Will the same weapon
that defeated the Serbs also defeat Israel?
They say that truth is always the first victim in war. Such is the case
in the Israeli/Hezbollah war.
It appears that Hezbollah has taken a page out of the Bosnian Muslim
playbook: Win the PR battle, and you win the war. What better example of media
disinformation than the Bosnian War, where images of civilians "slaughtered" at
Sarajevo's Markale market place, allegedly by Serb forces, were so instrumental?
If it worked for the Bosnian Muslims, why not for Hezbollah? Will Qana, Lebanon,
become Israel's Markale market place?
Yossef Bodansky, author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on
America, wrote the following in his 1995 book Offensive in the Balkans:
"Phase Three started with the self-inflicted major terrorist provocation.
On Friday 5, 1994, a major explosion rocked the Markale -- Sarajevo's main
market place -- causing heavy casualties. What was immediately described as the
ubiquitous 'Serb mortar shell' was actually a special charge designed and built
with help from HizbAllah experts and then most likely dropped from a nearby
rooftop onto the crowd of shoppers. Video cameras at the ready recorded this
expertly-staged spectacle of gore, while dozens of corpses of Bosnian Muslim
troops killed in action (exchanged the day before in a 'body swap' with the
Serbs) were paraded in front of cameras to raise the casualty counts.
"This callous self-killing was designed to shock the West especially
sentimental and gullible Washington, in order to raise the level of Western
sympathy to the Bosnian Muslims and further demonize the Serbs so that Western
governments would be more supportive of Sarajevo's forthcoming aggressive moves,
and perhaps even finally intervene militarily." (Emphasis added)
Some headlines that Americans never saw were "Muslims 'slaughter their
own people'," The [London] Independent, 22 Aug. 1992, and "Serbs 'not guilty' of
massacre," The Sunday [London] Times, 1 Oct. 1995.
In 1992, Peter Maher, Professor Emeritus of Linquistics, visited
Dubrovnik, Croatia, to see for himself the truth about the war. He wrote, "A few
months earlier, the press was filled with stories that the Pearl of the Adriatic
had been reduced to rubble. The stories were fakes." Professor Maher goes on to
explain just how it happened: "The dramatic 'Dubrovnik burning' pictures were
shot with long lenses. . . .But the smoke was from the fuel tanks of two
pleasure boats burning in the Old Harbor ... Dubrovnik's Old City never burned
and was never even targteted by the federal forces.....The only building in the
Old City of Ragusa to be gutted by explosives and fire was the library and
treasure of the Serbian Orthodox church, which housed a priceless collection of
medieval manuscripts and icons. It was not navy guns that did the damage, but
plastic and incendiary devices planted on the spot by Croatian forces."
Who can forget the horrific pictures that were repeatedly shown on CNN of
the two dead Muslim babies on a bus in Bosnia, allegedly killed by a Serb
sniper? I would never have known the truth if I had not been watching France 2
TV, which showed the funeral of these innocent babies. Officiating was a Serbian
Orthodox priest. These were not Muslim babies; they were Serbian babies, but for
American consumption, the Serbian Orthodox priest was cropped from the film so
that the American people would continue to believe that the babies were Muslim.
This kind of reporting is not just yellow journalism. It goes beyond the pale,
the same kind of "journalism" that Israel is experiencing today -- manipulation,
distortion, staging, forgery and the doctoring of photos by anti-Israeli media.
Welcome to the club!
Hopefully, in the current Israeli/Hezbollah conflict, the media
distortions will not sell. At the beginning of the Balkan conflict we did not
have the Internet and bloggers to expose CNN and its ilk. Today is different.
Almost immediately after photos of damage from an Israeli air strike on Beirut
were posted, outrage from bloggers who recognized that the photos were doctored
forced Reuters to admit that two or more photos were altered. The company
stated, "A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut has been
withdrawn after coming under attack by American web blogs. The blogs accused
Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage." Was this
simply one person's mistake, or is a pattern being exposed in the present
Israeli/Hezbollah war of the biased or even co-belligerent media that was at
work in the war against the Serbs?
