Hezbollah for Dummies

Everything you ever wanted to know about Hezbollah but were afraid to ask can be found in The New Yorker. This 2002 two-part piece, by Jeffrey Goldberg, has been re-posted in a prominent position on the magazine's website. Here's a snippet.

Fatah, which is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel from Lebanon, where it had its main base, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on the advice of his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, ordered Israeli forces into Lebanon. The stated purpose was to conquer what had come to be known as Fatahland, the strip of South Lebanon under Yasir Arafat's control, and to evict the P.L.O.'s forces. Sharon, though, had grander designs: to secure a friendly Christian government in Beirut and to destroy the P.L.O. It was not so much the invasion that inspired the Shiites, who were happy to see the South free of Arafat and Fatah. The Shiites took up arms when they realized that Sharon, like Arafat, had no intention of leaving Lebanon.

Hezbollah, with bases in the Bekaa and in Beirut's southern suburbs, quickly became the most successful terrorist organization in modern history. It has served as a role model for terror groups around the world; Magnus Ranstorp, the director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, says that Al Qaeda learned the value of choreographed violence from Hezbollah. The organization virtually invented the multipronged terror attack when, early on the morning of October 23, 1983, it synchronized the suicide bombings, in Beirut, of the United States Marine barracks and an apartment building housing a contingent of French peacekeepers. Those attacks occurred just twenty seconds apart; a third part of the plan, to destroy the compound of the Italian peacekeeping contingent, is said to have been jettisoned when the planners learned that the Italians were sleeping in tents, not in a high-rise building.

Until September 11th of last year, Hezbollah had murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group—two hundred and forty-one in the Marine-barracks attack alone.

It's worth printing out.

Oh, and here's another good New Yorker read, Jon Lee Anderson's analysis of whether Israel's invasion of Lebanon has styrengthened or weakened Hezbollah. The conclusion is grim.

Media acting badly?

The Star's Rosie DiManno steps back a bit -- just a bit -- from the media fray over the media fray over the June 2 arrests of 17 terrorism suspects in the GTA:

Because everybody's an expert on the media these days and nobody has an opinion that is allowed to go unexpressed — thanks ever so much for sharing — we in the business have been smacked around the past fortnight over the manner in which we report, shoot, analyze and comment on the news.

The hysterical reaction in some quarters has been matched — shrill for shrill — by defensive posturing and offensive pontificating.

Journalists behaving badly became a predictable ancillary preoccupation, mostly contrived on its merits but a handy means for pulling our eye off the ball of 17 Muslim males arrested on terrorism-related charges. That there was sufficient evidence to swear out warrants is lost in the rush not to judge.

You can damn well judge. That comes with the territory of being a sensate human being, even as it is the territory of the courts to convict or acquit.

The media-bashers — from within the profession and without — have been reminding us, incessantly, that the accused are merely, well, accused. Quite right too, although it would at least be consistent if such basic principles as innocent-until-proven-guilty were also applied to, say, uncharged-as-yet American Marines who purportedly committed atrocities against civilians in Iraq earlier this year. A humble little "alleged'' shouldn't be too much to ask.

It goes without saying — but is said ad infinitum, with exacting conscientiousness — that Islam is not the culprit in what has transpired locally over these last two weeks. Some 650,000 Canadian Muslims have zero to do with a minuscule number of adults and youths who may have been radicalized to the point of plotting atrocities. It apparently should also go without saying, to hear some people not tell it — Police Chief Bill Blair, for instance — that fundamentalist, anarcho-Islam is very much a common denominator in contemporary terrorism.

Tip-toeing into that minefield requires, seems to me, a giant dollop of "balancing'' — read: offsetting — reportage, whereby every whinge is afforded disproportionate examination in the media, and broken mosque windows (need I even say that such vandalism is shameful; yes I need say it) are equated, as an exercise in criminal relativism, with purported plans to bomb and behead etc.

The mosque incident, at least, was legitimate news, an episode that demanded telling, although the perpetrators, whoever they may be, are as unrepresentative of this zealously decent society as the aforementioned 17 accused are representative of the Muslim community.

