Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have been found among Hizbollah guerrillas slain by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, Israel’s Channel 10 television reported on Wednesday citing diplomatic sources.
It said the Iranians were identified by documents found on their bodies, but gave no further details on how many were discovered or when. Neither the Israeli military nor Hizbollah representatives in Beirut had immediate comment on the report.
ironically Reuters
As ever there needs to be serious confirmation of this. The rumours of direct Iranian involvement have been flying since the beginning of this war. If this is confirmed then the direct fingerprints of Iran are all over Hezbollahland. Which makes this a much bigger war.
Captain Ed, who is rapidly becoming Steve denBeste 2.0, sums up:
This will complicate the global communiy’s efforts to appease Teheran on the various peace proposals. It will make clear that the war in southern Lebanon is not a heroic native resistance but a cowardly proxy attack on Israel ordered by the Iranians. France will once again have to eat Foreign Minister Phillipe Douste-Blazy’s description of Iran as a “stabilizing force” in the region.captain’s quarters
If nothing else this should give the Israelis another few weeks of diplomatically unfettered operations and will underline the need for a real international force to patrol Hezbollahland when the Israelis leave. The Lebanese Army, at least 1/3 Shi’ite, is simply too conflicted to do it on its own and the UN has proven itself a joke in any but the simplest engagements. This is not going to be a joke because, for a real ceasefire to take hold Hezbollah will have to be disarmed and the Iranians sent home. Not an easy task.
Written by jay on August 10th, 2006 with no comments.
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For those just joining the Reutergate conversation a Guide for the Perplexed can be found at ZombieTime.com. It is pretty up to date and explains the differences between faked, staged and frankly misleading.
Written by jay on August 10th, 2006 with no comments.
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The Zerb devotes her treeware column to Reutersgate today. She seems to have learned a little from the comments on her blog. Baby steps to be sure but she’s beginning to get it.
However, she manages to undermine her own point with this bit of loonieness:
Worse, this all but ensures that any and all images of civilian casualties or the blasting of infrastructure will be called into question - while the actual deaths and destruction won’t.
the zerb
The images will of course be questioned. As they should be. Just like the death counts.
What the Zerb neeeds to realize is that information from a warzone is inherently unreliable. So, while it may feel good to emote about a particular image of a poor, dead, baby we have to recognize that that image may or may not have anything to do with reality.
Moreover, devoid of context, it is impossible to know if this or that image has been staged, if the destruction was the direct or the indirect result of enemy action, if the photographer has sexed up the image with rather more able photoshopping, how the image was cropped and so on.
Plus, what the MSM does not report is the circumstance which gives rise to the image. For example: every image of dead Lebanese civilians needs to carry the rider that Hezbollah deliberately sites its rocket batteries in civilian areas in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention. And, each image should also note that the presence of armed Hezbollah is a direct violation of the UN resolution under which Israel left Lebanon. And there should be mention that Iran and Syria’s arming of Hezbollah is in direct breach of that resolution.
But no MSM organization is going to clutter up the emotion with a lot of fine print context. Which means that the public is left with stark, inaccurate, politically spun images and asked to “feel” something about them. Because provocative images, dead babies, are designed to bypass any rational analysis and go right to the heart. Which is what makes them so powerful.
Ultimately, the problem Reutergate exposes is not the fact that photographers and reporters “make stuff up”; rather it is the fact that the home office at Reuters or the New York Times or WaPo or CNN have caved to the culture of emotion rather than reason: they want the strong, hard hitting, image. “If it bleeds it leads.” is simplistic; but we have moved from the cool world of print to the hot world of image. Marshall Mcluhan would be amused and Neil Postman depressed.
Written by jay on August 10th, 2006 with no comments.
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