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Demonizing Hezbollah to Legitimize a US/Israel Onslaught on Lebanon Gregory Shupak ([link removed])


Corporate media’s handling of the US-supported Israeli assault on Lebanon has, like all war propaganda ([link removed]) , entailed a campaign to demonize the purported bad guys—Hezbollah, in this case. The coverage of the US/Israeli assault on Lebanon has also evinced a casual disregard for Lebanese lives, and often an outright zest for killing the country’s people.


** One person’s terrorist…
------------------------------------------------------------
WSJ: Israel’s Deterrence Lesson for Biden

The Wall Street Journal (9/29/24 ([link removed]) ) celebrates assassination as "deterrence."

Denouncing Hezbollah as a terrorist ([link removed]) outfit is pervasive in corporate punditry. A Wall Street Journal editorial (9/25/24 ([link removed]) ) called the group “terrorists” three times, as in, "One lesson of October 7 is that Israel can’t let terrorists build up armies."

Another Journal editorial (9/29/24 ([link removed]) ) used the T-word twice before asserting that Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader Israel recently assassinated, was “a terrorist whose killers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Europeans.” The claim that Hezbollah is liable for killing “thousands of Americans and Europeans” is extraordinary, but the authors don’t make clear who or what they’re talking about, let alone offer any evidence to support their claim.

In the New York Times (9/25/24 ([link removed]) ), columnist Bret Stephens said Hezbollah is a “terrorist militia” and a “terrorist group” that “terrorizes its neighborhood.”

Max Boot ([link removed]) of the Washington Post (9/26/24 ([link removed]) , 9/28/24 ([link removed]) ) called Nasrallah a “terrorist kingpin” and referred to Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization” three times. “It would be nice to think the Lebanese government could now disarm Hezbollah and end its reign of terror,” he mused, describing the organization as “one of the world's deadliest terrorist groups.”


** Violence they dislike
------------------------------------------------------------

Two decades out from 9/11, it should be clear to honest observers that the term "terrorism” is politicized ([link removed]) to the point of uselessness. The US, Canada and other Western states have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but there is no universally applied objective measure of whether a given group deserves that label, nor is there a neutral body that decides who is and is not a terrorist. The US put Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress on a terror list in 1988, and Mandela’s name was not removed until 2008 (NBC, 12/7/13 ([link removed]) ).
Amal Saad: The US and other Western powers' designation of Hizbullah as a terrorist organization has effectively empowered Israel to escalate its campaign of state terrorism in Lebanon

Amal Saad (X, 10/4/24 ([link removed]) ): "The US and other Western powers' designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization has effectively empowered Israel to escalate its campaign of state terrorism in Lebanon."

In practice, to paraphrase what Noam Chomsky said ([link removed]) when asked if he thinks Hezbollah is a terrorist organization: “Terrorism” is used by the great powers to refer to violence that they dislike. The US considers Hezbollah a terrorist group, he argued, because the US supports Israeli invasions and occupations of Lebanon, and Hezbollah has twice driven Israel out of the country through successful military campaigns.

Amal Saad of Cardiff University, a scholar who focuses on Hezbollah, raised ([link removed]) the salient point about the US and its Western allies’ listing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization:

The blanket proscription of Hezbollah, including its civilian and political branches, has created a direct conflict between domestic and international law. By criminalizing these non-military elements, it provides Israel with cover to blur the critical distinction in international law between combatants and noncombatants, enabling it to act with impunity....

This was showcased by Israel’s strike on Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Unit, along with separate incidents where many other paramedics and healthcare workers were killed while attempting to rescue victims of Israel's attacks. It was also shown by Israel’s pager attacks on Hezbollah cadres, most of whom were members of its mobilization unit (off-duty reservists and thus noncombatants), healthcare workers and other civilians.


** Lebanon 'hijacked' and 'kidnapped'
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: What This Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran Conflict Is Really About

What the Mideast crisis is "really about," according to Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 10/1/24 ([link removed]) ): a struggle between "decent countries," like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and "brutal, authoritarian regimes."

Stephens (New York Times, 9/25/24 ([link removed]) ) built on the terrorism theme, writing that Hezbollah has “hijacked” Lebanon. Hezbollah and its allies won the majority of seats in Lebanon’s parliament in 2018, and although the bloc lost its majority in 2022, it still won more seats than any other formation (Al Jazeera, 5/17/22 ([link removed]) ). Performing well in elections isn’t “hijacking” a country.

