As I read through this article, I assumed the author was just a generic dope churning out distraction for the masses. The content seemed less sophisticated than that of professional dopes, such as Howard Kurtz, who in this flourish of inanity rationalises the murdering of journalists and the bombing of television stations as PR strategy, and acknowledges the intent but does not condemn the campaign to extinguish news that “could help tilt public opinion against the Jewish state,” Kurtz says, one that left Lebanon’s “telecom infrastructure in tatters” as his column went to print yesterday. Kurtz incorporates every viral cliche available to apologists for Israel, but he’s objective, and others are working an angle. He refers to the Daily Star‘s managing editor, Marc J. Sirois, as a nameless “columnist,” and pulls a quote from his article on Western media’s failure to convey the massively brutal extent of Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, but never mentions the title. He labels the Electronic Intifada “partisan” because it pointed out that the BBC delivered a “blow-by-blow account of every facet of the evacuation of foreign nationals in general and British nationals in particular,” on a day when at least 35 Lebanese had been killed. As Kurtz explains it, persons complaining about such discrepancies in coverage are biassed but the people who make the decisions to do so are not. I suspect he’d see it differently if every time he tuned into a news show it was a Lebanese or Gazan refugee being interviewed on what it feels like to be a target rather than an Israeli in Haifa.
America’s honey trap by Yossi Ben-Ari is a roller coaster ride compared to Kurtz’s predictable speed bumps. I’d decided it was one of the silliest things I’d read on the crisis until the end where I discovered that the author, Brig. Gen. (res.) Ben-Ari, “was a senior intelligence officer.” He claims that the U.S. is preventing Israel from negotiating a cease-fire, and that Israel should not be forced into being America’s proxy, which may be the case, but he goes on to assert that Israel is not liable for the damages in Lebanon, that the U.S. and the rest of the world are because they failed to make the area safe for Israel, and that they are now obligated to take on Syria and Iran for the same reason whilst Israel takes a well-earned rest. Ben-Ari complains that Israel is always having to do all the dirty work for the U.S., and asks, “Do we really need to stand at the head of the sane world in the fight against the axis of evil?”
“‘We Gave Israel No Green Light’”? Someone should inform the general.