The AP practically wrote a Hezbollah press release about Nasrallah’s speech the other day. Reuters was right behind them, eagerly advancing the “Israel will get it now!” theme that the terrorists who are going to “avenge” the killing of Imad Mugniyeh are pushing. But they missed an important part of Nasrallah’s speech that seemingly every other news organization in the world managed to find. Funny, that. Because it’s how Nasrallah says that Israel will be destroyed, and calls it an “inevitable” fact.
Here’s what Al Bawaba quoted Mr. Chipmunk Cheeks Nasrallah:
“The disappearance of Israel is inevitable, it is Divine law.” “The presence of Israel is but temporary and cannot go on in the region.”
That’s a pretty big anti-Israel statement to be telling thousands of Hezbollah supporters at a rally for their “martyrs.” But there was even more that the AP and Reuters didn’t seem to get.
Hizbullah’s Secretary General said that Moghniyeh’s killing was a clear sign that Israel was preparing a new war against Lebanon but said his troops stood ready for a new “victory”. “We will kill you in the fields, we will kill you in the cities, we will fight you like you have never seen before,” said Nasrallah, “Israel will be left without an army, and without an army Israel cannot exist.”
The Lebanon Daily Star managed to quote the speech correctly.
“The presence of Israel is but temporary and cannot go on in the region,” Nasrallah added. “Oh Hajj Imad, I swear by God that your blood will not have been spilled in vain.”
Even the Communist China news agency, Xinhua, managed to get more of the Nasrallah speech than the AP and Reuters.
“We will fight as we have never fought before, confronting the Israeli army with of a type of combat it has never before experienced,” Nasrallah was quoted as saying.
He stressed that Israel would cease to exist, saying “this is inevitable, it is divine law.”
The Hezbollah chief said that Israel’s existence is “temporary and cannot persist.”
The AFP editors didn’t have the heart to actually put the destruction of Israel quote in the headline, but they did run the quote in the lede.
Hezbollah chief blasts Israel in ceremony marking militant deaths
BEIRUT (AFP) — Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Friday vowed to avenge the death of one of his group’s top militants through the destruction of Israel, which he said was destined to disappear.“The disappearance of Israel is inevitable, it is divine law,” Nasrallah said at a ceremony to mourn the death of Hezbollah top commander Imad Mughnieh and other militants killed in attacks blamed on Israel.
“The presence of Israel is but temporary and cannot go on in the region,” Nasrallah added in comments transmitted via video link to thousands of Hezbollah supporters massed in southern Beirut.
In the meantime, the first AP release carries none of the above quotes. None of them. And the paraphrases—yellow journalism at its best. And I say this as one who learned how to practice yellow journalism while working my way up to editor-in-chief of my college paper. The lede from the AP’s first story on the Nasrallah speech:
Hezbollah accused Israel on Friday of trying to start a new war with the militant Islamic group by assassinating a top commander, and warned it would be a battle the Jewish state would lose.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said last week’s killing of Imad Mughniyeh in a car bombing in Syria was a “pre-emptive” strike meant to set the stage for more assassinations of the Lebanon-based group’s top officials.
“The Israelis are definitely threatening a war,” Nasrallah told tens of thousands gathered in southern Beirut for a memorial for Mughniyeh and two other Hezbollah leaders killed in the 1980s and 1990s.
Added in the update half a day later:
“The disappearance of Israel is an inevitable fact. It is an historical process in the region which will come to an end in several years,” he told the Jerusalem Post.
No, he didn’t. He told it to the world. You can find that quote in all of the above-linked articles. You won’t find it in the Reuters article, though. You can find it in the BBC article. You can find it in the Ha’aretz article. But this is the closest that Reuters comes to quoting Nasrallah’s “death of Israel” lines:
BEIRUT, Feb 22 (Reuters) – Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah vowed on Friday to avenge the assassination of his senior commander Imad Moughniyah and threatened to deal Israel a crushing blow if it attacked Lebanon again.
[…] Nasrallah said Moughniyah’s killing was a “pre-emptive move” by Israel for a future conflict with Hezbollah and vowed that any Israeli attack on Lebanon to weaken the group would be crushed and all of Israel would be hit with the group’s rockets.
[…] “No one, neither the Zionists, or their agents will be able to protect all the internal fronts. No one will be able to protect their internal fronts from our rockets,” the black-turbaned leader said via videolink.
This is the closest that the AP comes to quoting it:
Israel’s “army and its tanks will be destroyed in the south, and Israel will be without an army and then it will be no more,” he said.
To recap: Ha’aretz found the quote.
“Destroying Israel is an inevitable outcome, a historic law, a divine doctrine,” Nasrallah said. “When Israel won’t have an army it won’t survive, and that’s what I said about Mughniyah’s blood leading to the elimination of Israel.”
The BBC found the quote.
“The presence of Israel is but temporary and cannot go on in the region,” he told the Beirut rally.
The AFP found the quote.
“The disappearance of Israel is inevitable, it is divine law,” Nasrallah said at a ceremony to mourn the death of Hezbollah top commander Imad Mughnieh and other militants killed in attacks blamed on Israel.
But Reuters and the AP couldn’t find that quote without the help of other news sources, even though their reporters were at the speech. Huh. Go figure. It’s almost like the AP and Reuters are trying to whitewash Nasrallah’s threats to the existence of Israel or something. Gee. Why would they want to do that? I can’t for the life of me figure it out.
What anti-Israel media bias?