They used to say the first casualty in war is the truth and that certainly was the case with the war between Hizbullah and Israel in Lebanon over July-August 2006.
Not only did we have to put up with the usual pack of lies from politicians and the warring parties, but we were also treated to a stunning array of fakery in the media ranging from doctored and staged photographs to news stories based on fraudulent accounts from so-called "eye witnesses" to dubious casualty figures which claimed, inter alia, that the fighting had claimed the lives of 1,000 Lebanese who, according to many reporters including Ed O'Loughlin of the Melbourne Age, were mostly "civilians".
Strangely enough, no figures were ever made available of Hizbullah deaths in action.
Of course, it's not always easy to differentiate between ordinary civilians and members of a civilian terrorist organisation who usually wear civilian clothes and operate within civilian areas turning those areas into battle fields when they use them as cover to fire at enemy civilian targets.
Still, the impression we got from the way the war was reported in the west was that, by some miracle, not a single Hizbullah fighter had succumbed in its glorious "victory" over Israel.
Well, finally an Hizbullah casualty has been uncovered.
According to Reuters, Radwan Saleh, a 35 year old American citizen and Hizbullah fighter, was buried yesterday in Lebanon after his body was discovered in the village of Maroun al-Ras.
That brings the unofficial Hizbullah death toll to exactly one.
Not a bad effort against the fifth strongest army in the world - that is assuming we believe what Hizbullah and its cheerleaders including some in the media are telling us is the truth.
[FOOTNOTE: My first thought when I saw the Reuters photograph of the goose stepping Hizbullah "militant" was that it might have been doctored. It's not - the picture is genuine!]
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1 comment:
Well picked Wilbur.
The photograph of the goose stepping terrorist from Hezbollah was a real hoot.
There are reports coming out of Israel about how many Hezbollah fighters actually ran away from the action and deserted their posts.
I'm guessing that O'Loughlin won't cover these reports while he's in Lebanon and far enough from the Palestinian territories to be able to ignore the violence going on there.
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