{"id":280151,"date":"2024-11-11T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=280151"},"modified":"2024-11-11T07:22:28","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T07:22:28","slug":"prepping-readers-to-accept-mass-slaughter-in-lebanese-strongholds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/11\/prepping-readers-to-accept-mass-slaughter-in-lebanese-strongholds\/","title":{"rendered":"Prepping Readers to Accept Mass Slaughter in Lebanese \u2018Strongholds\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Dahiyeh, Lebanon attacked by Israel Nov 2024 – Media & Accuracy In Reporting<\/p><\/div>\n

9 Nov 2024 <\/em>– Back in May 2015, the New York Times<\/b>\u2019 Isabel Kershner<\/a> decided to moonlight as an Israeli military propagandist by penning an alleged expos\u00e9 (5\/12\/15<\/a>)\u2014headlined \u201cIsrael Says Hezbollah Positions Put Lebanese at Risk\u201d\u2014in which she diligently conveyed all that Israel had to say about Hezbollah\u2019s infrastructure in south Lebanon.<\/p>\n

The minuscule hamlet of Muhaybib, for example, was said to contain no fewer than \u201cnine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three anti-tank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah command post.\u201d In the village of Shaqra, home to approximately 4,000 people, the Israeli army had meanwhile identified some \u201c400 military sites and facilities belonging to Hezbollah.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The New York Times (5\/12\/15) relayed Israel\u2019s warning that \u201cin the event of another conflict with Hezbollah, many Lebanese civilians will probably be killed, and that it should not be considered Israel\u2019s fault.\u201d Strangely, the same logic does not apply to Israel placing its military headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv.<\/p><\/div>\n

Only after 11 full paragraphs of transmitting the Israeli line did Kershner manage to insert the disclaimer that \u201cthe Israeli claims could not be independently verified.\u201d But by that time, of course, the damage had been done, the reader having already been persuaded that south Lebanon was one big Hezbollah military installation, where Israel could not afford to concern itself with civilian lives in any future conflict. Driving the point home was former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, who informed Kershner that \u201cmany, many Lebanese will be killed\u201d in the next showdown with Hezbollah.<\/p>\n

I happened to be in south Lebanon at the time of the article\u2019s publication, and drove over to Muhaybib and Shaqra<\/a> to check out the fearsome landscape. Though I did not encounter any Hezbollah command posts, I did see some schoolchildren, elderly folks, bakeries, farms, clothing shops and, in Shaqra, a colorful establishment offering \u201cBotox filling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legitimizing destruction<\/b><\/h3>\n
\"CNN:<\/p>\n

CNN<\/strong> (9\/17\/24<\/a>) labels the target of a terrorist attack as a \u201cterror group.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Nine years have now passed since Kershner\u2019s bout of weaponized journalism, and Amidror\u2019s words have certainly rung true: Many, many Lebanese have been killed in Israel\u2019s latest war on Lebanon.<\/p>\n

From October 2023 through November 5, more than 3,000<\/a> people have been slaughtered in the country\u2014among them 589 women and at least 185 children. The vast majority were killed in\u00a0 September through November of 2024, when Israel ramped up its assault on Lebanese territory as a sideshow to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n

More than 800,000 people have been displaced<\/a>. Muhaybib has literally been blown up<\/a> in its entirety, and much of Shaqra has been pulverized as well. Israel has damaged or destroyed<\/a> nearly a quarter of all buildings along the entire southern border.<\/p>\n

And while the United States newspaper of record and other Western corporate media outlets have not exactly been preemptively calling in the strikes, \u00e0 la Kershner, they have nonetheless done a fine job of legitimizing mass killing, displacement and destruction in other ways.<\/p>\n

For starters, as FAIR has written about recently (10\/10\/24<\/a>), there\u2019s the insistence on following the US\/Israeli lead in branding Hezbollah a \u201cterrorist\u201d organization and a \u201cproxy\u201d for Iran. Never mind that the Shia political party and armed group emerged as a direct consequence of the 1982 US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people and constituted a textbook case of terrorism, including the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Israel in September staged an unprecedented terrorist attack<\/a> in Lebanon by detonating personal electronic devices across the country \u2014 killing 12 people, including two children\u2014CNN<\/b> (9\/17\/24<\/a>) spun the episode thusly: \u201cExploding Pagers Injure Members of Iran-Backed Terror Group.\u201d<\/p>\n

