The New York Times Pimps For Hezbollah
The New York Times today has decided that they had better reinforce the Hezbollah propaganda front. And Sabrina Tavernise, the author of the piece, does such a fine job of accusing Israeli soldiers of "slipping into the fog of war," and attacking Lebanese targets indiscriminantly. What she doesn't tell you is anything about the Israeli casualties from Hezbollah's attacks. When you read this piece, you're going to see a bleak picture painted, and one thast points the finger at Israel for this conflict, and all the damage inflicted rather than Hezbollah.
On a mountain road just south of here, a convoy of Lebanese villagers was fleeing north shortly after the war began. They had heard Israeli soldiers telling them to evacuate. Suddenly, a rocket struck a pickup truck full of people. Twenty-one people were killed, more than half of them children.
Israel said it believed the convoy was transporting rockets. The convoy had not notified Israel that it was going to make the trip. Those who survived said in interviews that they were simply following Israeli orders to flee the south as best they could.
The attack, which took place on July 15, was one of the war’s most lethal strikes. It is one of a number of civilian deaths, like the bombing of a house in the village of Qana this week that killed 29 people, that have brought intense criticism on Israel.
Civilian deaths illustrate the raw dilemma of modern warfare, in which a conventional army fights an elusive militia that loads its rocket launchers in family gardens, orchards and on village streets. In Lebanon, the result has been desperate efforts to flee and military miscalculations in the fog of war.
The families of the village of Marwaheen spent the morning of July 15 figuring out how to get away. They awoke to the sound of Israeli soldiers shouting through megaphones that they should evacuate, because war was coming. Musa Safe, a 77-year-old villager, insisted on leaving.
“He was crying,” said Entehab Safe, his daughter, who was tending her injured father in a hospital in the southern city of Sidon. “We decided to leave because of him.”
A group of between 100 and 200 villagers walked to a compound of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, near the town, and asked to be let inside. They were turned away. A spokesman for the force, Milos Strugar, said on Wednesday that workers told the villagers it could not provide shelter. Its compound was small and could not guarantee safety, he said.
“The U.N. said, ‘We can’t have you here,’ ” Ms. Safe said.
The villagers then trudged back to town. Some time later, another group decided to drive the winding mountain road down to the sea and to Tyre, said Musa Safe’s son Ali, one of the villagers who made the trip. Ali Safe, 32, set off with five other people, his wife and baby, his elderly parents and an aunt. In front of him was a pickup packed full of people standing in its back, holding on to fencelike walls.
Just as they rounded a sharp curve in the road on a bluff overlooking the sea, halfway between the villages of Shamaa and Bayada, the missile hit. Bodies were thrown from the white Datsun pickup. They were damaged so badly a rescue worker who responded to the scene said he collected some in pieces: one entire leg and a woman’s torso.
“It’s like when you throw something into the water, you see it spraying,” Mr. Safe recalled, sitting with his wife’s family in a small village north of Tyre. “I saw parts of people flying like that.”
A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces in Jerusalem said that the Israeli military believed the convoy “was transporting weaponry rockets.” But none were retrieved at the scene, according to the villagers and rescue workers. Ahmed Ghannam, whose brother, pregnant wife and six children died in the attack, said the people in the pickup were farmers. Fourteen were children.
The Israeli Defense Forces, in responses to questions about the incident submitted on Sunday, said 10 civilians had been killed in the attack. It was not clear whether the defense forces considered the other people in the car to be militia members, or whether it acknowledged the presence of only 10 people.
On July 17, the newspaper Haaretz reported that the Israelis had begun an investigation into the attack.
The Israeli Defense Forces spokesman also said the convoy had not coordinated its movement with Israel. It has become regular practice for aid and evacuation convoys to request permission from Israel for safe passage. The villagers said they did not understand that notification was necessary to avoid being shot. Few of them had phones, and even if they had, it is nearly impossible to call Israel from Lebanon.
The case was one of those noted in a report released on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch, which said it had identified 153 deaths of Lebanese civilians. It said the killings formed a pattern so extensive that it seemed to indicate that the Israelis were deliberately shooting civilians. It went so far as to accuse Israel of war crimes.
“In many of these strikes there is no military objective anywhere in the vicinity,” said Peter Bouckaert, who conducted the study. “Day after day we are documenting these strikes where they clearly hit civilian targets.”
Israel vigorously denies this and says that it has tried to avoid civilian deaths, but that Hezbollah tactics of working among the population makes that hard.
Hezbollah is woven tightly into the lives of much of the Shiite population in southern Lebanon. Aside from its militia, it helps administer hospitals and schools, an important service in Lebanon, where the central government is weak.
