Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Media bias in Lebanon incident (Barry Rubin)

Along the border with Lebanon, east of Metulla, some bushes were pushing in on the border fence. The fence is set in slightly from the border precisely so that Israeli soldiers can work on it. The IDF called UNIFIL and informed the UN that this work was going to be done today so that they could tell the Lebanese army that there was no aggression going on but just routine maintenance. Soldiers from UNIFIL came to observe and can be seen standing next to Israeli soldiers in the photos. Photographers were also standing by to film the operation.

But Lebanese soldiers opened fire on the Israelis who were working and in no way acting aggressively. The fact that journalists were standing next to the Lebanese soldiers shows that they knew Israel was going to do this maintenance and were observing. After the Israeli soldiers were ambushed, they returned fire. Reportedly, one Israeli officer, three Lebanese soldiers, and a Lebanese (?) journalist were killed.

So how did Reuters and Yahoo using an AP photo report this? By captions on photos saying that Israeli soldiers had crossed into Lebanon and been fired on! Other news agencies merely reported: Israel says the soldiers were inside Israel; Lebanon says they were on Lebanese territory.

Reuters: "An Israeli soldier is seen on a crane on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Israeli border near Adaisseh village, southern Lebanon August 3, 2010. Israeli artillery shelled the Lebanese village on Tuesday, wounding two people, after Lebanese Army troops fired warning shots at Israeli soldiers."

Yahoo: "A Lebanese officer spoke on condition of anonymity under military guidelines, said the clash occurred as Israeli troops tried to remove a tree from the Lebanese side of the border." No Israeli is quoted.

AP also missed explaining the story properly: "The violence apparently erupted over a move by Israeli soldiers to cut down a tree along the border, a sign of the high level of tensions at the frontier where Israel fought in 2006 with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah....There was no sign of any extensive Israeli preparations for a large-scale operation — an early indication the clash might not trigger a wider conflict."

The truth is easy to ascertain--did Israel announce the maintenance, permit the photographers and UN people to watch and then cross deliberately into Lebanon?--but Israel is being portrayed as an aggressor that caused the outbreak of fighting. So millions of people will either believe that Israel was at fault or that the event is in question.

The narrative, however, is simple: In an unprovoked attack, Lebanese soldiers fired on Israelis and murdered one soldier.

The presence of the photographers ahead of time, and particularly the fact that the journalist who was killed worked for the Hezbollah-aligned Al Akhbar newspaper, combined with the fact that the initial fire was not towards the soldier who was cutting the tree but towards his commanders, all indicate something being planned ahead of time.

(The Hezbollah-Al Akhbar link was reported in Corriere.)

Israel's statement on Lebanon incident

From Docstalk:

Earlier today Israeli soldiers were fired upon by the Lebanese Army-please note our soldiers were on the Israeli side of the border. There is a gap between the “fence” and the actual border. Our soldiers had coordinated with UNIFIL the ongoing the maintenance work on the fence. We were simply clearing some brush and shrubs from the fence area. You are reminded that this was the location of the abduction of several of our Israeli soldiers a few years ago. There was nothing unique about this ongoing maintenance work.Without provocation our soldiers were fired upon by a sniper(s) and we are still gathering intel on this point of the story. The facts are the soldiers doing the clearing work were located in one position and the Israeli commanders who were supervising the activity were located in an another location. It was these commanders that were initially shot at and regrettably a reserve Lt. Col was killed. A second commander , a Captain, was critically wounded and rushed to hospital. No further information available as to his condition.

This was a clear provocation-the soldiers doing the brush work were not initially fired upon, the Lebanese Army fired directly upon our commanders-clearly violating UN Res. 1701. I can confirm that there were no mortars fired onto our northern border. However, we were asked to cease retaliatory fire when our men were hit-we did so in order to allow the enemy to clear away its fallen soldiers (3). Thirty minutes after we honored the cease fire a RPG unit fired on one of our tanks. They missed, we responded and the RPG group went silent.

