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Just like the spring of 2002, the international press prefers hype to
facts

After a lot of hesitancy and a short-lived attempt to take balanced
positions, the worldwide left-wing has returned in full force to the
"Jenin massacre syndrome."

To remind: Many of the worlds leading journalists described the
fighting in Jenin during the spring of 2002 as a cold-blooded massacre
of thousands of Palestinians by the brutal IDF. TV screens around the
world featured Palestinian "eyewitnesses," who gave exact details of
blood-curdling actions by IDF soldiers that never happened. TV
reporters reported against a background of destroyed buildings as
"evidence" from the field that Israel had mercilessly flattened an
entire city and the refugee camp next to it.

It took months for human rights organizations, even the United
Nations, to issue their reports refuting Palestinian claims. There was
no massacre in Jenin, no ethnic cleansing, no intentional destruction
of hospitals. There was a bloody battle in which soldiers died on each
side.

Learning the lessons

The fairytale about the "Jenin massacre" may have died, but were
lessons learned? Some were. The European media, especially the
electronic media, has given some expression to the suffering of
Israeli civilians under attack. It has not (usually) supported
Hizbullah.

But in other cases, no lessons were learned from the blood libel of
the Jenin massacre. During the second week of fighting, Israel's
military campaign in Lebanon is currently being portrayed as the total
destruction of Lebanon, of essential civilian infrastructure, as a
human tragedy on the level of the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of
thousands of people in Southeast Asia.

Reading reports from left-leaning field reporters, one gets a picture
that Beirut has been destroyed at least as badly as Dresden was during
the Second World War. Foreign television channels use one section of
footage over and over, showing the destruction of one neighborhood in
south Beirut, to "show" what has happened throughout the city.

The most worrying thing about the current anti-Israel wave is its'
global scope: Leaders and opinion makers around Latin America, for
example, have denounced Israel in some of the strongest terms
imaginable. The UN Human Rights Commission has joined the chorus, as
have international law organizations, cinema types, even journalists.

These claims, unfortunately, rest on the arrogant statements and
bragging of several Israeli politicians and generals. Threats to "bomb
Lebanon fifty years backwards" - statements intended for domestic
consumption, and perhaps as part of the psychological warfare against
the enemy - were picked up and broadcast by the world media as proof
of Israel's destructive intentions.

The facts

And where is the truth in all this? The air force's bombing of Lebanon
have caused, as always happens in war, damage and destruction, but
this damage has been extremely limited. Israel has not "kicked
Lebanon's ass," nor is there any intention to do so. In Beirut, to
date, the airport has been hit, as have several strategic targets and
buildings in the Shiite Quarter. That's a far cry from the
descriptions of horror being played out nightly on television screens,
and of charges of war crimes.

The situation in south Lebanon is worse because of the planned
civilian flight. But Hizbullah has turned the whole of south Lebanon
into a war zone, by blurring the distinction between military and
civilian areas. The organization also aims its rockets at Israel's
civilian population. Thus, civilians were forced to flee both southern
Lebanon and northern Israel.

Still, talk of a "Lebanese nakba," a humanitarian disaster that any
honest person would feel revulsion about, fails to reflect reality. It
is no more than horror propaganda that many prefer to believe,
including many Israeli journalists. Analysts repeat the claims without
verifying the facts, and preach moral lessons and philosophies based
on these claims.

More than numbers

The numbers, of course, don't tell the whole story: The death of even
one innocent person is a terrible tragedy, and 50,000 refugees is an
appalling horror. But statistics do have a public relations value.

As of this writing, some 360 Lebanese have been killed by Israeli
military action, about half of them Hizbullah fighters (as opposed to
official Lebanese statistics). After two weeks of bombing, these
numbers tell the story of low-level war. There is no "destruction of
Lebanon," just like there was no "Jenin massacre."

In 2006, because of the mistaken approach that "the world is with us,"
because of the different character of the fighting and psychological
and diplomatic reasons, the facts have been abandoned. This is a
mistake, one that works against Israel with opinion makers around the
world.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3280038,00.html