In many southern towns, such as Bint Jbail, the scene of much of the fighting in this war, Hezbollah is essentially in control. In the south, Hezbollah uses its standing to wage war on Israel, launching missiles from neighborhoods friendly to it and storing weapons in buildings such as hospitals and mosques. “In a very difficult situation, Israel is endeavoring to be as surgical as possible,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry. “Our enemy is Hezbollah’s military machine and the infrastructure that supports it. We are targeting that machine.”
The war seemed to pivot on the issue of civilian casualties earlier this week, after the deaths in Qana, more than half of them children. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled a trip to Beirut, where it was clear that Lebanese officials would not receive her. Diplomatic efforts stalled, and Israel agreed to a partial pause in its airstrikes.
High on the hilltop last month, in the attack on the convoy, Mr. Safe’s car was hit as well, and on fire. His wife got out with their baby, Ahmed, and Mr. Safe pulled his father to safety, but his mother burned to death in the car.
“I felt that human beings had no value,” he said, sitting in a quiet hilltop garden, a bandage around his hand. “The human became like animals, like simple fish.”
The Lebanese authorities say more than 500 people have been killed since the war began. They identify most as civilians. Israel tracks Hezbollah deaths and estimates that 350 fighters have been killed since the war began. Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, said that Israeli forces had seen 100 bodies.
Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit organization that monitors defense policy in Washington, said it did not appear that Israeli forces were purposefully taking aim at civilians. “If they had wanted to, they really could have done tremendous damage,” he said. “You could level whole blocks if you really wanted to do that.”
In Beirut, for example, the scale of destruction in the southern Shiite suburbs is breathtaking, but the rest of the city remains largely untouched.
“To really judge it, take Beirut as a whole and compare it to Grozny as a whole,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who directed the Air Force’s study of air power in the 1991 Gulf War. He was referring to the capital of Chechnya, the breakaway Muslim republic that the Russian army flattened in two wars there.
Still, the areas of heaviest fighting, such as Bint Jbail and the village of Aitarun, have been largely leveled. Bodies are still stuck under the rubble in many southern villages.
Israeli planes have flown 6,900 sorties hitting 3,300 targets since July 12, when the conflict began, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry.
Mr. Ghannam buried his brother and his brother’s family in a temporary grave in Tyre. The family considered the road too dangerous to bury them at home.
“The road — people wanted to use it to escape,” he said.
Notice the italicized paragraph above, where Ms. Tavernise tries to spin Hezbollah's role other than the terrorists they are? Don't get us wrong here. We feel sorry for the lives lost in war, but this is hardly the time to accuse Israeli soldiers of working in any sort of "fog of war." We're just under thirty days into this war, and already the MSM is acting like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm waiting to see the first story written, first op-ed written that states Israel is in a "qugmire."
Don't laugh. It's coming. It's just a matter of time.
And I guess we should've been expecting a column like this from our own media. Given how antiwar they are, it comes as no surprise. Again, a column like this was just a matter of time. And after yesterday's piece,/li> in the Boston Globe from the PLO guy (posted on our new site) we could only wonder how long it would be before the Times decided to up the ante, and show some support for Hezbollah.
What is truly sickening about this whole piece is that it focuses only on the Lebanese deaths. It paints a picture that only Lebanese people are dying. Only Lebanese children are dying or being hurt in this war. In actuality, both sides are suffering from this war. But I'm not taking Europe's or the UN's side in this. Israel must deal with Hezbollah, or this conflict will continue to drag on. There can be no lengthy cease-fires becuase it will only give Hezbollah time to replenish its dwindling supply of rockets. And not every Israeli operation results in death. In fact the raid into the Bekaa Valley (reported here by Yoni Tidi) produced not only high level Hezbollah members, but an intelligence find that rivals that which we found after we took out Zarqawi. That was revealed today on Hugh's show when Yoni called at the bottom of the first hour.
The war will continue until Hezbollah is disarmed, and their control of southern Lebanon is broken. WE don't like the idea of putting an international force ont he border to keep these two separate, but if that's what it takes when Israel is done, then so be it.
But the New York Times should be ashamed of themselves for running this piece of propagandic pap. This only serves to turn more people against Israel's efforts, and break the resolve of it's allies. The Times could care less about dead babaies on either side. They have an agenda, and their reporters in the Middle East are doing a bang-up job of ensuring that everyone hates Israel for the civilian casualties in this war. The Times would have been better in reporting a reminder of who started this war, and why Israel is vehement in its response.
