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Media Disregarding Truth About Hezbollah Barry Farber Our University of North Carolina college newspaper (The Daily Tar Heel) billed itself "The only college daily except Monday in the south except Texas!" That let you know we enjoyed that little touch of prominence. My Cousin Henry grew up in the tiny town of Weldon, North Carolina. One day, in lashing back against the teasing of those of us from larger cities, Henry said, "In the late 1800s Weldon was one terminal of the second-longest railroad in the country!" Or maybe it was the world. That let us know Henry was proud of Weldon and knew how to make his tee more impressive than his golf ball. By our crafting of distinctions we betray our feelings. And that grabs my attention these days every time someone in media debate says, "Look. Hezbollah is the only Arab fighting force that ever made Israel retreat!" Are they trying to do for Hezbollah what we were trying to do for our college paper and what Henry was trying to do for Weldon? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe sometimes. Maybe somewhat. Or, it's also possible they're simply wrong. Hezbollah has a lot of sharing to do for that distinction. We won't count the Jordanian fighters in Israel's 1948 War of Independence who clung tenaciously to East Jerusalem and what came to be called the entire West Bank. A British officer, Sir John Glubb, known to the Arabs as Glubb Pasha, had molded them into an efficient fighting force, and any Israeli who was there will tell you they were tougher as a standup regular army than Hezbollah's embed-yourself-in-babies "guerrillas." Let's go back to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Egyptian forces stormed across the Suez Canal, broke through Israel's Bar Lev line and recaptured half of the Sinai Peninsula before Israeli troops under Ariel Sharon pushed them all the way back and split the Egyptian Third Army from the First Army on the west side of the Suez Canal. They made Israel retreat.
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Syrian troops in that war also had initial success against the Israelis. Even if American media folks have foggy memories, you'd think some patriotic Egyptian or Syrian would tip off Al-Jazeera to correct the record out of sheer national pride. Sure, this war is definitely not your father's Arab-Israeli war, but why do so many in the civilized world go out of their way to light up a halo around Hezbollah? Every time a Western talking head salutes Hezbollah as "the only Arab force that ever made Israelis retreat," it splashes torrents of adrenaline down upon extremist Islamic livers and spurs them on to even more murderous exploits. Let's suppose you forgot about Egyptian and Syrian successes in the Yom Kippur War and you honestly thought that Hezbollah really was the first Arab force that ever made Israelis retreat. Suppose you thought that was true. Here's another truth: If the Arabs laid down their arms, it would be the end of violence. If Israel laid down its arms, it would be the end of Israel. Why not throw a truth like that in once in a while? I'm aware that I'm betraying nostalgia for a media that selected their sympathies morally in wartime and did their word-fighting accordingly. During World War II the media were on our side, like the British and French. When the British troops were trapped on the French beaches of Dunkirk awaiting rescue from large boats, small boats, rowboats, and inner tubes, the British and American media didn't say: "Whaddaya know! This is the first time a German force ever made a British force evacuate." Instead they hailed the "miracle" of rescuing a quarter-million British troops from those beaches to defend the home island and fight again. Today the media pride themselves not on choosing sides according to moral imperatives, but on being as impartial as a parking meter. I can handle that attitude better in coverage of a Super Bowl in which the morality of the two teams is a non-issue than I can a threat to the existence of Israel by the likes of Hezbollah.
England fought the civilized world's war alone from the fall of France to Nazi Germany in June 1940 until Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union a whole year later. Now Israel is fighting the civilized world's – including Lebanon's – war against Hezbollah. Why don't they let me hear that kind of comment now and then in addition to "Hezbollah is the first Arab force that ever made Israel retreat"? Spinning through selective distinction is nothing new. It's time to bring back old Ludwig Sertorius, Hitler's Edward R. Murrow, who gave us the championship spin of all World War II. As Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery's British Eighth Army was chasing German General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps westward across North Africa in the longest, fastest, and most disastrous military retreat in history, old Ludwig told the German people on radio, "All British attempts to interfere with our systematic advance to the rear have been successfully smashed!" I harvested similarly artful spin in a much more praiseworthy cause from astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. "Buzz," I asked him, "You and Neil Armstrong had the same training and the same abilities. Yet he was the first to set foot on the moon. Nobody remembers the name of the man who walked from the surf onto the beach right behind Columbus. Do you resent the notion that Armstrong will always be the first to walk on the moon when at no extra cost it could have been you?" "You've got that all wrong, Barry, " he said. "When we splashed down upon our return in the Pacific Ocean, our capsule was helicoptered to the deck of the aircraft carrier and I was the first one out, thereby becoming the first person ever to return to Earth from someplace else!" So, why don't the media tell the truth about Hezbollah instead of saying it's the "first Arab force ever to make Israel retreat"? Why don't they say, for example, "Hezbollah is the Arab force that has caused more Arab civilians to be killed than any other force – Arab OR Israeli – in the half-century-plus of hostility between Arabs and Israelis." Do I say that out of love for Israel? You bet I do. But I also say it out of love for truth.
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