The border is now quiet, has been for a few hours. Israel is now engaged in more intel information gathering. This was the worst violation of the border since 2006. An evolving story and we thank the IDF for its work.

From The Muqata, summarizing the Q&A:

Noah Pollak (Commentary Mag): Why was this so well documented on the Lebanese side? Seems odd.

Lt. Col Avital: We are investigating. Were snipers brought especially for this attack? We will know in next few hours.

Michael Totten: Rumors of Hizbollah fighters on scene. Is this true?

Lt. Col Avital: Right now, full responsibility on Lebanese Army. This will be checked.

Lt. Col Avital: Soldiers conducting maintenance work; it was the IDF commanders who watched the work who were shot at.

The Border is currently calm.

Official Casualty Statement:

Lt Col (res) killed: Dov Harari.
Critically wounded (res) company commander (Captain).

Another report I saw via email says that Hezbollah officers might have been in LAF uniforms, because their actions were more Hezbollah-like than LAF-like.

Keep in mind, as I've been reporting, that Hezbollah has been under political pressure from Lebanon for the likelihood that Hezbollah members were behind the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Hariri. This would provide a perfect way to deflect from that scandal.

Reporters present during clash Israel Lebanon

Surprisingly there were reporters present when the clash happened. No-one wonders why they were there. Reporters are not all the time present where the army (of any country) is, or are they? Why were they there?

The journalist who got killed is Assaf Abu Rahhal and he was connected to the newspaper Al-Ahkbar. Interesting detail is that Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said the following about this newspaper on March 16, 2006:

On March 16, 2006, the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt appeared on the popular LBC talk show Kalam Alnas, and he seemed unusually agitated over plans for the launch of Beirut’s newest paper. “Who says the Syrians are really gone,” he declaimed. “Together with the Iranians, they are funding a new newspaper called Al Akhbar.”

The new paper, Jumblatt said, was a tool of Hizbollah, the core of the opposition and an ally of Iran and Syria. He repeated rumours that its mandate was to promote Khomeinism, brainwashing readers into supporting the allegedly fanatical militants dragging Lebanon into war with Israel. The paper, he claimed, would take an Islamist position on individual liberties and endorse Baath-style repression.

Jumblatt made these comments when the first issue of the newspaper was not out yet. It's odd to blame the unborn baby. However, the article continues:

Al Akhbar was the brainchild of the widely admired left-wing journalist Joseph Samaha, who quit his job editing As Safir – one of Lebanon’s two leading dailies, which he helped found in 1974 – for the chance to launch his own paper. But months before its debut, Samaha’s vision of a critical, reader-friendly paper was already being overshadowed by his stated sympathies for the opposition and the newspaper’s purported association with Hizbollah.

And states eventually:

Many inside Lebanon still see it as a more sophisticated front for Hizbollah – though unlike Al Manar, Hizbollah’s TV channel, the paper could not be reasonably accused of propaganda.

From what I grasp of the rest of the article is that the newspaper does a pretty well job, but still - if it is true that inside Lebanon it is seen as a more sophisticated front for Hezbollah... - it is something to keep in mind.

It might be coincidence, but the other journalist, Ali Chaayeb, who was present at the time of the clash and who got injured, is connected to al-Manar.

The Gulf's problem with Blackberry

Al Arabiya reports:

The United Arab Emirates' looming crackdown on BlackBerry services will extend to foreign visitors, putting the government's concerns over the smart phones in direct conflict with the country's ambitions to be a business and tourism haven.

The Emirates' telecoms regulator said Monday that travelers to the city-state of Dubai and the important oil industry center of Abu Dhabi will - like the 500,000 local subscribers - have to do without BlackBerry e-mail, messaging and Web services starting Oct. 11, even when they carry phones issued in other countries. The handsets themselves will still be allowed for phone calls.

And what exactly is the UAE problem with Blackberries?