Israel is accused of indiscriminately killing civilians, as in the Qana
incident. It is difficult to find any suggestion in all of the articles on the
subject that Qana was staged. Questions should have been raised. For instance,
how is it that the IDF air attack was between midnight and 1:00 AM, but when the
building blew up (or collapsed) at 8:00 AM there were approximately 50 women and
children (reported numbers vary) sleeping in the building? Why is no one asking
what was in that building that caused it to blow up seven or eight hours after
the air strike? Why is no one in the mainstream media asking why those people
were still in the building or why there were only women and children?
While western democracies try to keep civilians, especially their own,
safe from ongoing hostilities, Islamic forces have a history of using their own
civilians as human shields. Israel claims that Hezbollah deliberately puts its
weapons and fighters in civilian neighborhoods, keeping residents hostage and
not caring if they are killed or not. One interesting fact can be found in the
book by Lord David Owen, titled Balkan Odyssey, in which he writes, "In Sarajevo
it became ever clearer that there were in fact two sieges of the city: one by
the Bosnian Serb army, with shells, sniper fire and blockades, and the other by
the Bosnian government army, with internal blockades and red tape bureaucracy
which kept their own people from leaving. In a radio broadcast the army -- not
the government -- said that able bodied men aged 18-65 years and women aged
18-60 years were forbidden to leave because they were needed for the city's
defence; but their main reason was different. In the propaganda war, the Serbian
siege aroused the sympathy of the world, and for this they needed the elderly
and the children to stay. It was their most emotive propaganda weapon for
bringing the Americans in to fight the war, and they never wanted it to be
weakened."
For those who think accusing Muslims of deliberately killing their own
civilians or putting them where they are sure to be "collateral casualties" is
farfetched, I would ask, why is that any more unthinkable than encouraging one's
own child to be a suicide bomber?
One noticeable difference between the reporting in the Israeli/Hezbollah
war and the Balkan war is balance. Although the media coverage is primarily
one-sided in the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict, nearly four to one showing civilian
casualties in Lebanon vs. those in Israel, the Balkan war news of Serbian
casualties and suffering was almost non-existent.
In 1995, the journal World Affairs published the following quote from
John Ranz, U.S. chairman of Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp: "The
gigantic campaign to brainwash America by our media against the Serbian people
is just incredible, with its daily dose of one-sided information and outright
lies....What is today's reality? The murderers of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies are
back [in Croatia] from the U.S., Canada, Argentina where they fled after World
War II. The Serbs fought the Nazis, they paid a terrible price for standing at
the side of the allies against Hitler. Humanity owes them a debt of gratitude."
Yohanan Ramati, Director of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense,
seconded the notion: "This organized anti-Serb and pro-Muslim propaganda should
cause anyone believing in democracy and free speech serious concerns. It recalls
Hitler's propaganda against the allies in World War II. Facts are twisted and,
when convenient, disregarded."
Most disturbing is a 1992 observation by Gregory Copley, who wrote in his
Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy report, "Pictures of dead or
wounded (or raped) Serbs often fill the screens of the world's television and
print media, only to be re-labeled as dead or wounded or raped Croats or
Muslims. Many Serbian victims -- and the bulk of the victims of the conflict,
contrary to popular reports, have been Serbs either from Bosnia and Herzegovina
or from Croatia -- not only suffer the indignity of defeat in death; they also
are used in death as models in the macabre image manipulation operation of the
Croatians and the Muslim Bosnians. If the Vietnam War was lost to the United
States by the negative television images of its own reporters, then the Balkan
war against the Serbs are being won by Ustashi Croatia and the Muslim Bosnians
by an active, planned manipulation of international television."
Like any sovereign nation, Israel has the right to defend itself against
Muslim terrorists.The Serbian people should have had the right to defend their
sovereignty against the same Muslim terrorists whom we are fighting today.
