AFP: ZIONIST MEDIA LIES CONCEAL HIDDEN AGENDA BEHIND ISRAELI INVASION OF LEBANON

ZIONIST MEDIA LIES CONCEAL HIDDEN AGENDA BEHIND ISRAELI INVASION OF LEBANON

Christopher Bollyn | American Free Press | August 16, 2006 [?]

As Israel kicked its war of aggression in Lebanon into high gear, the pro-Israel controlled media in the United States bombarded the U.S. population with carefully crafted lies designed to provide support for Israel's illegal aggression and conceal the hidden agenda behind it.

Wherever an American might look for news about the on-going Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, one is bound to be hit by a host of carefully crafted media lies that pass for truth. Across the spectrum of the U.S.-based mass media, from the Internet to network television news to talk radio and Christian radio programs, there is a series of oft-repeated bold-faced Zionist lies about Israel's ongoing military campaigns.

These lies are designed to garner U.S. public opinion in support of the Israeli aggression in Lebanon, which is clearly illegal and disproportionate. In order to keep U.S. public opinion in line, the Zionist planners use their controlled media outlets to spread and repeat bold-faced lies.

Because these falsehoods are constantly repeated as truth, without any scrutiny or analysis in the Zionist-controlled media in the United States, it is necessary to point out the falseness of the fundamental lies upon which the Israeli aggression is based.

Zionist Lie No. 1: Two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped in Israel.

The first lie, the initial falsehood, which has been used as an acceptable casus belli, is that Hezbollah "kidnapped" two Israeli soldiers from Israeli territory on July 12.

Based on this lie, Hezbollah, branded as a "terrorist" group by Israel, Canada and the United States, stands accused of having started the war. Unfortunately, both Zionist claims are bold-faced lies.

The Israeli version, however, which lacks any factual basis to support it, has been trumpeted by every media outlet, including the well-respected journalist Robert Fisk of The Independent (UK).

In an article about the recent Israeli massacre of scores of Lebanese women and children sleeping in the basement of a building in Cana of Galilee (Qana, Lebanon), Fisk inserted both Zionist lies as fact: "Hizbollah's missiles are Iranian-made," he wrote, "and it was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal and provocative raid across the border."

(No wonder he got beaten up in Afghanistan.)

Initial news reports from international wire services, based on a Lebanese police report, however, clearly indicate that the two Israeli soldiers were not kidnapped at all, but captured -- inside Lebanon -- after having crossed the border and infiltrated the Lebanese village of Aitaa al-Chaab. Furthermore, these first reports have not been retracted or proven false.

Indeed, the story that the Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon was reported by a number of leading international press services, including the German news agency (DPA), AFP from France, AP and UPI. This version of events, however, is never mentioned by the Zionist-controlled mass media outlets in the U.S.

Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA), for example, had 10 articles on this matter on July 12-13, 2006. All of them reported that the Israelis had been captured in Lebanon.

On July 12, for example, DPA reported from Beirut: "The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement announced Wednesday that its guerrillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon.

"Implementing our promise to release the Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured at 9:05 am (0605 GMT) two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon," a statement by Hezbollah said.

"Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were captured as they 'infiltrated' into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border," DPA reported.

"There was no immediate confirmation of the Hezbollah claims from any official Israeli source," the German wire service reported. "An Israeli army spokeswoman however said there was 'concern' over the fate of the two soldiers."

If the soldiers had truly been kidnapped while "on patrol" on the Israeli side of the border, this is hardly the response the Israeli army would be putting out.

After more than two weeks of intense Israeli bombing and shelling of Lebanon, the nation's economic infrastructure was reduced to rubble and some 800,000 Lebanese refugees roamed the region looking from shelter. In many cases the refugees' homes and villages of south Lebanon have been completely destroyed. Where will they live?

PRE-PLANNED INVASION

"Israel's military response by air, land and sea" to the provocation was "unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago," Matthew Kalman wrote in a July 21 article in San Francisco Chronicle.

"More than a year ago," Kalman wrote from Jerusalem about the Lebanon campaign, "a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail."

To set the stage, Ehud Olmert, the new Israeli prime minister, commenced his term with extremely violent and relentless terror attacks against the people of the Gaza Strip, which culminated in the fatal artillery strike that destroyed a Palestinian family on the beach.

