One question I have yet to see the Mainstream Media address is
why there are still so many civilians in south Lebanon. The BBC
says the stragglers are too old, sick and poor to leave. If
Lebanese families are abandoning their sick and elderly as they
flee the war zone, it speaks poorly of the Muslims, not the
Jews.
If we go back to 1978, when Israel launched an offensive in
southern Lebanon in retaliation for a PLO bus hijacking in Tel Aviv
(35 Israelis killed, 100 injured) we find this story — also from the BBC:
Civilians Flee Southern Lebanon
The large town of Nabatiya, only two miles from the Litani
river, has been almost totally depopulated of its 30,000
inhabitants who have fled the shelling.
What’s different this time? Certainly there are no more poor, sick
and elderly than in that earlier conflict? Perhaps the difference
is that Hizbullah has been schooled in the overarching importance
PR, of sacrificing civilians as a means of winning the propaganda
war, and the weight of world opinion in wartime.
Listening to the mainstream media one is unlikely to know that
Lebanese civilians were warned to leave southern Lebanon before the
fighting started. To quote Israeli Foreign Ministry official Gideon
Meir: “The Israeli defense forces dropped leaflets and warned the
civilian population to leave the place because the Hizbullah turned
it into a war zone.” In fact, the Israelis telephoned Lebanese
civilians. Such courtesy is unprecedented in the annals of military
history.
Nor are we likely to have heard the report from the Israeli
military that Hizbullah has prevented civilians from leaving
villages in southern Lebanon:
Roadblocks have been set up outside some of the
villages to prevent residents from leaving, while in other villages
Hizbullah is preventing UN representatives from entering, who are
trying to help residents leave. In two villages, exchanges of fire
between residents and Hizbullah have broken out.
Hizbullah, of course, knows that without its civilian shields to
hide behind, the Israeli forces will wipe them out within days.
Likewise, the only way to defeat a superior Israeli force is to
turn world opinion against the Jews. And that can only happen if
lots of Lebanese women and children are “martyred.”
Have you noticed that when there are casualties, the media
automatically assumes that all are civilians or noncombatants —
even though Hizbullah fighters don civilian clothes, fire rockets
from civilian areas, and scramble into nearby buildings afterwards
to hide among civilian populations — and this before any
legitimate investigation takes place?
As usual, the media is cooperating with the terrorists. A decade
ago in the Bosnian War, Slobodan Milosevic happily invited
television crews to broadcast the hostage U.N. peacekeepers’ plight
to the world. Saddam employed a similar device. Bomb us, and you
murder your own people. Today, southern Lebanon is crawling with
journalists interviewing every Lebanese civilian they can scare up,
ordinary folks who have long tolerated the terrorists’
presence.
THE HUMAN SHIELD strategy is a relatively new tactic, first cooked
up by Saddam in the First Gulf War. The Iraqi dictator, however,
used Western civilians, not his own people, to discourage attacks.
This strategy was soon copied by Milosevic in Bosnia and the
Taliban in Afghanistan. American peace activists
even picked up the trick, volunteering to be human shields prior to
the Second Gulf War. What’s new here is that Hizbullah has taken
the criminal tactic one step further in cynically and cowardly
using its own people as civilian shields.
This is not Clausewitz’s brand of warfare. It bears no
resemblance to traditional warfare among civilized nations, which
was waged with honor and dignity. Rather we have non-state
terrorist groups hiding behind the skirts of women and the bibs of
babies. As we’ve seen in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan and now Lebanon,
civilians, particularly dead civilians, are more important to
winning than rockets and guns. And it takes a lot of dead women and
infants to win a war.
Another question needs addressing: Why does Hizbullah, which
started this war, get a free pass from the media and human rights
groups when it puts its civilians at risk and when its missiles
kill Israeli civilians? Critics call Israel’s response
disproportionate. What is disproportionate is the anti-Israel
coverage from the international media. Much of it, in my view,
bordering on anti-Semitism.
Christopher Orlet is a frequent contributor and runs
the Existential Journalist.