Nor is it “kidnapping” a country, as Stephens’ Times colleague Thomas Friedman (10/1/24 ([link removed]) ) asserted. Friedman wrote:

It is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah...were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon.

Friedman is also wildly oversimplifying the range of views held by people in “the Sunni and Christian Arab world.” The Associated Press’ Bassem Mroue (9/28/24 ([link removed]) ), writing from Beirut, characterized Nasrallah as “idolized by his Lebanese Shiite followers and respected by millions of others across the Arab and Islamic world,” even as Hezbollah lost some of its popularity after intervening on the side of the Syrian government in the war in that country.

Saad Hariri, the two-time Lebanese Prime Minister and leader of the primarily Sunni Future Movement party, called Nasrallah’s assassination “a cowardly act that we condemn in its entirety.” He offered “heartfelt condolences to [Nasrallah’s] family and comrades,” and added that the killing has brought Lebanon and the region “into a new phase of violence” (LBC International,9/28/24 ([link removed]) ).

Lebanese Christian leaders praised Nasrallah, including the country’s former president, Michel Aoun, who called Nasrallah “a distinguished and honest leader who led the national resistance on the paths of victory and liberation” (Newsweek, 9/28/24 ([link removed]) ).


** Reduced to a 'proxy'
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: A Death in Beirut

For the Washington Post (9/29/24 ([link removed]) ), Nasrallah's assassination was "a much-deserved comeuppance for an Iranian proxy militia."

A slight variation on the effort to suggest that Hezbollah should be understood in purely sectarian terms are the ubiquitous reductions of the group to an Iranian “proxy” (Wall Street Journal, 9/29/24 ([link removed]) , 9/25/24 ([link removed]) ; Washington Post, 9/29/24 ([link removed]) ; Boston Globe, 10/6/24 ([link removed]) ; New York Times, 10/1/24 ([link removed]) ). Stephens (New York Times, 9/25/24 ([link removed]) ) made the same allegation but in more racist, dehumanizing language,
writing that “Tehran is the head of the octopus and Hezbollah...is merely one of its tentacles.”

As I’ve previously shown (FAIR.org, 4/21/21 ([link removed]) , 8/26/20 ([link removed]) ), it just isn’t true that Hezbollah is an Iranian vassal. The goal of this narrative is to misrepresent Hezbollah as a foreign imposition without a mass base in Lebanon.

The point of presenting Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon in the most negative possible light is, of course, to make the US/Israeli onslaught against Lebanon sound legitimate: Readers who think Hezbollah is a terrorist group without any legitimacy in Lebanon are more likely to support a war to crush them than audiences who are aware of facts that don’t fit this narrative—such as the group’s record of building “a vast network of social services, including hospitals, schools and youth programs” (New York Times, 8/14/20 ([link removed]) ).

Nor, likewise, do simplistic tales that cast Hezbollah as a purely malevolent force capture the widespread popularity ([link removed]) the group has at times garnered in Lebanon and elsewhere in Arab majority countries. It won considerable admiration in 2000 when its military forced Israel to end its 18-year occupation of Lebanon (AP,9/28/24 ([link removed]) ), and, as the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (3/8/16 ([link removed]) ) conceded, when it successfully fought off Israel’s 2006 re-invasion.


** 'Remarkable restraint'
------------------------------------------------------------
WSJ: Biden Tilts at Hezbollah Windmills

The Wall Street Journal (9/25/24 ([link removed]) ) claimed that Israel has given the last 11 months "over to diplomacy on its northern front." That "diplomacy" has attacked Lebanon 7,845 times, killing more than 600 people, including at least 137 civilians (Al Jazeera, 9/11/24 ([link removed]) ; Amnesty International, 9/25/24 ([link removed]) ).

The commentariat has also painted Hezbollah as the aggressor in its struggle with Israel. The first Journal editorial (9/25/24 ([link removed]) ) on Israel's Lebanon assault said that Israel had given the months since October 7 “to diplomacy on its northern front, even as Hezbollah fired 8,500 rockets and forced 60,000 Israelis from their homes.” The Journal's follow-up editorial (9/29/24 ([link removed]) ) praised Israel for supposedly "exhibit[ing] remarkable restraint for nearly a year in response to Hezbollah's thousands of rocket and missile attacks that have made the country's north uninhabitable.”

