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Thursday, August 10, 2006

AP practically writing press releases for Hezbollah

Confederate Yankee writes a good essay about Hezbollah's media manipulation. Here's part:
Scan the photos coming out of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, and you'll see and unending stream of dramatic photos of dead women and children and anguished rescue workers climbing through the remains of bombed-out residential buildings, and you will see heart-rending photos of toys in the rubble. You will see mourning. You will see pain. You will see a civilian infrastructure in tatters.

What you will not see, except in very rare cases, is Hezbollah.

The "Party of God," well-known for their parades of armed masked men in the past, have vanished into the ether. You will see no Hezbollah fighters brandishing their weapons with bravado. You will see no photos of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers or rockets prepared to fire upon Israel’s civilian population. You will see no photographs of shattered launchers or weapons caches or even fighting aged men amid the rubble. The media itself quietly reports that anyone who does take such pictures may be killed, though you wouldn’t know it from the amount of attention that disturbing detail has received in the press.

Hezbollah is fighting the Victim's War, hiding behind civilians that they set up as targeted pawns by firing rockets from inside Lebanon's villages, cites, and towns, from outside apartment buildings, hospitals and schools in residential neighborhoods.

It is a war of cowards, largely covered by sympathetic Arab Muslim stringers and their Hezbollah minders who determine what can and what cannot be reported; a war in which the "professional" media is all too complicit.
Well, here are one of those rare cases, along with a caption that is so fawning that one almost has to assume that the author is on the Hezbollah payroll:

A Hezbollah volunteer carries pots and pans, as he passes next to bags full of food trays with rice before delivering them tosome of the hundreds of thousands of refugees now living in schools across the capital at a makeshift Hezbollah-run kitchen in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday Aug. 10, 2006. Even now, despite crippling Israeli airstrikes that have destroyed most of Hezbollah offices across the country, the guerrilla group is actively assisting in relief efforts. Hezbollah runs a sophisticated network of schools, clinics and social services deeply rooted in the Shiite Muslim community.(AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Hezbollah volunteers fill food trays with rice before delivering them to some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees now living in schools across the capital, at a makeshift Hezbollah-run kitchen in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday Aug. 10, 2006. Even now, despite crippling Israeli airstrikes that have destroyed most of Hezbollah offices across the country, the guerrilla group is actively assisting in relief efforts. Hezbollah runs a sophisticated network of schools, clinics and social services deeply rooted in the Shiite Muslim community.(AP Photo/Hussein Malla)