Weekend fare

We don’t yet know if Hassan Nasrallah – subject of my post two days ago, What is Hezbollah? – was killed by Israel’s terrorist attack on Beirut on Friday evening. Given that Israeli leaders lie the moment their lips move, claims of having succeeded in taking him out are worthless. They may even be a ploy to flush him out, a point made in the first of my offerings for the weekend.

13:56, some four and a half hours after writing this post, It’s been confirmed by Hezbollah that Nasrallah was indeed killed.

As is the point that, even if the leader of the “Party of God” – comprising military, political and welfare wings – is indeed no more, he, like all Hezbollah commanders, will be replaced before nightfall by one long groomed for the job.

The attack – and Israel’s thinking, interspersed with that of a hapless Mr Zelensky whose recent trip to Washington had no clear purpose – are discussed here by two former CIA analysts, Larry Wilkinson and Ray McGovern, with genial Judge Andrew Napolitano their interlocutor. (Note to self: feature Ray more often. His softness of tone and careful way of using it form a refreshing counterweight to the more strident critics of empire featured on this site.)

As one who has long contrasted the maturity and calm sobriety of leaders like Vladimir Putin, Sergey Lavrov and Xi Jinping with the short term recklessness and bombast of their Western counterparts, I took grim satisfaction in a point, agreed by all three panellists, that the Middle East looks even darker than Ukraine. Why? Because in the latter, one of the control centres has adults in the room.

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My second offering is also a video. At 57:58 it’s twice as long as my first but I recommend it for truths likely to be news to the most eagle-eyed observers of the genocide and the UK’s role in abetting it. One is that criticisms of British supply of arms to Israel are largely wide of the mark. (The US and Germany are far more important in that respect, hence the ease with which London could announce reductions in any case cosmetic.) More important are its services in providing the aerial intelligence by which the IDF may slaughter more accurately, in Lebanon as in West Bank and Gaza.

Which leads us to the role played by Cyprus. The impressive Matt Kennard of Declassified UK points out to Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman that whereas the Turkish occupation of the north of the island is heralded by its national flag on every hill top and street corner, Britain is at pains to play down its occupation of three percent of the south. As the RAF makes undocumented flights from just outside Limassol to supply Tel Aviv with targeting intel – exposing this colonial outpost with a level of attention it is neither accustomed to nor welcomes – Britain’s deep state efforts to suppress such news make interesting listening.

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My final offering is not a video. I’ve long been an admirer of the one-time Guardian columnist, Jonathan Cook. After having one story too many spiked at that treacherous organ – see here and here for why I call it that – for the crime of casting the Palestinian cause in too favourable a light, however well evidenced that light, his posts as a freelancer in Nazareth had me describe him, in a post eight years ago on Syria, as “the best informed middle east commentator on the block”.

His experiences at the Guardian, and more importantly his penetrating assessments of the vital role played by liberal media on behalf of empire and its outposts – of which, as Stephen Gowans has thoroughly documented, Israel is the most important – place him alongside such voices as Media Lens and Noam Chomsky in providing, mostly but not exclusively in a Palestine context, witheringly accurate critiques of the extent to which superficially independent and left of centre corporate media serve power.

And of the bloody consequences of that servicing.

The BBC is weaponising its Lebanon reporting to help disguise Israel’s crimes

Western publics are being subjected to an unprecedented campaign of media propaganda to conceal Israel’s true goals as it expands the slaughter.

The more Israel expands its war across the Middle East, the more the western media intensifies its war on our minds.

Establishment media outlets like the BBC are weaponising the language of their reporting against audiences no less effectively than Israel weaponised primitive pieces of technology against the people of Lebanon.

Thousands of Lebanese were maimed by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies last week. Likewise, the media coverage is mangling the ability of western publics to understand how and why Israel is dangerously stoking fires across the region.

Words like “audacious”, “escalation” and “targets” have become tools to conceal meaning, not to illuminate – and for good reason. Because Israel’s actions are so obviously criminal, so obviously horrifying, so obviously genocidal. Language becomes a weapon to hide the truth.

The media chorus goes like this: Israel is attacking Lebanon to stop Hezbollah rocket fire and allow the residents of Israel’s most northerly communities to return home. Or in the blunter, Orwellian language of Israeli officials framing this horror show: Israel must “escalate to de-escalate”.

Lebanese civilians are paying the heaviest price: some 550 of them were killed in the first day of Israel’s bombing campaign alone. Many tens of thousands have been driven – ethnically cleansed – from the territory of south Lebanon.

Why? Because, says Israel, Hezbollah has hidden its cache of rockets in their homes. Those homes must therefore be destroyed. Strangely, Hezbollah seems to have forgotten that it has extensive rocky terrain across south Lebanon where it could more safely and wisely hide its arsenal.

If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is …

Continue reading on Jonathan’s substack …

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