Converting communities into targets<\/b><\/h3>\n
\"Guardian:<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/strong> (10\/4\/24<\/a>) was one of numerous outlets that referred to Dahiyeh, a densely packed Beirut suburb, as a \u201cHezbollah stronghold\u201d\u2014painting the entire community was a legitimate military target.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Then there is the matter of the term \u201cHezbollah stronghold,\u201d to which pretty much every corporate media outlet has proved itself hopelessly addicted when describing the densely populated neighborhood of Dahiyeh in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.<\/p>\n

Devastated in Israel\u2019s 2006 war on Lebanon, Dahiyeh is now once again under maniacal bombardment by the Israeli military, which on September 27 leveled a whole residential block in order to assassinate Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Sure enough, the New York Times<\/b> (9\/27\/24<\/a>) was standing by with the headline<\/a>: \u201cIsrael Strikes Hezbollah Stronghold in Attempt to Kill Leader.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just google \u201cHezbollah stronghold\u201d and you\u2019ll see what I mean \u2014 that the press is apparently incapable of talking about Dahiyeh any other way. Or, if you\u2019re not in the mood for googling, here are some illustrative links to the Washington Post<\/b><\/a>, Guardian<\/b><\/a>, Wall Street Journal<\/b><\/a>, ABC News<\/b><\/a>, NBC News<\/b><\/a>, Reuters<\/b><\/a> and Associated Press<\/b><\/a>. And that\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n

To be sure, there is substantial public support in Dahiyeh for Hezbollah\u2014not that support for an anti-Zionist<\/a> resistance organization should make anyone fair game for extrajudicial slaughter. There is also support for numerous other Lebanese parties and groups in this neighborhood of nearly 1 million people, although the \u201cstronghold\u201d designation tends to erase the diversity that exists.<\/p>\n

But the real problem with the terminology is that, when deployed in the context of war, a \u201cstronghold\u201d is more likely to be interpreted as \u201ca fortified place\u201d\u2014the first definition of the word appearing<\/a> in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In that sense, then, Dahiyeh is effectively converted into a legitimate military target, its inhabitants dehumanized by the linguistic arsenal of a media establishment that is ultimately committed to validating Israeli massacres of civilians.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not only Dahiyeh. The press has now expanded its obsessive use of the \u201cstronghold\u201d descriptor in accordance with Israel\u2019s current killing spree in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, both of which regions we are now continuously reminded<\/a> are also \u201cHezbollah strongholds.\u201d When the Lebanese health ministry reported 60 killed in airstrikes in Lebanon\u2019s Bekaa Valley on October 29, the BBC<\/b> noted<\/a> that \u201crescue efforts were still under way in the valley, which is a Hezbollah stronghold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in July, the same outlet had warned<\/a> that the south Lebanese city of Tyre would \u201cbe in the firing line in the event of all-out war, along with the rest of southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.\u201d Four months later, Tyre and the rest of southern Lebanon are an unmitigated horrorscape, blunted for a Western audience by media euphemism.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Bel\u00e9n Fern\u00e1ndez is an <\/em>Al Jazeera columnist and <\/em>a contributing editor at <\/em>Jacobin Magazine. She has written for the<\/em> New York Times, London Review of Books, Current Affairs, and<\/em> Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications. She is the author of <\/em>Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), <\/em>Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), <\/em>Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and <\/em>The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 fair.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

9 Nov 2024 – Only after 11 full paragraphs of transmitting the Israeli line did Kershner manage to insert the disclaimer that \u201cthe Israeli claims could not be independently verified.\u201d But by that time, of course, the damage had been done, the reader having already been persuaded that south Lebanon was one big Hezbollah military installation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":280153,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[1138,1748,3339,3264,88,2097,1855,234,767,2571,880,70,886],"class_list":["post-280151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-fake-news","tag-fake-report","tag-hezbollah","tag-idf","tag-israel","tag-lebanon","tag-mainstream-media-msm","tag-media","tag-middle-east","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-state-terrorism","tag-usa","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280154,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280151\/revisions\/280154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}