Carine Hajjar of the Boston Globe (10/6/24 ([link removed]) ) rationalized Israel’s attacks in similar terms, writing that “in the past year, more than 60,000 Israelis have been displaced from the northern region by escalating rocket fire. No country would put up with that.”

These are complete misrepresentations: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) shows (Al Jazeera,9/11/24 ([link removed]) ) that Israel was responsible for about 82% of all attacks on either side of the Lebanon/Israel armistice line between October 7, 2023, and September 6, 2024. In roughly the same period, prior to Israel’s most recent escalation, Israel had killed 137 civilians in Lebanon, whereas attacks by armed groups in Lebanon killed 14 civilians in Israel (Amnesty International, 9/25/24 ([link removed]) ).

Totally absent from the Journal editorials is the significant fact that Hezbollah has consistently indicated that it would agree to a ceasefire with Israel if Israel agreed to end itsgenocide ([link removed]) in Gaza (Reuters, 2/29/24 ([link removed]) ; AP,7/2/24 ([link removed]) ). Indeed, an Israeli official told NBC (9/28/24 ([link removed]) ) that Israel “took the decision to assassinate Nasrallah after concluding he would not accept any diplomatic solution to end the fighting on the Israel/Lebanon [armistice line] that was
not tied to an end to the war in Gaza.”

Whatever corporate media say, Israel isn’t massacring people in Lebanon because Hezbollah is attacking Israel; it’s massacring them so that it can go on massacring Palestinians.


** Arab lives don’t matter to corporate media
------------------------------------------------------------
Al Jazeera: Lebanon sees deadliest day since civil war as Israeli attacks kill 492

Arab deaths are rarely treated as having serious moral weight in US corporate media (Al Jazeera, 9/23/24 ([link removed]) ).

The op-ed pages have also demonstrated, at best, a callous indifference to Lebanese life and, at worst, rah-rah enthusiasm for the slaughter of Lebanese people.

The first Journal editorial (9/25/24 ([link removed]) ) wrote:

Following the exploding pagers and successful attack on Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force commanders, Israel this week dropped evacuation notices and bombed Hezbollah’s missile stores. Israel says it destroyed tens of thousands of missiles and launchers, most hidden in civilian homes, leaving Hezbollah without half its strategic arsenal.

Lebanon says more than 550 people have been killed, including terrorists.

The attacks on the Radwan Force killed 15 Hezbollah members and 31 people in total (NPR, 9/21/24 ([link removed]) ). Wiping out 16 non-Hezbollah persons, including three children (Le Monde, 9/21/24 ([link removed]) ), evidently isn’t enough for the editors to qualify the extent to which this violence was a “success.”

The subtext of the reference to the “evacuation notices” is that Israel did its due diligence by warning civilians—“death threats” is more apt than “evacuation notices”—but UN human rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani pointed out ([link removed]) that these “notices” seemed to presume that civilians would know where Hezbollah’s weapons are stored. The messages, she said, helped spread “panic, fear and chaos.” She went on to say:

If you warn people of an imminent attack, that does not absolve you of the responsibility to protect civilians. The obligation to protect civilians is paramount. So, whether you've sent out a warning telling civilians to flee, [it] doesn't make it okay to then strike those areas, knowing full well that the impact on civilians will be huge.

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (9/23/24 ([link removed]) ), despite issuing these supposed warnings,

in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the Israeli army deliberately denies civilians enough time to escape the areas being bombed, offering them no real protection from the dangers arising from military operations.

Moreover, some of those Hezbollah “missile stores” the Journal referred to took the form of “hospitals, medical centers and ambulances,” all of which Israeli airstrikes damaged, as the Lebanese minister of health noted (Human Rights Watch, 9/25/24 ([link removed]) ). The Lebanese Health Ministry also said that Israeli bombs hit “cars of people trying to flee” (Al Jazeera, 9/23/24 ([link removed]) ). That the Journal didn’t mention Israel’s killing of 50 children in its September 23 attacks (CNN, 9/24/24 ([link removed]) ) demonstrates how little value ([link removed]) the paper assigns to Arab life.