What's worse, in my opinion, is the disingenuous journalism that occurs when reporters are deployed to bring back the non-story, this to provide pseudo-ballast for the genuine story, follow? There is an implicit apology — a "please don't hate us" shying away — in such vigorously symmetrical manoeuvres. It's journalism as justification, the tit-for-that.

Buried in the column is this little gem:

I wasn't at the Brampton courthouse on that first-appearance occasion. A veteran photographer told me it was the worst he's ever seen of the media ganging up on targets, with terrified women cowering from the cameras.

Maybe so, but it's a fine distinction. This is what we do, as unseemly as that might be. This is what we've done, countless times, to grieving families of victims, much less accused.

True enough. There's a lot of unseemly behaviour. Back when I used to do daily news for CBC-TV in Montreal, they would always assign me the sad stories because I would cry and then the people whom I was interviewing would cry ... you get the teary picture.

Still, it's interesting that even a veteran shooter thinks that the media mob was worse than usual. Maybe it was that there were so many cameras there, from the U.S. for example. Maybe it's something about how these suspects -- and by extension, their families -- are being treated as something less than ...

Read Rosie. She doesn't have the answers. But she raises some provocative issues, as usual.

 

First Rumble

Probably the most explosive reading this week is called The Israel Lobby, in the London Review of Books. It's an edited version of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy published last week by John Mearsheimer, the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and Stephen Walt, the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

They examine the U.S. relationship with Israel, arguing that it runs counter to U.S. interests.

[T]he thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Needless to say, the very mention of an "Israel lobby'' raises hackles in many quarters, although AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has been ranked, assuming that these things can objectively be ranked, as the second most powerful lobby group in Washington.

You can see that there's a lot of discussion all over the web by looking here and here for example but not a lot of North American mainstream media coverage, at least not that I can see by conducting a simple Google news search.

The authors have come under attack, as has their research. Which is fair game. I've read the study and am no historian so I will leave the fact-checking to others. But I can attest to much of what is written in the paragraphs on media. (I have added some links).

The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.

‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’

News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.

Note that, among other errors, the professors get the name of CAMERA wrong, as CAMERA itself points out in a ''preliminary assessment'' of the study.

That said, there is no doubt that there are some very well-funded, although not necessarily coordinated, media watchdog groups, that zero-in on journalists and pundits perceived not to be on board. Two outfits in Canada are Honest Reporting and the Canadian Coalition for Democracies. Their members are quick to write letters in ''astro-turf'' campaigns to publicly spank reporters who stray from the message.

Don't get me wrong: When you make a mistake, it should be pointed out. But sometimes the campaigns go way beyond seeking a correction.

Of course, it must be said that the other side of the Middle East conflict has its supporters and lobbyists as well, although they don't appear to be as wealthy, well-organized, entrenched, or influential. And it certainly doesn't help their public relations campaign to have suicide bombers on their side.

You can be sure that this story is just beginning.

Token of Gratitude

A brand new feature right here at Zerb's blogging store: your must-read of the week!

This is from the New York Review of Books, in which many a great piece on the Iraq war has appeared. It's a review of My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope by Paul Bremer, the proconsul who slunk out of town, and The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, by New Yorker writer George Packer.

It reveals, in one relatively easy read, just how political the attack on Iraq was.

Bremer says that Bush "was as vigorous and decisive in person as he appeared on television." But in fact he gives an account of a superficial and weak leader. He had lunch with the President before leaving for Baghdad —a meeting joined by the Vice President and the national security team—but no decision seems to have been made on any of the major issues concerning Iraq's future. Instead, Bremer got a blanket grant of authority that he clearly enjoyed exercising. The President's directions seem to have been limited to such slogans as "we're not going to fail" and "pace yourself, Jerry." In Bremer's account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. But there is no evidence that he cared about the specific questions that counted: Would the new prime minister have a broad base of support? Would he be able to bridge Iraq's ethnic divisions? What political values should he have? Instead, Bush had only one demand: "It's important to have someone who's willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq." According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush's candidate for president of Iraq's interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had "been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition."

The more you know, the worse it seems.

Booked Up

Stacks and stacks of new media-related books piled up around me.

First, there's the obvious, including Mary Mapes' Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power, the account of last year's disastrous CBS's 60 Minutes II story about U.S. President George W. Bush's getting preferential treatment in the National Guard duty during Vietnam.

