Monday, July 17, 2006

Idiot Wind Follow Up

My previous post needs a little fleshing out. Here are some of the egregious points of NPR's Morning Edition coverage on the Middle East Crisis. In the piece on foreigners fleeing Lebanon Renee Montagne states that "Israeli warplanes are back in action...hitting a Hezbollah stronghold and..." I would like to ask Montagne what stronghold that was--a house with family members in it, a convoy of civilians fleeing the bombing? Imagine if the Hezbollah rocketing of Haifa was described as hitting an Israeli Kadima stronghold? In a later piece Renee Montagne is interviewing Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev. She does ask him about "massive attacks on Lebanese infrastructure and civilian casualties unrelated or at least not related directly to Hezbollah" which is positive, but she lets him off with his response of "we've been hitting Hezbollah and Hezbollah infrastructure to prevent Hezbollah from being rearmed." Okay, and then the follow-up questions with details of homes, bridges, villages etc. being hit and international laws on collective punishment, etc? Nothing, instead Montagne asks three times about whether Israel will bomb Iran or Syria. She also allows Regev to cite UN resolutions three times regarding disarmament of Hezbollah and yet never asks about numerous UN resolutions that Israel regularly flaunts. Lastly Montagne updates the death toll in Lebanon and then states, "Hezbollah is thought to receive between ten million and twenty million dollars a month in aid from Iran and its fighters go there for training." This is given with absolutely no citation of the source of this "intelligence." Sounds like propaganda to me.

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