The same applies to a Washington Post editorial (9/29/24 ([link removed]) ), which began:

In a display of military and intelligence prowess reminiscent of its surprise victory over Arab armies in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has delivered a series of devastating preemptive blows on Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese paramilitary force, culminating in the assassination of its longtime leader, Hasan Nasrallah, under a hail of bombs on Friday.

The piece went on to say that

Israel seems to prefer not to have to follow up its air campaign by going into Lebanon on the ground, which would be costly for both the Jewish state and civilians of Lebanon inevitably caught up in the fighting.

Here Lebanon’s dead are erased, their murders cast as a hypothetical possibility rather than a well-documented reality, while Israeli brutality is praised as “a display of military and intelligence prowess.”


** 'More Hezbollah's fault'
------------------------------------------------------------
HRW: Lebanon: Israeli Strikes Kill Hundreds as Hostilities Escalate

What the Wall Street Journal (9/29/24 ([link removed]) ) called "a remarkable display of intelligence [and] technological skill," Human Rights Watch (9/25/24 ([link removed]) ) said "appears to violate the prohibition against booby-traps" under international law.

When they didn't ignore civilian deaths, some of these pundits blamed Hezbollah for them. The Journal editorial board (9/29/24 ([link removed]) ) wrote:

Israel has changed its strategy from tit-for-tat responses to a pre-emptive campaign to degrade Hezbollah’s missile stores, launchers and military leadership. These are all justified targets in war. It’s tragic when civilians are also killed, but that is more Hezbollah's fault. Nasrallah, who knew he was a marked man, located his hideout under residential buildings.

Israel’s campaign has been a remarkable display of intelligence, technological skill and above all political will. The sabotage of Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies wounded or killed scores of fighters. Its targeted bombings against Hezbollah's terror masters showed how much Israeli intelligence has penetrated its communications. It continued to bomb Hezbollah targets on Sunday, including military commanders.

Even if US/Israeli attacks were limited to what the Journal calls “justified targets in war,” the bombers’ obligations wouldn’t end there. It’s inadequate—not to mention callous—to brush aside dead civilians as being “more Hezbollah’s fault.” As Human Rights Watch (9/25/24 ([link removed]) ) explained:

The attacking party is not relieved from its obligation to take into account the risk to civilians, including the duty to avoid causing disproportionate harm to civilians if the defending party has located military targets within or near populated areas.

Of course, the US/Israeli airstrikes didn’t just “degrade Hezbollah's missile stores, launchers and military leadership.” Rather, they “randomly and directly target[ed] civilian buildings, including the buildings of surrounding hospitals and schools,” according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (9/23/24 ([link removed]) ). According to the group, Israel also “used drones to light fires in southern Lebanon’s forests” and burn agricultural land.

As the UN’s refugee agency put it ([link removed]) two days prior to the publication of this Journal editorial, “118,466 Lebanese and Syrian people have been displaced inside Lebanon as Israel airstrikes continue to devastate civilian lives.” It’s patently false to describe such actions as “targeted bombings against...terror masters.”

Likewise, Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attack (CounterSpin, 9/27/24 ([link removed]) ) didn’t exclusively kill and wound “scores of fighters.” The sabotage killed at least 37 people, including children and medical workers, an apparent violation of the prohibition against booby-traps under international law (Human Rights Watch,9/25/24 ([link removed]) ). The explosions wounded nearly 3,000, many of them civilian bystanders (CNN, 9/27/24 ([link removed]) ). Calling all this mass maiming and murder “a remarkable display of intelligence [and] technological skill” betrays a racist lust for Arab blood.

Matthew Levitt of the Boston Globe (9/23/24 ([link removed]) ) was similarly unconcerned with the harm done to noncombatants, and gushed over Israel’s technical mastery: “Israel, in an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger deception, outfoxed Hezbollah” in a “tactical success.” Yet the communication devices blew up “in crowded civilian areas, such as residential streets and grocery stores, as well as in people’s homes,” causing innumerable people to lose one or more eyes or hands or both (Amnesty International, 9/20/24 ([link removed]) ).

Whether it’s this cold-blooded attitude to people in Lebanon, or offering one-dimensional accounts of Hezbollah’s role in the country that reduce it to mere villainy, pundits appear to be using their platforms to try to get the public to sign off on savage US/Israeli violence.


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