Which reminds me. On last Sunday's Reliable Sources, which focused on the New York Times' Judith Miller and had Mapes on as a guest, George Washington University's Steve Roberts had this to say to host Howard Kurtz:

ROBERTS: You know, I think there is a parallel between Judith Miller and Mary Mapes, your guest on the first half-hour here, Howard. Both of them are convinced that they were right and everybody else was wrong.

And I think that Miller -- the single biggest mistake Judy Miller made was the same mistake Mary Mapes made. She wanted this story to be true true.

KURTZ: This being the WMD story.

ROBERTS: The WMD story. I think she protected Scooter Miller -- Scooter Libby not just as a confidential source, but as part of a group of people who were arguing the same line that she favored and wanted to defend.

I think she made the exact same mistake as Mary Mapes. She ran through the stop signs because she in her heart wanted this story to be true.

Except the Bush story is true. The trouble is, that Mapes relied on evidence that could not be verified. But I digress.

Also on my reading list are:

* Gwynne Dyer's With Every Mistake, a collection of his post 9/11 columns with notes on what he was thinking at the time and what he thinks now. It also examines how the media shape fact and opinion, and the role they played in marching the U.S. population into a warmongering mode.

* Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson and Rita Leistner. This high-quality, full-colour picture book is not exactly the most appetizing coffee table material. But it boasts important and arresting images that never made it into the mainstream.

* Filtering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model, edited by Jeffrey Klaehn. This one looks at everything from "Israeli propaganda'' in CanWest papers to how the media cover, or don't cover, the the environment.

Finally, not quite a media book, but one with a chapter on the media that I have already read and plan to frum sentence by drivelly sentence:

* Rescuing Canada's Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution by Tasha Kheiriddin and Adam Daifallah. Lord knows it needs rescuing. Not that I want to help but Lord knows we can use stronger opposition from this end of the spectrum as well. Otherwise, the Liberals will occupy that space. Not good for anybody.

Now the challenge is to find the time for all this reading between all this writing.

Male call

I always thought I wrote like a girl. But not according to this cool tool my friend Carla Maria Lucchetta turned me on to tonight. 

(T)he Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

I entered random chunks of my scribblings, both from columns and this blog, and my musings came out as overwhelmingly testosterone-laden. I am not sure what this means but maybe I ought to trade in the thongs for jockey shorts.

Try it with your own musings.

gLiterati

Mixed reactions to last night's 12th Giller Awards, now known as The Scotiabank Giller Prize. (The bank has taken a tastefully lowkey position here, much to the relief of those literati who feared that last night's ultra bunfest would be overrun with grasping money types.)

I thought that CTV did a slick job of producing the gala. The rooms were done up with red velvet curtains and red roses, with the most gorgeous centerpieces imaginable. I just wanted to lie down on these beds of roses. I thought that Sandra Faire, wife of Ivan Fecan who heads Bell Globemedia which owns CTV, was responsible for the decor but she told me no, crediting Karen Gruson with the look of the place.

The show, hosted by Canada AM's Seamus O'Regan, went off without a hitch, except perhaps at the end when, as the clock ran out, David Bergen, the winner of the $40,000 prize, got the musical hook.

Some literary types I know were not so impressed. For example, one novellist complained that the show, with its too-cute ''betting breaks'' instead of commercial breaks, was ''crass.''

My attitude? If you're going to complain, then you have no business knocking back the free booze and first class grub.

Anyway, I am not big on boldface, something I leave to my friend and colleague Rita Zekas, who was a very close pal of Doris Giller. Rita, who knows how to be a door whore with the best killer shoes and the fastest-notetaking fingers in town, is the go-to girl on this. I was too busy trying to keep my cleavage in check.

Booked

It was the battle of the book launch parties last night in the Bathurst/King area.

First up was the slap-up for A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age, a memoir by the Globe and Mail's wonderfully acerbic TV critic and soccer maniac John Doyle. Plenty of TV boldface in attendance at the, natch, Irish pub. Interestingly, most of it was from CBC and not CTV, although they both share the same Bell Globemedia ownership.

