Military historian Victor Davis Hanson has a sobering review of the current situation in the ME and the questionable sympathies of the world press;
The old Arab agenda of recapturing “stolen” land has been superseded by a new Islamist jihad that is as fanatical as it is inhuman. The Islamists care not a whit for ground, but only for the abject destruction of the Jewish state and to finish the Holocaust that they claim did not take place. Few of the pundits now clamoring for “engagement” care to recall that Syria probably murdered Rafik Hariri, or that Iran promises to wipe Israel off the map.
The near criminal indifference of the international community is cause for greater depression still. No one says a thing about horrific Arab racism and anti-Semitism that brazenly offer the world pictures of our secretary of State as a primate and constant hate speech of Jews as apes and pigs. And here at home, a celebrity actor, the staff of a failed congresswoman in Georgia, and a crazed Muslim with a gun in Seattle all shout about the evils of the “Jews” — a good cross-section of just how insidious is the growing anti-Semitism.
The globalized media is absolutely discredited after the coverage of Lebanon. Reuters has destroyed its reputation, gained from 150 years of world reporting, by releasing doctored pictures and tolerating staged photo-ops. Almost all the Western media outlets failed to distinguish Lebanese civilian from military casualties — as if the Hezbollah terrorists they never filmed and never interviewed never died.
Indeed, thanks to the unprofessional reporters abroad, and their disingenuous chiefs back home, the world never saw the killers who sent the rockets nor many of their civilian victims on the ground in Israel. Nor did the reporters apprise their audience of the different landscapes in which they worked: candor in Israel might win loud disagreement; truth in Lebanon meant death. It would be as if Reuters, AP, or the New York Times embedded its reporters within the Waffen SS, beaming daily reports back home about the great morale and noble suffering of the Wehrmacht as it advanced into the snowy Ardenn.
… and near the end gets something wrong;
In an amorphous war of self-induced Western restraint, like the present one, truth and moral clarity are as important as military force. This past month, the world of the fascist jihadist and those who tolerate him was once again on display for civilization to fathom. Even the most timid and prone to appeasement in the West are beginning to see that it is becoming a question of “the Islamists or us.”
In this eleventh hour, that is a sort of progress after all.
Or rather, is proven wrong. Returning from Lebanon after spending a few days as guests of Hezbollah, two Canadian politicians have established themselves as this year’s leading contenders for the Nobel Prize In Bad Judgement,
It would aid the cause of peace if Canada dropped Hezbollah from a list of banned terrorist organizations, according to two Canadian MPs on a fact-finding mission to Lebanon.
When asked if he were in favour of Hezbollah being taken off the terror list, Etobicoke Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj said: “Yes, I would be.”
He likened the situation in the Middle East to Northern Ireland, where “if there wasn’t the possibility for London to negotiate with the IRA, you’d still have bombings.”
“Hezbollah has a political wing, they have members of parliament, they have two cabinet ministers,” Wrzesnewskyj said. “You want to encourage politicians in this military organization so that the centre of gravity shifts to them.”
New Democrat Peggy Nash, who represents the Toronto riding of Parkdale-High Park, said her discussions in Lebanon had led her to believe “that it is just not helpful to label them a terrorist organization.”
“If the political parties in Lebanon who may disagree with Hezbollah, and be opposed to them and their philosophy, can figure out a way to work with Hezbollah and try to get along internally, then perhaps we should take a cue from that.”
This was the message that both MPs said they would bring back to their caucuses, and eventually to the House of Commons, when they return to Canada this week.
Unbelievable.
Related – How Islamic Terrorists Manipulate the Media
Also – lots this morning on this at Blogging Tories.
