The BBC is using its coverage of Lebanon to disguise Israel’s crimes

By Jonathan Cook

The UK public is being subjected to an unprecedented campaign of media propaganda to conceal Israel’s true objectives while magnifying the massacre.

The more Israel expands its war across the Middle East, the more the Western media intensifies its war against our minds.

Established media outlets like the BBC are weaponizing the language of their reporting against the public as effectively as Israel weaponized primitive bits of technology against the people of Lebanon.

Thousands of Lebanese were maimed by explosive pagers and walkie-talkies last week. Likewise, media coverage is distorting the Western public’s ability to understand how and why Israel is dangerously fanning the flames across the region.

Words like “audacious,” “climbing,” and “targets” have become tools for hiding meaning, not illuminating—and for good reason. Because Israel’s actions are so obviously criminal, so obviously horrible, so obviously genocidal. Language becomes a weapon to hide the truth.

The media chorus goes like this: Israel is attacking Lebanon to stop Hezbollah’s rocket fire and allow residents of Israel’s northernmost communities to return home. Or, in the more direct and Orwellian language of the Israeli officials framing this horror show: Israel must “escalate to de-escalate.”

Lebanese civilians are paying the heaviest price – around 550 of them were killed on the first day of Israel’s bombing campaign. Many tens of thousands were expelled – ethnically cleansed – from the territory of southern Lebanon.

Why? Because, according to Israel, Hezbollah hid its stockpile of rockets in its homes. These houses, therefore, must be destroyed. Strangely, Hezbollah seems to have forgotten that it has vast rocky terrain across southern Lebanon where it could more safely and wisely hide its arsenal.

The media is uncritically broadcasting equally ridiculous Israeli propaganda videos that show Hezbollah rockets hidden in Lebanese living rooms.

Indeed, graphs showing “cross-border attacks” since October 7 last year – when Hamas escaped for a day from the concentration camp that Israel turned Gaza into over decades – suggest how Israel’s narrative about its bombing of Lebanon to “ stopping Hezbollah rocket fire” is completely false.

Of the 9,600 cross-border attacks, Israel committed 7,845 of them – or four-fifths – and began doing so on October 7. Israel actually intensified its attacks on Lebanon in early September, just as Hezbollah was dramatically reducing its rocket fire.

What the graphics cannot convey is the asymmetrical nature of these clashes.

Hezbollah’s rockets have caused much less damage to Israel than the much greater number of Israeli bombs and missiles, which are much more powerful.

By the third week of September, Israel had killed more than 750 Lebanese, compared to 33 Israelis. The difference is even more stark now.

However, the Western media has not framed Hezbollah’s attacks as its “right to defend itself” – a right we are continually reminded Israel has.

Why has the priority been Israel’s need to “stop” Hezbollah’s less numerous and mostly non-lethal rockets, rather than Lebanon’s need to stop Israel’s more numerous and much more lethal bombs?

But more importantly, Israel does not want the Western public to be exposed to other, more plausible reasons for Hezbollah’s rockets in recent years – or what it would take to make them stop. And the Western media is skillfully helping Israel keep these reasons hidden.

Hezbollah has repeatedly noted that its rocket fire would stop if Israel withdrew from Gaza and ended the massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians there, as it is required to do under international law.

In two separate decisions, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and an act of aggression against the Palestinian people that must end, and that a “plausible” case was made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Although no one at the BBC or elsewhere would ever admit it, Hezbollah is actually much closer to upholding international law than Western states like the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, all of which are helping to arm and sustain the “plausible” genocide of Israel.

With Western media refusing to provide any meaningful context for Hezbollah’s actions, Israel’s self-serving narrative fills the void: the assumption is that Hezbollah – and possibly all “Arabs” – are driven solely by irrational, anti-Semitic desire. of murdering Jews in Israel.

The implication is that Lebanon deserves everything it gets from Israel.

Because Israel’s actions are so obviously criminal, so obviously horrible, so obviously genocidal. Language becomes a weapon to hide the truth.

BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen helped push this particular narrative on the Monday night news this week by describing Hezbollah in the following terms: “Fighting Israel is in their DNA, that’s why they exist .”

Let’s ignore Bowen’s confusion between Hezbollah’s military wing and its political and welfare arms – exactly the Israel-centric view of Hezbollah imposed by the British government in designating the entire movement as “a terrorist organization.”

Do Hezbollah politicians, the civil servants, police officers, doctors, teachers and administrators it employs to run the institutions of Lebanon – the “state within a state” as the media calls it – exist solely to “fight Israel?” ” Is this really the only reason they exist?

But even if we ignore all the civilians involved with Hezbollah and focus exclusively on its military wing, is Bowen’s characterization impartial, fair, or even accurate?

Hezbollah is not driven by simple bloodlust to “fight Israel,” as the BBC’s Middle East expert suggests. For many Lebanese citizens, he is there to protect their country from an Israeli army that has aggressively interfered in its affairs for decades, long before Hezbollah even existed.

Published in Middle East Eye, September 28, 2024.