A Question of Balance
War, it is said, is a series of catastrophes that, sooner or later, result in victory. But the war between Israel and Hezbollah has resulted not in victory but in a disturbingly unquiet peace.
First, there's the question about whether the United Nations will put some muscle where its mouth is and insist on disarming Hezbollah. President Bush has declared victory, but that is way premature. It doesn't fit with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statement that the disarmament of Hezbollah should be achieved "voluntarily." Dream on! Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the boss of Hezbollah (and Iran's puppet), has already said he won't disarm. To no one's surprise, the Lebanese defense minister vows not to order his Army to confiscate Hezbollah's rockets, mainly because his Army couldn't defeat the New York City Police Department. As for the U.N., its record in Somalia, Bosnia, and Lebanon offers little cause for hope. So nobody will do it, and Israel, which might, is withdrawing on the basis of a document widely seen as a fraud even before the ink on it dries. The bottom line: Lebanon may well be Hezbollah's for the taking. What that would mean, of course, is the prospect of more rockets and missiles raining on Israeli civilians.
Ugly people. The world's information media seem either incapable of or unwilling to apprehend what's now going on around the globe. Al Manar, Hezbollah's TV station, has always been devoted to hate. Al Jazeera, the other Arab cable network, likes to proclaim its integrity but demonstrates nothing of the kind. These two propaganda channels have inflamed the Arab masses with anti-Israel, anti-American propaganda. The American media, of course, have presented the war in a more balanced fashion-but the "balance" of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other reporting is bogus. Truth simply doesn't always reside in the middle. If that sounds odd, try this: The Japanese, on the one hand, were wrong to bomb Pearl Harbor, while the Americans, on the other, were wrong to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such "balance," in the Middle East, ignores some rather important facts:
a. that if Hezbollah laid down its arms, there would be no war, while if Israel laid down its arms, there would be no Israel;
b. that this was not a war waged by Israel against innocent Lebanon but a war against Hezbollah;
c. that it was not a fight to occupy but merely to protect Israel's right to exist within recognized, legitimate borders.
Context, context. That's precisely what's missing in the media's "balanced" reporting of the conflict. Television is especially problematic. The images we see on our screens may be factually accurate, but many represent a profound untruth, leaving viewers with a plethora of images of a shattered Lebanon and a surging Israeli military. A number of American reporters acknowledged that Hezbollah overseers determined what they filmed. Repeated-and sometimes doctored-photographs of several damaged buildings were intended to confer on Beirut the epic status of a Dresden in World War II.
The "balanced" media are also somehow incapable of pointing out the fact that it was then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak who ended the Israeli presence in Lebanon in 2000, only to have Hezbollah begin frenetic preparations for an offensive war-missiles are not, after all, defensive weapons. Or that since Ariel Sharon ordered the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last year, Israel hasn't experienced a single day of peace. The media must begin to recognize the fact that its familiar formulas for integrity just don't work in this new world that is anything but brave.
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