Emirati authorities say the move is based on security concerns because BlackBerry data are automatically shipped to company computers abroad, where it is difficult for local authorities to monitor for illegal activity or abuse.

The security issues are not, as has been framed in some sources, that Emirati data is being saved on Canadian servers where they cannot control it. The issue is that the UAE wants to monitor personal communications that are now being encrypted.

I found the following from Arab News, about rumors of a similar Saudi move, to be more troubling:

...The Al Arabiya satellite channel reported Monday that the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) will not ban BlackBerry services after the Kingdom's three major telecommunication companies reached a solution with Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind BlackBerry phones, to provide CITC with monitoring services.

So does this mean that Saudi Arabia can now read all Blackberry messages that originate or terminate in the kingdom?

Does the US or Canada have that ability?

Apparently, India also has a deal with Blackberry to watch messages, and Kuwait got RIM to block certain adult websites from its browser.

A few years ago, Skype caved to Chinese demands that its messages be visible to authorities, and created a less-secure version of Skype which the Chinese can monitor. This sounds very similar.

Muqata, Israellycool liveblogging attack on Lebanese border (updated)

Details are sketchy but there was a "massive" exchange of fire between the IDF and Lebanese forces. The Muqata is liveblogging, and so is Aussie Dave.

So far it looks like 4 Lebanese killed, including a journalist. Lebanese media report an Israeli soldier was killed and one seriously wounded.

AP released this photo, saying that it shows an Israeli soldier on the Lebanese side of the border, possibly installing a camera in what might have been the spark that started the fire. The Muqata points out that the border fence is not exactly along the route of the Blue Line and the soldier was inside the border itself.

The IDF says "The border area is east of the Israeli town Metula. The incident occurred west of the internationally recognized "Blue Line" (the border between Israel and Lebanon) and east of the security fence, thus lying in Israeli territory."

UPDATE: Both Muqata and Israellycool are uncovering some disturbing wire service photos that seem to imply that UNIFIL was on the scene during the incident. The fact that there are photos from what seem to be beforehand (like the one above) makes this look a little like this incident was pre-planned, with both UNIFIL and media knowledge. I'm no fan of conspiracy theories, but the time to research these issues is now, not months from now. It is not as if we haven't seen cooperation between Hezbollah, UNIFIL and the media before.

UPDATE 2: Commenter David sends us this photo from Ha'aretz showing blue-bereted UN "peacekeepers" next to Lebanese forces, although I don't know the timeframe.

Ha'aretz also confirms the Israeli soldier killed, 45-year-old Lt. Col. Dov Harari, from Netanya.

UPDATE 3: From Israel Matzav:

Israel Radio reports (6:00 pm) that Northern sector commander Gadi Eizencott ... said was that the IDF was ambushed while doing work, they returned fire, then stopped firing to let the LAF (at the LAF's request) retrieve bodies and wounded, and then got 'sucker punched' with an RPG shot at a tank.

Arabs freak when Tunisian singer chants "Long live Netanyahu!"

A Tunisian entertainer, Mohsen Sharif, has been captured on video entertaining a group of visiting Jewish pilgrims who annually come to Tunisia to visit the ancient synagogue in Djerba on Lag B'Omer, last May.

On the video, he starts a chant, "Long live Netanyahu! Long live Bibi!"

Not surprisingly, the Arab reaction has been a bit negative.

A Facebook group immediately popped up, calling him a traitor and demanding that his nationality be stripped, complete with disparaging (and some threatening) images.

Hamas infighting?

Firas Press reports about some serious Hamas infighting between the Al Qassam Brigades and the official Gaza security forces. These include kidnappings, beatings and public accusations of indecency.

Firas Press does very little original reporting, and usually directly rips stories off other Palestinian Arab sites. This story was copied from Palvoice.com, which is also Fateh.org - so it is hardly unbiased. Nevertheless, it does name some names, so it might have some validity.