Publius II
The New York Times today has decided that they had better reinforce the Hezbollah propaganda front. And Sabrina Tavernise, the author of the piece, does such a fine job of accusing Israeli soldiers of "slipping into the fog of war," and attacking Lebanese targets indiscriminantly. What she doesn't tell you is anything about the Israeli casualties from Hezbollah's attacks. When you read this piece, you're going to see a bleak picture painted, and one thast points the finger at Israel for this conflict, and all the damage inflicted rather than Hezbollah.
On a mountain road just south of here, a convoy of Lebanese villagers was fleeing north shortly after the war began. They had heard Israeli soldiers telling them to evacuate. Suddenly, a rocket struck a pickup truck full of people. Twenty-one people were killed, more than half of them children.
Israel said it believed the convoy was transporting rockets. The convoy had not notified Israel that it was going to make the trip. Those who survived said in interviews that they were simply following Israeli orders to flee the south as best they could.
The attack, which took place on July 15, was one of the war’s most lethal strikes. It is one of a number of civilian deaths, like the bombing of a house in the village of Qana this week that killed 29 people, that have brought intense criticism on Israel.
Civilian deaths illustrate the raw dilemma of modern warfare, in which a conventional army fights an elusive militia that loads its rocket launchers in family gardens, orchards and on village streets. In Lebanon, the result has been desperate efforts to flee and military miscalculations in the fog of war.
The families of the village of Marwaheen spent the morning of July 15 figuring out how to get away. They awoke to the sound of Israeli soldiers shouting through megaphones that they should evacuate, because war was coming. Musa Safe, a 77-year-old villager, insisted on leaving.
“He was crying,” said Entehab Safe, his daughter, who was tending her injured father in a hospital in the southern city of Sidon. “We decided to leave because of him.”
A group of between 100 and 200 villagers walked to a compound of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, near the town, and asked to be let inside. They were turned away. A spokesman for the force, Milos Strugar, said on Wednesday that workers told the villagers it could not provide shelter. Its compound was small and could not guarantee safety, he said.
“The U.N. said, ‘We can’t have you here,’ ” Ms. Safe said.
The villagers then trudged back to town. Some time later, another group decided to drive the winding mountain road down to the sea and to Tyre, said Musa Safe’s son Ali, one of the villagers who made the trip. Ali Safe, 32, set off with five other people, his wife and baby, his elderly parents and an aunt. In front of him was a pickup packed full of people standing in its back, holding on to fencelike walls.
Just as they rounded a sharp curve in the road on a bluff overlooking the sea, halfway between the villages of Shamaa and Bayada, the missile hit. Bodies were thrown from the white Datsun pickup. They were damaged so badly a rescue worker who responded to the scene said he collected some in pieces: one entire leg and a woman’s torso.
“It’s like when you throw something into the water, you see it spraying,” Mr. Safe recalled, sitting with his wife’s family in a small village north of Tyre. “I saw parts of people flying like that.”
A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces in Jerusalem said that the Israeli military believed the convoy “was transporting weaponry rockets.” But none were retrieved at the scene, according to the villagers and rescue workers. Ahmed Ghannam, whose brother, pregnant wife and six children died in the attack, said the people in the pickup were farmers. Fourteen were children.
The Israeli Defense Forces, in responses to questions about the incident submitted on Sunday, said 10 civilians had been killed in the attack. It was not clear whether the defense forces considered the other people in the car to be militia members, or whether it acknowledged the presence of only 10 people.
On July 17, the newspaper Haaretz reported that the Israelis had begun an investigation into the attack.
The Israeli Defense Forces spokesman also said the convoy had not coordinated its movement with Israel. It has become regular practice for aid and evacuation convoys to request permission from Israel for safe passage. The villagers said they did not understand that notification was necessary to avoid being shot. Few of them had phones, and even if they had, it is nearly impossible to call Israel from Lebanon.
The case was one of those noted in a report released on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch, which said it had identified 153 deaths of Lebanese civilians. It said the killings formed a pattern so extensive that it seemed to indicate that the Israelis were deliberately shooting civilians. It went so far as to accuse Israel of war crimes.
“In many of these strikes there is no military objective anywhere in the vicinity,” said Peter Bouckaert, who conducted the study. “Day after day we are documenting these strikes where they clearly hit civilian targets.”
Israel vigorously denies this and says that it has tried to avoid civilian deaths, but that Hezbollah tactics of working among the population makes that hard.
Hezbollah is woven tightly into the lives of much of the Shiite population in southern Lebanon. Aside from its militia, it helps administer hospitals and schools, an important service in Lebanon, where the central government is weak.