It was hard to see who was there the Paddock pub was so packed, but I did spot The National's Peter Mansbridge, who rushed off early to return to the air for the first time since the end of the lockout, plus the fifth estate's Linden MacIntyre, Made in Canada's Dan Lett, comic Daryn Jones and exec producer Gerald Lunz, both of Rick Mercer's (used to be) Monday Report, and documentarian Mark Starowicz, who'd parked himself on a barstool at the back. Many behind-the-scene CBCers were also there and everybody told me that they were so glad to be back to work, and that the mood in the Broadcast Centre was not as hostile as they had feared.

As for CTV types, well, it was hard to outdazzle the presence of themselves, Bell Globemedia president and CEO Ivan Fecan and his producer wife Sandra Faire, who braved the crowd. Spotted huddled from the rain on the front patio with the unrepentant smokers was cheery comedian Mike Bullard who was the subject of a profile by Doyle today. I did catch Globe publisher Phillip Crawley on his way out.

From there it was down the street and around the corner -- mygawd I am starting to sound like the National Post's snooper and pooper Shinan Govani, who was also at both parties -- to a much more chi-chi watering hole, the Century Room, for the What I Meant To Say shindig. Edited by Ian Brown of TVO, it's a collection of 25 essays by guys, supposedly on their private lives. I have only read two excerpts in the Globe and, based on those, maybe Robert Fulford's scorching review (sub. req'd.) of it yesterday in the Post nailed it. You have to love his headline, "12 Angry Men and 13 Whiny Ones."

After a while the contributors, most of them middle-aged journalists, begin to sound depressingly similar. I can't find a radical among them, or, for that matter, a conservative. Some pieces, presented as confessions, turn out to be mainly complaints about an unfair world or unfair women. The style often feels tentative and decaffeinated, as if something were being hidden or held back.

Several pieces are, as the English used to say, blushmaking, in the sense used by a character in a 1944 Terence Rattigan play: "idiotic, blushmaking, sentimental slush." Brown tries to inject some literary class with an epigraph from Camus and references to Blake and Orwell but there's little sense of cultural landscape. The thinking and tone of What I Meant to Say are standardized. The mental furniture in most of these minds comes from Ikea.

That hoedown was also jammed but in a so much less interesting way. I don't know. Maybe morose middle-aged male writers, who tend to keep to themselves most of the day, just aren't party animals. One tour of the room and I was out of there, but for a bummed smoke patio-side from Globe managing editor Colin Mackenzie where I got to meet poet Christopher Dewdney, who did not contribute to the book.

Random Harvest

Seems that the spanking new eFrank didn't get the whole Maclean's-v-The Globe and Mail smackdown over the Peter C. Newman bio of Brian Mulroney completely right. (Which means I didn't either but at least, in true journalistic weasel  fashion, I fudged my posting.) eFrank has Maclean's looking like the loser. "Screwed and tatooed" in fact.

Turns out that, because the Globe played the story the way it did, it lost thousands in Random House advertising. (I'm hearing as much as $50,000.) Random House also gave Maclean's the excerpts gratis -- and they ended up handing the newsweekly its best-selling issue in years. What's more, in its ads for what is sure to be the top-selling Canadian book of the year, there are promos saying "First revealed in Maclean's -- now in stores!"

The Sept. 12 issue of the Globe meanwhile is fishwrap.

Stevie Cameron, Call Your Lawyer!

I hear Brian Mulroney has hired journalist Arthur Milnes to ghost write his memoirs, although work on the McLelland & Stewart book has been delayed due to the former Prime Minister's ailing health this spring.

Milnes, late of the Kingston Whig-Standard and currently a contributor to Ottawa's Hill-Times, apparently has a historical interest in all things prime ministerial, especially Conservative prime ministerial.

Intrepid blogger that I am, I called him at his home tonight to check out the rumour.

"I would suspect Brian Mulroney does not need a ghost writer," he laughed.

That's a non-denial, I retorted.

"I'm not saying anything; you'll have to ask him," he said, inexplicably adding that he was sitting on his deck reading a book about Sir John A. Macdonald. "Give (Mulroney) a call."

Yeah. Right. He's on my speed dial.

UPPITY DATE: Milnes just tracked me down at home to tell me I threw him off.

"I put down my John A. Macdonald book," he laughed.

"I am not the ghostwriter,'' he insisted. "I am the researcher. He really doesn't need a ghostwriter."

Oh, everybody needs a ghostwriter.