Also at the same site is a story about a senior Hamas sheikh, 42 year old Mahmoud Abu Abdallah of Deir al-Balah, caught red-handed molesting a girl. The case was closed and hushed up when Hamas officials intervened.

Jordan says rocket from Sinai; Egypt denies

From AFP:

Jordan has proof a Grad-type rocket that hit its port city of Aqaba killing one person and wounding five others was fired from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, a senior official told AFP on Tuesday.

"We can now say without hesitation that the Grad rocket was launched from Sinai," said the official close to the investigation who was speaking on condition of anonymity 24 hours after the rocket slammed into Aqaba.

"We have strong suspicions about the identity of the group behind this attack," he added, declining to name the group for now.

Egypt denies it:

A senior Egyptian official on Tuesday rejected allegations that the rockets that struck the Jordanian port of Aqaba and the vicinity of the neighbouring Israeli city of Eilat the previous day were fired from the Sinai Peninsula.
South Sinai governor Mohamed Abdel-Fadil Shousha told the German Press Agency dpa: 'Let the media say whatever they want. The border between Egypt, Israel and Jordan is a region of mountains and it does not make sense to launch the type of missiles they are talking about.'

But, just to make sure, Egypt decided to look anyway:

Egypt has launched a search operation in the Sinai Peninsul after the firing of rockets that have reached the territories of Israel and Jordan on Monday, an Egyptian security official said Tuesday. The source claimed the move was in response to Jordanian declarations of holding proof the rocket fire was performed from the Sinai Peninsula.

Arab media quotes Israeli reports that a sixth missile was found in the Sinai, aimed towards Eilat, which would indicate that the rockets were indeed shot from Egypt.

The group suspected of firing the rocket is called Global Jihad. Haaretz' Avi Issacharoff thinks that Aqaba could have been an intended target as well, as the jihadists hate Jordan almost as much as they hate Israel. He says that Global Jihad often trains in Gaza but operates in the Sinai, indicating a relationship with Hamas.

Free Gaza ignores increased aid to Gaza

Israel has steadily been working to increase the number of goods being brought into Gaza. The average number of trucks entering Gaza with goods has gone up from 140 to 250, and Israel is expanding both the number of hours and the size of the Kerem Shalom crossing.

This is all in response to the flotilla incident, so pretty much anyone would agree that the organizers of the flotilla have succeeded in helping ordinary Gazans, as prices have plummeted for consumer goods and the Gaza economy is in significantly better shape today than it was only two months ago.

Yet the Free Gaza movement is almost silent on this accomplishment. In fact, rather than celebrate its role in helping Gaza, it is dismissive of any increased aid, quoting UNRWA's Chris Gunness on its website as saying that any limitations on goods going into Gaza is still collective punishment and illegal. One would think that they would at least be somewhat self-congratulatory on helping Gazans - their supposed goal - but they are not.

I have not seen anything from Free Gaza or similar groups that suggest any way to limit Hamas' ability to build or import weapons aimed at Israeli civilians.

It sure sounds like their goal is not to help Gazans but to help Hamas. Which would be consistent with the published positions of these "peace activists" in favor of violent "resistance."

Daniel Schorr's journalistic ethical dilemma

Judea Pearl writes in the Jewish Journal about journalist Daniel Schorr, who passed away last week. Pearl quotes a letter he once received from Schorr in 2003 that in turn quoted from his autobiography the following poignant story:

My last major assignment in Poland was to produce, in 1959, an hour-long documentary, “Poland-Country on a Tightrope,” for Ed Murrow’s CBS Reports series. This gave me a production team and the time and resources for a deeper look at Poland-its people, its schools, its fast-decollectivizing farms.

And Oswiecim. Auschwitz.

In 1959 not many from the West had visited Auschwitz, and I was not prepared for what I would see and try to capture on film. I have always tried to separate my Jewish heritage from my reporting, but keeping emotion under control in Auschwitz, where members of my family may have died, was not easy.

