The Hezbollah Bombardment
Lebanese soldiers with armored personnel carriers confronting Hezbollah members and allies on the northern edge of Beirut on Tuesday. (Wael Hamzeh/European Pressphoto Agency )
Twice this week, the International Herald Tribune has referred to “the Israeli bombardment” of Lebanon in articles about internal conflict in Lebanon.
On Saturday-Sunday, Hassah Fattah (with Nada Bakri) reported:
Some analysts credit the alliance with helping stabilizing conditions in Lebanon after the Israeli bombardment in the summer as well as with helping change Hezbollah’s focus from regional to local. (“Lebanon split on Christian leader”)
And today, Bakri and Fattah report:
Early Tuesday, groups of protestors set up roadblocks along major thoroughfares leading into Beirut, blocking roads with burning tires and rubble that was said to be from buildings demolished in the Israeli bombardment of the city’s southern suburbs last summer, and setting fire to vehicles. (“Strike led by Hezbollah brings Beirut to a halt”)
This tendentious description obscures the fact that it was Hezbollah which initiated the war, with Hezbollah’s July 12 rocket bombardment of Israeli towns and villages, and the accompanying crossborder raid in which Hezbollah killed and captured Israeli soldiers on Israeli soil. The employment of “Israeli bombardment” exonerates Hezbollah as a party to the war (not to mention initiator). It was Hezbollah, after all, which dragged all of Lebanon into war, a fact for which many Lebanese resent Hezbollah.
As Beirut Journalist Michael Young wrote in July:
Of course the people here are angry and anxious about the possibility of a widening of the Israeli attacks, but their rage, as they see the country being taken apart, is often directed against Hezbollah.
But why should this minor detail about Hezbollah’s summer aggression get in the way of a story about Hezbollah’s winter bullying of the Siniora government?
Versions of these two articles also ran in the New York Times, which twice edited out the misleading term “Israeli bombardment.” (See here and here.)
This would not be the first time that the Times commendably edited tendentious language out of a report that also appeared in the Tribune.
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