. The outrage felt for the US government
and military in the Middle East and throughout much of the world is
reaching a boiling point.
A few examples of the media
coverage Sunday will suffice. This is from the New York Times: “Israel
said the Qana strike was aimed at Hezbollah fighters firing rockets
into Israel from the area, but an explosion caused a residential apartment
building to collapse, crushing Lebanese civilians who were spending
the night in the basement, where they believed they were safe. The Israelis
raised the possibility that munitions stored in the building blew up
hours after the air strike, destroying the building.”
In other words, the Lebanese
blew themselves up. This scurrilous claim was not repeated elsewhere,
as far as this writer could make out.
The Washington Post presentation
is more typical: “Israeli warplanes blasted a group of buildings
in this southern Lebanese village Sunday, killing dozens of people,
most of them women and children, according to Lebanese officials. The
Israeli military said the air strike was aimed at destroying Hezbollah
rocket launchers nearby and that civilians were not being targeted.”
With some 800 Lebanese dead
since the beginning of the war, 90 percent of them civilians, a semi-honest
media would not leave such claims unchallenged. If Israel, with its
surgically precise missiles and bombs, continues to kill civilians in
large numbers, perhaps one should draw the logical conclusion that their
strikes are, in fact, hitting their targets.
The unsubstantiated claim
that Hezbollah fighters were launching missiles from the immediate vicinity
of the building that collapsed is simply taken as good coin by the American
media. Why should the Israeli government and its military be given the
benefit of the doubt? Fox News, the right-wing voice of the Murdoch
interests, was most forthright in passing off IDF claims as fact, but
none of the networks or major newspapers cast any serious doubt on the
Israeli military’s justifications.
On NBC’s “Meet
the Press,” host Tim Russert opened his program, on the morning
after the bloodiest episode in the 19 days of the war, with Israel’s
ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman. Russert provided Gillerman
a platform for the defense of Israel’s actions. He did not begin
by expressing his horror at the massacre, but by politely asking as
to whether Israel would now agree to a ceasefire.
Gillerman responded in the
predictable, cold-blooded manner. “First of all, Tim, this is
a horrible, devastating, bloody Sunday, and it’s a horrible morning,
and we grieve the deaths of those civilians and children. But it is
very, very important to stress that they may have been hit by an Israeli
bomb, but they are victims of the Hezbollah. If Hezbollah wasn’t
there, this would never have happened.
“And I wouldn’t
put it beyond that vicious, brutal, cynical terrorist organization to
have held those people there against their will after we’d repeatedly
asked them to leave, so that they would actually be used as human shields,
and maybe even, as farfetched as this may sound, for this to happen,
because this serves nobody’s purpose, except Hezbollah and Iran.”
‘The dead made us do
it!’ Russert made no comment in response to this filthy allegation.
On CNN’s early morning
program, anchors Tony Harris and Betty Nguyen took pains to put a good
face on the Israeli actions. After reporting the facts of the attack,
Harris continued: “Israel says the site was used by Hezbollah
to launch rockets into Israel. An Israeli spokesman called the area
a war zone and said Lebanese civilians were warned to leave. Even so,
the Israeli defense minister has ordered an investigation.”
Over images of the bombing,
Nguyen commented, “It is just hard to stomach this morning. We’ve
seen the protests as well. But, on the flip side, Israel says that it
has sent out warnings. It dropped flyers. It also made a radio announcement
telling people to get out of the area.”
Harris then introduced Jacob
Dalal, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Force, who was interviewed
from Jerusalem. Harris was immensely sympathetic to the difficult situation
in which the IDF finds itself: “Give us some insight,” he
said to Dalal, “if you would, help us understand the IDF’s
strategic approach to this conflict right now. On the one hand, you
clearly are trying to wipe out Hezbollah, which is your stated objective,
but on the other hand, you have to balance that against the possibility
of killing civilians. So help us understand strategically how you’re
approaching this conflict right now.”
To this friendly query, Dalal
replied, “That’s an excellent question and that indeed is
the dilemma. That’s the dilemma of the war on terror. How, on
the one hand, you attack terrorists and terrorist targets, and on the
other hand, you spare civilian lives, because terrorists operate from
within the civilian environment. Now, this balancing act is a very difficult
balancing act for any army, and we’re trying to do the best we
can.”
The Israeli claim, that it
acts with concern for Lebanese civilians and is engaged in this so-called
balancing act, Harris takes as given and makes the starting point for
a friendly chat with a representative of the Israeli military.
Advertisement for the Israeli state
CNN’s “Late Edition”
with Wolf Blitzer on Sunday was little more than an unpaid advertisement
for the Israeli state and its operations. Speaking to one correspondent
on the ground in Lebanon, Blitzer made his position in regard to Qana—the
culpability of the civilians themselves—quite clear: “The
Israelis say they gave plenty of warning to all the individuals living
there, dropping leaflets. They showed us some of those leaflets that
they say they dropped. Among other things, it said to civilians in villages
located south of the Litani River, ‘Because of the terrorist acts
that have been executed against the Israeli state from inside your villages
and houses, the IDF had to react immediately against these actions,
even inside your own villages.’”
Blitzer had filmed segments
for his “Late Edition” program intended to underscore the
hardships endured by Israelis during the current fighting. A lesser
man might have thought that images of young children killed by Israeli
bombs had made his footage somewhat unseemly, but Blitzer went right
ahead.
Beginning his special report
near Haifa, at an Israeli air force base, Blitzer took a tour by automobile
through the port city, commenting, that the ride was “bleak—not
many cars on the streets; not many people either. As I take a look at
this port and this Haifa bay, it’s pretty depressing to see there
aren’t many ships at all docked at Haifa right now.”
Later in the program, Blitzer
showed a ride he took aboard a US Blackhawk helicopter with Israeli
air force Brigadier General Ido Nehushtan. They flew north along Israel’s
Mediterranean coastline. Blitzer commented: “Haifa, a city of
some 300,000 under normal circumstances, is drained. ... The huge port
area, usually full of cargo ships from around the world, is largely
empty. So are the beautiful Mediterranean beaches nearby.”
Lebanon bleeds from every
pore. But near Haifa “the beautiful beaches are empty”!
Blitzer went on to conduct
an interview with Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a
know-nothing ignoramus, and Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New
York, an ardent pro-Zionist. McConnell could not bring himself to express
regret over the massacre in Qana, remarking instead, “Unfortunately,
Hezbollah uses civilians as shields. The Israelis don’t do that.”
Schumer, asked how Bush and
Rice were doing in the Middle East crisis, replied, “Well, I have
no criticism of the president on this issue because I think he is doing
the right thing.” This is the opposition party in the US.
A Syrian cabinet minister,
Bouthaina Shaaban, was met with the usual American media arrogance.
Blitzer’s first question: “Is Syria ready to stop facilitating
weapons shipments to Hezbollah, as alleged by the US and Israeli governments
as well as other governments?” Blitzer failed to note that the
word ‘alleged’ undermined the premise of his question. How
can someone stop doing something you haven’t proved they are doing
in the first place?
At one point, Shaaban made
the following point, “Remember, Nazi Germany was claiming that
it was fighting terrorism. And then the whole world had to stop that.
We are facing something very similar to what happened as a result of
the actions of Nazi Germany against civilians.”
Blitzer ignored this. His
program ended with a special segment revealing that Hezbollah’s
rockets weren’t “the only thing posing a real danger. In
this exclusive report I prepared earlier in the week, I found out that
there are also some new threats from the Mediterranean Sea,” including
exploding jet skis and life rafts. Meanwhile the broken bodies of women
and children continued to be discovered in the rubble in Qana.