Duraid Al Baik, foreign editor of Gulf News, described the first two months of Olmert's term "the bloodiest, deadliest and the most criminal period of the 58-year old state of Israel." Incidents of Israeli state terror, however, are generally not reported as such in U.S. news networks. Even obvious terror attacks committed by Israel, such as the murder of the family on the Gaza beach, are simply not reported as terror and, adding insult to injury, Israel's nonsensical excuses for such actions are accepted without question by the media.

Lie No. 2: The massacre of Cana was caused by Hizbollah, which had fired missiles from the area.

On July 30, Israel bombed a 4 story residential building in Cana, which collapsed on top of several dozen people, who had taken shelter in the basement. Most of the victims were the children and women of two extended families.

The Israelis and controlled media quickly defended the action saying that Hezbollah had fired missiles from the area. This also turns out to have been a lie.

"There were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike," Ha'aretz (Israel) reported two days after the bombing.

"As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident," Ha'aretz reported. "It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

"The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version," Ha'aretz wrote, "there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike."

A WAR CRIME

Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of committing a war crime in Cana and treating southern Lebanon as a "free-fire zone."

It said the failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants is a war crime and asked the United Nations to investigate Israel's serious violations of international law.

"The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area a combatant who is fair game for attack," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW. "Such consistent failure to distinguish combatants and civilians is a war crime."

Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that Israel's shelling of cities was an "unacceptable targeting of civilians," and stressed that international law demands accountability.

Roth said responsibility for Cana rested "squarely with the Israeli military."

"Just because the Israeli military warned the civilians of Cana to leave does not give it carte blanche to blindly attack," Roth said. "It still must make every possible effort to target only genuine combatants."

Lie No. 3: Israel does not target civilians or ambulances.

The fact that some 800 Lebanese civilians were killed during the first three weeks of the Israeli onslaught and that some 20,000 were killed in Israel's previous invasion in 1982 exposes the falsity of this shameless lie. There are specific well-known incidents, such as the targeting of Red Cross ambulances, which expose this bold-faced Zionist lie.

That Israel targets ambulances is obvious from the images seen on television news reports showing Lebanese ambulances pierced by Israeli missiles exactly in the center of the red cross painted on the roof. As Fisk noted in a recent article, "Israeli missiles had clearly pierced the very centre of the red cross on the roof of each ambulance."

"All the crews were injured," Fisk wrote, asking the obvious: "Did the pilots use the cross as their aiming point?"

Lie No. 4: "Israel would never target a UN force."

After Israeli bombs struck the UN observation station at Khiam in Lebanon, killing four international observers, Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni denied that the bombing had been deliberate as the UN Secretary General suggested.

"Israel would never target a UN force," Livni said. "It is not part of our policies; it is not part of our values."

Livni's statement is another bold-faced lie. Israel has often targeted UN bases, including several in the days before the station at Khiam was hit. Apart from the recent murder of 4 UN observers, the most egregious Israeli atrocity committed against a UN base occurred on April 18, 1996, during the Israeli "Grapes of Wrath" aggression against Lebanon, when prime minister Shimon Peres (now vice premier) ordered the precision-guided artillery shelling of the FIJIBATT UN base at Cana, in which hundreds of Lebanese had sought shelter. More than 106 Lebanese civilians, most of them children, were killed in this earlier deliberate Israeli attack on a UN base.

"Israel's slaughter of civilians" during the 1996 Israeli offensive in Lebanon was "so cavalier, so ferocious," Fisk wrote at the time, "that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre."

Lie No. 5: Hezbollah is a terrorist organization which Israel is fighting in the "war on terror."

Only three nations, Israel, the United States and Canada, consider Hezbollah, an Islamic resistance group that was created during the first Israeli occupation of Lebanon, to be a terrorist organization. The group's leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah has vehemently denied that Hezbollah is a terrorist group. In Lebanon, Europe, Russia, China and across the Arab and Islamic world, Hezbollah is regarded as a legitimate resistance organization.

The U.S. government and the Zionist-controlled media use the "terrorist" label in order to de-legitimize popular resistance movements, such as Hezbollah, to Zionist terrorism, expansionism, and hegemony in the region.