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13. august 2006
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The United Nations Human Rights Council, the offspring of the now defunct UN Human Rights Commission, has produced a one-sided condemnation of Israel, and also decided to send a team to Lebanon to "investigate" Israel's supposed crimes. However, the resolution itself already contained the conclusion of this non-existant investigation.
The resolution alleges systematic human rights violations by Israel using terms like war crimes, crimes against humanity and massacres.
Israel and the United States, although not members of the council, urged a vote against, calling the resolution unbalanced.
European Union countries, alongside Japan and Canada, voted against, calling it one-sided and divisive.
Those voting for included China, Russia, India, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay, Zambia and South Africa, as well as members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
The usual suspects, then.
It speaks volumes that even the usually Israel-hostile BBC is less than pleased.
The resolution passed highlights once again the bitter divisions of the Middle East, the BBC's Imogen Foulkes says.
Human rights groups and aid agencies struggling to bring relief to Lebanon all agree the humanitarian situation in the region is becoming catastrophic, our correspondent notes.
But this resolution, revealing once again just how politicised the United Nations can be, is probably not what they were looking for, she adds.
Just dissolve this silly commission once and for all and get the charade over with.
10:14:32 AM 
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It is no wonder that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah so eagerly accepted deployment of Lebanon's regular armed forces in the south.
The equipment Lebanese soldiers will use to perform their duties is outdated, in some cases even dating back to the 1950s and 60s. Many of the army's 300 tanks are more than 20 years old, and its artillery doesn't pack much of a punch. Military officials concede that they currently lack even a single serviceable combat jet. The navy has been sailing more or less blindly since Israel's air force disabled its radar systems. Besides, the few ships it has stationed in the south are more or less ineffective. Indeed, many doubt that the Lebanese military will have much of an effect at all.
In addition, the Lebanese army, consisting of members from different religious groups, is widely believed to have conflicting loyalties and is infiltrated by militias. If even asked to move against Hezbollah, many units will probably refuse, or switch sides. In fact, given its outdated equipment and lack of training, the only sane course for even loyal Lebanese soldiers given such an order would be to run away.
It appears the Unifil forces deployed to strengthen the Lebanese army will have a main force of French soldiers, and then the usual mix of small contingents from many other countries. This can get very ugly.
8:29:58 AM
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The Associated Press' Kathy Gannon has jumped to the defence of "Green Helmet", who we are told is a Lebanese civil defense worker named Salam Daher. The piece is an emotional hack job intended to brush aside criticism from bloggers and refute the argument that Daher was a Hezbollah-related PR man. The AP article is even titled "'Green Helmet' helps rescue the wounded." This is an argumentative article portrayed as newsreporting.
After hours of digging in the blistering heat, Salam Daher emerged from the wreckage with the body of a 9-month-old baby, a blue pacifier still pinned to its nightshirt.
He held the infant up and, click, an Associated Press photographer snapped another picture of Daher, in his trademark green helmet, displaying a civilian victim of Israeli bombs for the world to see.
Richard at EU Referendum, one of the blogs first revealing the press staging at Qana, is answering the AP hack. Charles at LGF is also responding.
The extensive number of press photographs from Qana reveal that Gannon is less than honest. You don't see Daher digging for hours in these pictures. You see him interested only in finding suitable subjects for press display. And when one is found, it is not a matter of holding "the infant up and, click" as Gannon claims, but about running around with it, looking for suitable camera angles and setting up the appropriate facial expressions to go with the press photos. The timelines reveal this was going on for hours, with dead children picked up and carried around, put into ambulances, taken out of ambulances, all while the cameras are running. One would believe a genuine rescue worker had other priorities on a disaster scene.
One characteristic of Kathy Gannon's hack is that it fails to inform the readers about the real arguments it is set out to disprove, namely the extensive photographic evidence from the scene. AP can undoubtedly trust most of the reading audience to not know the extent of the propaganda effort we have seen revealed, and thus this article only deals with a number of straw man arguments. Is Salam Daher a member of Hezbollah? We obviously cannot know. Maybe he isn't. But if he is not, he is surely doing a job they will approve of. Maybe he really is 'a member of the civil defense for 20 years'. If so, he goes about his job in a rather curious way.
Gannon also writes:
To many in the West, such photographs are surprising; but they are not unusual in the Middle East, where grief and drama are often intertwined, and that can include displaying of bodies.
Ah yes, the cultural argument, "you wouldn't understand this anyway; this is the way they do it down there."
Now, I may just have a bad memory, but I do not remember such a public display of dead children in the countless cases of massacres by Islamist terrorists of children in Iraq or Algeria. I do remember pictures of victims of Islamist bomb attacks against civilians in Iraq, covered by blankets. Now, maybe the civilians of Iraq, anguished by their loss, did hold up dead children to photographers, but the press for some reason did not publicise it. Somehow I doubt it.
I do, however, remember seeing the same public display of children, in at least one case really the victim of an accident, from Gaza, photographed by the same pack of AP, AFP and Reuters press photographers that have been covering Lebanon. I don't think the issue here is the local Middle East culture, but a very strong institutional bias in the press, or bad press culture if you wish.
1:15:45 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.09.2006; 05:00:04.
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