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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

The BBC's Hezbollah lovefest

Jeremy Bowen, the infamous BBC editor who blames all of the Middle East problems squarely on Israel, has written another piece that glorifies terrorists, this time Hezbollah:
The mighty Israeli army, one of the most technologically advanced forces in the world, had been unable to stop Lebanese guerrilla fighters from Hezbollah firing low-tech missiles into the north of their country.

In more than a month in 2006 Israel's enormous firepower did what the UN estimated was $3.6bn of damage to Lebanon, including the destruction of 80 bridges, 600km of roads and 900 factories, markets, farms and other commercial buildings.

It killed 1,187 Lebanese, mainly civilians, and wounded 4,092.

But it could not stop Hezbollah firing its rockets, and it could not rescue the two Israeli soldiers whose capture by Hezbollah sparked off the fighting in the first place.

He gets this close to calling the scrappy Hezbollah terrorists "heroic" in the face of the unfeeling Zionist army machine mowing down only civilian infrastructure.

Also, the "mainly civilians" part, stated as fact, is not clear at all. Israel released the names and addresses of 440 Hezbollah terrorists killed during the war, and it estimates about 600 were killed altogether. Lebanon, on the other hand, counts all Hezbollah members as "civilians" in its counts of the casualties. At best, Bowen is being misleading, at worst he is a liar, and at any rate without his citing his sources we will never know where he gets his numbers from.
(h/t: Backspin)