This morning, there was a large explosion in a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command location in the Bekaa region in southern Lebanon, near the Syrian border.
The PFLP-GC immediately issued a press release saying that this was an IDF airstrike.
Arabic-language media spread the word about the Israeli aggreesion.
Since then, two things happened:
- The IDF denied doing any activity in Lebanon at all.
- Multiple Lebanese security sources reported what did happen:
Five fighters from a pro-Syrian Palestinian militant group were killed in an accidental explosion at a base in eastern Lebanon, a Lebanese security source said Wednesday."An old rocket exploded in an arms depot on the base and five fighters were killed," the security source said, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.In Beirut, a Lebanese military official said the explosion was the result of a blast within the base, adding that there was no airstrike. An official with a regional group allied with the Syrian government, said the explosion was the result of a “human error” that occurred when militants were handling ammunition. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity.
Yet looking at the last several hours of Arabic media reporting on the explosion and its aftermath, the Israeli denial is barely mentioned on a couple of Western-oriented Arabic sites, and the report about an old missile explosion has been ignored completely.
This is even after wire services like AFP reported on the rocket explosion.
This is not government-level censorship. This is an unofficial policy for Arabic media to censor facts that do not fit the narrative or that can cause unease among some of their readership.
If they even published it as a competing set of claims, as The National (UAE) did in English, any thinking person would see that the PFLP-GC is lying and Israel's denial is truthful - and that means that Arabs are less trustworthy than Jews, which contradicts the mega-narrative of Jews being dishonest and Arabs being honorable and trustworthy.
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