The accounts in Part 1 depict a straightforward human tragedy. In Part 2, I want to look at efforts to supply a different perspective.
A good starting point is Qana in Context, a communique released on August 1 by HonestReporting.com, an organization formed in 2000 by Jewish students in Great Britain who were appalled by press coverage of the second Intifada. “The media in Europe was twisting the story to brand Israel as a bad guy! Jews in the UK were in shock and felt under attack. A few idealists decided enough was enough.” They created a web site predicated on the conviction that “Israel is in the midst of a battle for public opinion – waged primarily via the media. To ensure Israel is represented fairly and accurately HonestReporting.com monitors the media, exposes cases of bias, promotes balance, and effects change through education and action.”
HonestReporting.com thus reflects a hallmark of our times, the belief that unwelcome news must stem from bias and that one must adopt a partisan approach of one’s own simply to redress the balance and create something approaching fairness. On the surface, organizations like this are dedicated to truth and merely want to give it a chance to emerge. But their own words undercut such a notion. Their real conviction is that a war is underway, that media coverage is an important battlefield of the war, and that the crucial thing is to win.
I don’t mean to pick on HonestReporting.com. To repeat, they are a sign of the times, and they have plenty of counterparts on all parts of the political and ideological spectrum.
So how to deal with something like Cana?
Following an Israeli Air Force strike against a building in the village of Qana, Israel is once again subject to some severe criticism in the international media. TV viewers and newspaper readers have been confronted with highly emotive and disturbing images of bodies being pulled from the rubble.
Undoubtedly, the loss of life is extremely tragic and the vast majority of Israelis deeply regrets this incident. However, while some media wishes to portray Israel as a malevolent force that deliberately murders civilians, some wider context needs to be added to the coverage of the Qana story:
I summarize the main points:
1. 150 rockets had been fired into Israel from Qana.
2. Hezbollah deliberately targets civilians, it deliberately adopts the moral camouflage of civilians, and it deliberately operates in high population areas so as to invite civilian casualties. The IDF, in contrast, does none of these things.
3. Lebanese civilians have been warned to get out of areas that are slated for attack. The civilians in Qana received 48 hours’ notice before the air strike in question.
4. A double standard is being applied, in that NATO’s aerial campaign in Kosovo produced 500 civilian deaths because of Serbian use of civilians as human shields. No outcry comparable to Qana occurred.
5. There are inconsistencies in the news accounts:
a. The Red Cross has published that 28 corpses were evacuated from Qana, 19 of which were children. These figures clash with the Lebanese report that 57 people were killed.
b. Why is there an unexplained 7-8 hour gap between the time of the air strike and the building collapse? Initially the IDF speculated that Hezbollah explosives in the building were behind the explosion that caused the collapse. Another possibility is that the rickety building remained standing for a few hours, but eventually collapsed. “It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there, IDF Brigadier General Eshel said. “I’m saying this very carefully, because at this time I don’t have a clue as to what the explanation could be for this gap,” he added. [Italics supplied]
The communique also links to a story that alleges that a number of the photographs of the dead at Qana were staged or faked. This second story specifically references the blog Confederate Yankee, which shows a number of photos and tries to make the argument that, while the children depicted in them are clearly dead, it wasn’t necessarily because of the IDF air strike. The post insinuates that a massacre may have been manufactured, but does not press the case. Instead it falls back on statements about the 150 rockets fired from Qana and the fact that the civilians of Qana had five days’ notice — not two as in the HonestReporting.com memo — to vacate the village.
Confederate Yankee is the nom de blog of Bob Owens, who holds an MA in English from East Carolina University (my parents’ alma mater — Go Pirates!) and has worked as “a day laborer, college freshman composition instructor, salesman, sports writer, web designer, and technical writer.” But apparently not as a coroner or forensic investigator, though he can determine corpses in a state of rigor mortis by looking at news photos.
Is what occurred at Qana substantially as reported? Based on the HonestReporting.com communique and the links it supplies to other sites, I see no evidence to suppose that the coverage was inaccurate or even biased. What HonestReporting.com seems to expect is that reporters ought to insert into a story about an air strike gone bad an apologia for the IDF: reminders that Israelis are getting rocketed (true), that the Hezbollah are bad people (undoubtedly), and that the IDF is making every effort to minimize civilian casualties (unproven and regrettably open to question). Readers get that information in other stories; it doesn’t have to be shoehorned into every last story that emerges from the conflict.
But maybe there’s a more competent impeachment of the Qana events elsewhere. Let’s have a look.
