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The misinformation war rages on

Why the western media isn’t telling us the full truth about the conflict in Israel and Lebanon.

Eamonn McCann, 24 Oct 2006

Frightening. That was the response of a non-bigoted friend a couple of weeks back to news footage of a huge crowd gathered in Beirut to hear the leader of Hezbollah claim victory over the Israelis in the recent conflict.

This was Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s first public pronouncement since the ceasefire. My friend had, reasonably, taken the turn-out as a measure of how Hezbollah’s popularity has swollen as a result of its resistance to the invasion. Given the projection of Hezbollah as fundamentalist Islamic organisation intent on imposing Sharia law on the world, small wonder he’d experienced a tremor of unease.

But what, I asked, had Nasrallah said to the Beirut multitude? He didn’t know. And I didn’t know either. Because nowhere had either of us encountered a report of the bearded one’s actual remarks.

So, I turned to the English-language Beirut newspaper, the Daily Star. Its editorial on the day after the speech had declared that Nasrallah had thrown down a challenge to Lebanon’s political class, one that all Lebanese should embrace with enthusiasm.

It might be imagined on this basis that the Star is a Hezbollah newspaper. After all, George Bush has denounced Hezbollah as terrorist. In his key speech in Los Angeles on August 1, Tony Blair included the movement in an “arc of extremism” which threatened the whole world and which “we” would have to confront and defeat. The Israeli invasion was backed by the US and Britain on the ground that destroying Hezbollah was an essential element of the War in Terrorism.

So Bush and Blair presumably believe that in calling on “all Lebanese” to endorse Hezbollah, the Star was giving editorial support to Terrorism...

This would be a strange turn of events. In a desperately difficult situation over the last 30 years, the Star has won respect throughout journalism as a serious, independent-minded, secular publication. It is one of a number of affiliates of the US-owned, Paris-based International Herald Tribune. The others include Haaretz (Israel), El Pais (Spain) and Asahi Shimbun (Japan).



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