In many southern towns, such as Bint Jbail, the scene of much of the fighting in this war, Hezbollah is essentially in control. In the south, Hezbollah uses its standing to wage war on Israel, launching missiles from neighborhoods friendly to it and storing weapons in buildings such as hospitals and mosques. “In a very difficult situation, Israel is endeavoring to be as surgical as possible,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry. “Our enemy is Hezbollah’s military machine and the infrastructure that supports it. We are targeting that machine.”
The war seemed to pivot on the issue of civilian casualties earlier this week, after the deaths in Qana, more than half of them children. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled a trip to Beirut, where it was clear that Lebanese officials would not receive her. Diplomatic efforts stalled, and Israel agreed to a partial pause in its airstrikes.
High on the hilltop last month, in the attack on the convoy, Mr. Safe’s car was hit as well, and on fire. His wife got out with their baby, Ahmed, and Mr. Safe pulled his father to safety, but his mother burned to death in the car.
“I felt that human beings had no value,” he said, sitting in a quiet hilltop garden, a bandage around his hand. “The human became like animals, like simple fish.”
The Lebanese authorities say more than 500 people have been killed since the war began. They identify most as civilians. Israel tracks Hezbollah deaths and estimates that 350 fighters have been killed since the war began. Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, said that Israeli forces had seen 100 bodies.
Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit organization that monitors defense policy in Washington, said it did not appear that Israeli forces were purposefully taking aim at civilians. “If they had wanted to, they really could have done tremendous damage,” he said. “You could level whole blocks if you really wanted to do that.”
In Beirut, for example, the scale of destruction in the southern Shiite suburbs is breathtaking, but the rest of the city remains largely untouched.
“To really judge it, take Beirut as a whole and compare it to Grozny as a whole,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who directed the Air Force’s study of air power in the 1991 Gulf War. He was referring to the capital of Chechnya, the breakaway Muslim republic that the Russian army flattened in two wars there.
Still, the areas of heaviest fighting, such as Bint Jbail and the village of Aitarun, have been largely leveled. Bodies are still stuck under the rubble in many southern villages.
Israeli planes have flown 6,900 sorties hitting 3,300 targets since July 12, when the conflict began, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry.
Mr. Ghannam buried his brother and his brother’s family in a temporary grave in Tyre. The family considered the road too dangerous to bury them at home.
“The road — people wanted to use it to escape,” he said.
Notice the italicized paragraph above, where Ms. Tavernise tries to spin Hezbollah's role other than the terrorists they are? Don't get us wrong here. We feel sorry for the lives lost in war, but this is hardly the time to accuse Israeli soldiers of working in any sort of "fog of war." We're just under thirty days into this war, and already the MSM is acting like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm waiting to see the first story written, first op-ed written that states Israel is in a "qugmire."
Don't laugh. It's coming. It's just a matter of time.
And I guess we should've been expecting a column like this from our own media. Given how antiwar they are, it comes as no surprise. Again, a column like this was just a matter of time. And after yesterday's piece,/li> in the Boston Globe from the PLO guy (posted on our new site) we could only wonder how long it would be before the Times decided to up the ante, and show some support for Hezbollah.
What is truly sickening about this whole piece is that it focuses only on the Lebanese deaths. It paints a picture that only Lebanese people are dying. Only Lebanese children are dying or being hurt in this war. In actuality, both sides are suffering from this war. But I'm not taking Europe's or the UN's side in this. Israel must deal with Hezbollah, or this conflict will continue to drag on. There can be no lengthy cease-fires becuase it will only give Hezbollah time to replenish its dwindling supply of rockets. And not every Israeli operation results in death. In fact the raid into the Bekaa Valley (reported here by Yoni Tidi) produced not only high level Hezbollah members, but an intelligence find that rivals that which we found after we took out Zarqawi. That was revealed today on Hugh's show when Yoni called at the bottom of the first hour.
The war will continue until Hezbollah is disarmed, and their control of southern Lebanon is broken. WE don't like the idea of putting an international force ont he border to keep these two separate, but if that's what it takes when Israel is done, then so be it.
But the New York Times should be ashamed of themselves for running this piece of propagandic pap. This only serves to turn more people against Israel's efforts, and break the resolve of it's allies. The Times could care less about dead babaies on either side. They have an agenda, and their reporters in the Middle East are doing a bang-up job of ensuring that everyone hates Israel for the civilian casualties in this war. The Times would have been better in reporting a reminder of who started this war, and why Israel is vehement in its response.
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 2:22 AM
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