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‘Western Press Obscured the Sheer Terror of What Israel Had Carried Out’: CounterSpin interview with Mohamad Bazzi on Lebanon pager attacks

So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon.

Janine Jackson interviewed NYU’s Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s terror attacks in Lebanon for the September 27, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson,

Janine Jackson: Speaking of Israel’s remote detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies of suspected Hezbollah members in Lebanon, former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta told CBS, ”I don’t think there is any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”

Panetta’s remarks were widely reported, mostly straight, but for Fox, where Sean Hannity said Panetta “had the gall to say Israel is engaging in terrorism against the terror group Hezbollah.”

It seems worth noting: Just before Panetta, CBS viewers heard from a former FBI analyst who said of the explosions in stores, cars and homes that killed some 39 people and injured more than 3,000, including children:

Tactically, what Israel has done has been brilliant. They have severely degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. They’ve severely degraded Hezbollah’s ability to respond to Israeli things. They’re really hoping that, strategically, Hezbollah gets the message: Stop firing rockets into our country.

That “tactic” has led to more death, more destruction and, some say, more chance of a still wider, more devastating war.

Joining us now to talk about unfolding events and US media’s depictions is Mohamad Bazzi. He’s director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, as well as former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mohamad Bazzi.

Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you for having me.

JJ: CBS segued from the “brilliant tactic” guy to Leon Panetta by saying that some saw Israel’s action as a “deception one step too far. The United Nations labeled the operation a violation of international law, and it’s raised some eyebrows here at home too.” It’s equally hard to imagine that this wasn’t a violation as that it wouldn’t immediately be condemned as such, had anyone else carried it out, would you say?

MB: That’s an excellent point. It would certainly have been condemned, let’s say, if Russia had carried out a similar operation, or even something a fraction of this kind of attack, in Ukraine.

I think one of the things that struck me, and I suspect it struck you and others who watch the Western media, is the sense of marvel over the ingenuity of Israel’s technological prowess. So what we had is a lot of the coverage framed as, “Oh, this is taking a page out of a spy thriller, or a dystopian movie.”

And in some ways, what unfolded in Lebanon last week was something dystopian, but it wasn’t a movie. It affected real people’s lives. And so many in the Western media were fixating on the novelty of Israel’s attack, and sometimes celebrating it, but they neglected to acknowledge or even consider the sheer terror experienced by tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. And this is a society that suffered through years and years of trauma, and this was the latest attack that unfolded in this incredibly pernicious way.

A lot of the coverage also didn’t get into the question of whether this constituted a war crime. And, on the face of it, it seems to meet the definition of a war crime: Human Rights Watch, a few other rights organizations, issued statements noting that international humanitarian law forbids the use of booby traps, especially with objects that have such important use for civilians. I think it would fit the definition of a war crime, beyond just being an act of terrorism that’s meant to instill terror in a civilian population.

JJ: Hezbollah, like Hamas, is for many US media consumers almost like a sports team, or like a kaiju, a monster like Godzilla. And I think it might sound strange to some to think that they aren’t solely a military force in Lebanon, but in fact have a much broader role.

MB: Yeah, a lot of media consumers and listeners in the US don’t get the context. They don’t get the background that Hezbollah is not only a militia, it is not only the militia that’s labeled a terrorist group by the US and by many countries in the EU, but it’s also the most dominant military force in Lebanon, and it’s also the most powerful political party and political movement in the country.

So Hezbollah runs an extensive social service network. It operates schools and hospitals and supermarkets and credit unions.

…………………………..It’s the act of terror. It’s the imprecise nature, this deliberate setting off of detonations of thousands of small bombs that went off at the same time on a Tuesday afternoon, as people were going about their daily lives. And so the bombs went off in grocery stores and hospitals and sidewalk cafes and barbershops. The next day, on Wednesday, some of the walkie-talkie explosions went off during the funerals of people who had been killed the day before during the pager explosions.

So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Short even of his resignation, though, how many times do US officials need to lie or hide or dissimulate before journalists stop quoting them credulously? Isn’t it just insulting to readers and to the public at some point?

MB: We certainly have many decades of this, going back to Vietnam, of course, US officials lying about war and lying about US support for allies who commit atrocities.

The report from ProPublica has been an exception. It’s an excellent report. It just came out in the last couple of days, based on internal leaks, because there are officials in the State Department, and elsewhere in the Biden administration, that find all of this unconscionable, and don’t want to see this continued support.

And it’s a very important leak, not just because of what it tells us about Blinken and others in the administration, and their ability and willingness to lie to the US public and to lie to the US media, but it also shows us that there’s actually a fairly straightforward path for the Biden administration to stop its weapons transfers to Israel, because those weapons transfers violate US laws. And if they were honest, and they had admitted it, they would’ve had to stop sending weapons, because that’s what US law requires. It’s what the Biden administration’s own guidelines require.

So that was a tremendously important leak by ProPublica. And, unfortunately, I’ve seen some references to it in the past few days, but it’s not getting the widespread attention in the corporate media and in the legacy media that it should be getting.

It’s certainly getting a lot of attention on social media. People are sharing it, and sharing the documents, and it’s creating these calls for Blinken to resign, or for Biden to do something. But it’s certainly troubling to see the legacy media ignore this as well.

And it all raises the question, what more do you want? What more can be presented to the media for it to change its approach to covering this war?

…………………MB: I would certainly like to see more humane coverage. It’s a basic ask, and it’s unfortunate that we have to make this ask, but I would like to see more humane coverage of Palestinians, of Lebanese, of other Arabs and Muslims.

I think one of the things we’ve seen, just in this past week, in the way that the pager explosions and the walkie-talkie explosions were covered—this marveling over Israel’s ingenuity, it ignores the reality on the ground, but it also contributes to the dehumanization of Palestinians and Lebanese and Arabs, this widespread dehumanization that we’ve seen, certainly for decades, but we’ve seen it ramp up to an extreme since Israel launched its war on Gaza. …..more https://fair.org/home/western-press-obscured-the-sheer-terror-of-what-israel-had-carried-out/

October 3, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, media