Monday, May 12, 2008
At MJT's, Lee Smith conveys a report from a friend and colleague in Lebanon, Elie Fawaz, who says:
“So, we know that Hezbollah's well-trained fighters are in control of most of west Beirut. The decision taken by Walid Jumblat and Saad al-Hariri not to fight back in Beirut, but rather hand most of their positions to the army ended any illusion regarding the sanctity of the “resistance” - that it would never turn its weapons inward, for now its hands are dripping with the blood of innocent Lebanese. But it's different in the Chouf where Jumblatt's forces bloodied Hezbollah.
However, according to Associated Press reporter Bassem Mroue, Hezbollah's show of force in Beirut was only temporarily marred by fighting between "government supporters and opponents in Lebanon"
The fighting in the town of Chouweifat calmed late Sunday after Druse leader Walid Jumblatt called on his Druse opponents, who are allied with Hezbollah, to mediate a cease-fire and hand over the region to Lebanese troops.
Iran's state-run Press TV reported on its Web site that 17 opposition fighters were killed in the mountain clashes. It did not elaborate, and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia refused to comment.
Officials could not immediately provide casualty figures from other mountain towns where fighting also raged a day earlier. But the latest deaths pushed to 54 the number of people killed since violence erupted Wednesday, in the worst internal clashes since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.
The AP report features this photograph and caption, which give the impression that Jumblatt's forces lost the battle.
A Druse woman, Yessra Halawi, reacts after her house burned Sunday during clashes between pro-government supporters of Druse leader Walid Jumblatt and Shiite gunmen and their allies in Chouweifat, south of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday May 12, 2008. Lebanese soldiers deployed across mountains overlooking the Lebanese capital Monday after at least 11 people were killed in fierce clashes between pro-Syrian gunmen and government supporters entrenched in the hilly plateau, security officials and paramedics said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
But Fawaz reports that:
..“After taking over West Beirut, Hezbollah tried to move to the Shouf, where there are two Shiite towns, Kayfoun and Qmatiyye. Hezbollah is trying to link them up to the Dahieh through the Karameh road, which links Dahieh to Choueifat-Aramoun-Doha-Deir Qoubel-Aytat-Kayfoun and Qmatiye, so that it can make encroachments, maintain access routes and not allow the Druze to surround the two Shiite towns.
“That was the plan, but Hezbollah got a severe beating in the Shouf. They were not able to penetrate anything, relying instead - for the first time in the current fighting - on artillery/mortar fire. To no avail. Yesterday alone we heard that seven Hezbollah fighters who tried to infiltrate got killed.
I wonder why Iran's state-run Press TV and Hezbollah militia didn't want to go into the details...
AP reporter Mroue boasts that:
In contrast, Fawaz concludes:
Fawaz does not claim to be presenting the news from a completely unbiased point of view. But AP does. Thousands of media outlets present these AP reports to their readers, as if they were written and photographed by unbiased journalists. They're not.
It's no secret that Hezbollah has a history of orchestrating and blatantly staging media reports. Looks like they're doing it again. I wouldn't be surprised if Flat Fatima is getting a call from her agent right now.
Brian Ledbetter at Snapped Shot has been keeping track of Hezbollah's media manipulations. He says:
In an insightful article written for Reason Magazine, Michael Young says:
If Western journalists are telling their editors that Hezbollah sources are 'closed', or hard to reach, they're telling more tall tales. I traveled to Beirut in Dec. 2006 (when Hezbollah was just threatening to take over the airport). I had never been to the Middle East before, it was my first hour there, and I looked every bit like the American soccer mom I am. Although I told the taxi driver who took me to my hotel I was a tourist, he told me that I was a reporter and he offered to take me on a guided tour of the Hezbollah-controlled areas in the south.
When we drove past a poster of Nasrallah, the taxi driver proudly said ‘there’s the man’. I assumed he was working with, or at least friendly to, Hezbollah. I didn't go on his tour, partly because he overcharged me for the ride to my hotel.
In my experience, Hezbollah is about as ‘closed’ to western reporters as City Line double decker tours are to tourists arriving in New York City. Check it out, check it out.