I had to read parts of my script several times, trying to control a catch in my throat and sound detached as I reported, “Here was the greatest death factory ever devised, where a million died, pushed through these gas chambers at a rate of 60,000 a day, their bodies efficiently moved out and lifted mechanically into brick ovens after their clothes and hair and gold teeth had been removed. For many, there was no room in the ovens, and they were buried in open pits, now these stagnant ponds. If you run your hand along the bottom, you will pick up human ashes and fragments of bone.”

...While working on this Polish documentary, I ran into what may have been the greatest ethical dilemma of my career. Our little CBS cavalcade of three rented cars, carrying the camera crew, the producer, and a Polish interpreter, was driving through a small town in eastern Poland, not far from the Soviet border, when we espied a strange sight. It was a caravan of about ten horse-drawn wagons, carrying a few dozen people and piled high with their possessions. Stopping to talk to them, I discovered that they were Polish Jews and that I could converse with them in the Yiddish that I had hardly used since childhood.

They had come across the border in the Soviet Union and were on their way to a railway station, bound for Vienna and from there to Israel.

Our camera was soon set up in the muddy road, and I interviewed them in Yiddish. They could not tell me, however, how it was that they were permitted to travel to Israel. Out of consideration for Arab opinion, Russia and its satellites officially banned emigration to Israel.

Back in Warsaw the next day I consulted the Israeli minister, Shimon Amir, a chess-playing friend of mine.

“They told you they were on their way to Israel, and you have that on film?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “But how is it possible?”

“All right, since you know this much, I will tell you the rest, and then you will decide what to do.”

He explained that the Jews came from a part of Poland that had been annexed by the Soviet Union, that there were several thousand more caught on the Soviet side who had survived the war and the Holocaust and were desperately anxious to leave. Israel had negotiated a delicate secret arrangement with the Soviet and Polish governments. The Jews would be “repatriated” to Poland with the understanding that they would almost immediately leave the country-bound for Israel.

“But there was one condition attached to the agreement,” said Amir.

“The arrangement must remain a secret. If any word becomes public, the Soviets will immediately cancel the arrangement.”

“So,” my friend concluded, “you can decide, Mr. Schorr. Put this on television, and you condemn thousands of Jews to remaining in the Soviet Union.”

Each evening, my cameraman would pack up the cans of film we had shot that day and ship them by air to New York, later to be assembled with narration for our documentary. But I held back the reel with the Jewish interviews. It stayed on my desk in the hotel next day, and the next day and the next. I would have liked to have consulted Murrow, but could not do so over an open telephone. I never decided, exactly, that for humanitarian reasons I would practice self-censorship. I simply kept postponing the decision until it was too late. After a while, my camera crew stopped asking about it.

This was a profound violation of my journalistic ethic that a reporter has no right to interpose himself between information legitimately acquired and the public he serves.

My CBS Reports program, “Poland-Country on a Tightrope,” went on the air, documenting the political chill settling over Poland as Gomulka came to terms with his Soviet bosses. Auschwitz was in my film. But not the caravan of Jews making their way to Israel.

When next I was in New York, I brought the reel of film with me and went to see Murrow. He had strong pro-Israel sympathies himself. When he was sick, my Zionist mother had a tree planted in Israel in his name as a prayer for his recovery. His first question to me was, “How is my tree doing?”

I then produced the can of film and explained how, against all my principles,I had withheld it. All he said was, “I understand.”

They don't make journalists like that anymore.

Palestinian Arabs have no Arab support (Efraim Karsh)

Historian Efraim Karsh notices the same poll that I noticed a week ago:

What... are we to make of a recent survey for the Al Arabiya television network finding that a staggering 71 percent of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks? “This is an alarming indicator,” lamented Saleh Qallab, a columnist for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. “The Arabs, people and regimes alike, have always been as interested in the peace process, its developments and particulars, as they were committed to the Palestinian cause itself.”

But the truth is that Arab policies since the mid-1930s suggest otherwise. While the “Palestine question” has long been central to inter-Arab politics, Arab states have shown far less concern for the well-being of the Palestinians than for their own interests.

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, once admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan “was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.”

From 1948 to 1967, when Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the Arab states failed to put these populations on the road to statehood. They also showed little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving their quality of life — which is part of the reason why 120,000 West Bank Palestinians moved to the East Bank of the Jordan River and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad. “We couldn’t care less if all the refugees die,” an Egyptian diplomat once remarked. “There are enough Arabs around.”

Not surprisingly, the Arab states have never hesitated to sacrifice Palestinians on a grand scale whenever it suited their needs. In 1970, when his throne came under threat from the Palestine Liberation Organization, the affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan ordered the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, an event known as “Black September.”

Six years later, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the Syrian Army, massacred some 3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar. These militias again slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in 1982 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, this time under Israel’s watchful eye. None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians’ rescue.

Worse, in the mid-’80s, when the P.L.O. — officially designated by the Arab League as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people” — tried to re-establish its military presence in Lebanon, it was unceremoniously expelled by President Hafez al-Assad of Syria.

This history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause for their own ends while ignoring the fate of the Palestinians goes on and on. Saddam Hussein, in an effort to ennoble his predatory designs, claimed that he wouldn’t consider ending his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait without “the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Arab territories in Palestine.”

Shortly after the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaitis then set about punishing the P.L.O. for its support of Hussein — cutting off financial sponsorship, expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers and slaughtering thousands. Their retribution was so severe that Arafat was forced to acknowledge that “what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

Against this backdrop, it is a positive sign that so many Arabs have apparently grown so apathetic about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For if the Arab regimes’ self-serving interventionism has denied Palestinians the right to determine their own fate, then the best, indeed only, hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis lies in rejecting the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems.

The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and to understand the need for a negotiated settlement.

(h/t JSing)

Anti-Israel sentiment on the increase in Jordan

From the Financial Times:

Last month, a Jordanian non-governmental organisation published an advertisement for candidates to join an environmental training project in the Jordan Valley. This neglected to mention the project was in co-operation with Israel, on the Israeli side of the border but it was identical to many previous ads. It prompted a storm of protest after an Islamic newspaper revealed the Israel connection.

“They circled my name and phone number in the ad as if to target me,” says the Jordanian organiser, who prefers to remain anonymous. “I do not feel physically threatened and luckily there has been no leverage on me but many others avoid going into the same field of peace co-operation because of such tactics.”

Jordan is the only Arab state where NGO’s openly initiate such co-operation in several fields, including the environment, journalism, healthcare, youth work and even political research.

Israel’s peace with Egypt is cold and few Egyptians collaborate openly with Israelis. In Jordan, protests against such ties – from the country’s anti-normalisation movement, consisting mainly of Islamists with some pan-Arabists – are as old as the country’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel but they are getting louder.

Official tolerance for this movement fluctuates with the state of relations between the government and the Islamists, and with the Israeli-Jordanian relations. The latter have been bleak in recent months.

“It is worse than at any time since the signing of the peace treaty,” says Jordanian analyst and writer Oraib Rantawi. “I’m hearing things from the inner circle of the ruling elite [code for the people close to King Abdullah II] I have not heard before. They are talking about Israel as the enemy.”

...The NGOs involved in joint Israeli projects feel the increased ambivalence towards the treaty. “The government is keeping a closer watch on what I do and can do less to rein in the anti-normalisers,” says the Jordanian organiser.

Badi al-Rafaih is a leader of the anti-normalisation movement and member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He says: “Years ago I was arrested and even beaten up for what I do. But now nobody wants to defend Israel or have anything to do with it.”

For those who hope for peace in the Middle East, this is the best one can expect - a frigid detente that itself will remain under pressure from extremists, forever.