In Hezbollah’s media relations, Michael Totten writes:
And I’ll add that is there is nothing “special†or difficult about getting a quote from Hezbollah. I’ve done it. All I had to do was call their press office and take a taxi down to their headquarters. Every journalist in Lebanon has the phone number. What’s difficult is preserving access to Hezbollah. Doing so is not necessarily impressive, however. It took me five minutes and a press pass to gain access, but it lasted less than a week. I was threatened for writing this blog post, and I was blacklisted for publishing this article in the LA Weekly.
So in the past when the NYT (or, for that matter, any Western media outlet) published paeans to the PR savvy of the new Hezbollah it’s important to keep in mind that such articles came at a price.
But Hezbollah today has a new populist image, with representatives forming the largest single-party group in the Lebanese Parliament. It also has an impressive network of schools, hospitals and welfare centers that cater to tens of thousands of families, and an information network that may be unrivaled anywhere in the world, at least by an organization that many Western nations still list as a terrorist group.
Had John F. Burns written anything remotely negative about the group, he wouldn’t have gotten further access and probably wouldn’t have been able to work in Hezbollah controlled areas. So the reporter effectively became part of the PR effort that he was praising.
It’s something to keep in mind when looking at The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University (emphasis mine) and seeing Ayatollah Fadlallah referenced including links to his website. Similarly, he’s featured on the Washington Post’s “On Faith” website, on which he’s given a chance to sanitize define Islamic terms for visitors to the Post’s website. Here’s an excerpt his definition of Jihad.
Jihad in Islam (The violent confrontation of the enemy) is the fighting movement that aims at preventing the enemy from forcing its hegemony over the land and the people by means of violence that confiscates freedom, kills the people, usurps the wealth and prevents the people’s rights in self-determination and running their own affairs. Therefore, Jihad is confronting violence by means of violence and force by force, which makes it of a defensive nature at times and a preventive one at others.
Not as bad defining it as an inner struggle but “defensive” and “preventive.”
Here’s Sheikh Fadlallah on the recent massacre at Merkaz Harav:
Ayatollah Mohamad Hussein Fadlallah is the most senior Shiite religious figure in Lebanon to have praised the massacre of eight Israeli students at Mercaz Ha-Rav Yeshiva in Jerusalem on March 6. In his sermon during Friday prayers, Fadlallah declared: “the heroic operation in Jerusalem proved that the mujahedeen in Palestine are able to hit the Zionists hard.” His remarks were carried by Hizbullah’s television network, al-Manar, on March 8.
(The article also
There was nothing “defensive” or “preventive” (the unarmed young men killed were not in any sort of army program) about last week’s terror attack.
In various ways, our media seeks not to report about the Islamist threat to the West, but to present it as just another benign viewpoint. Sanitizing the way the Times has in Lebanon or the Post is doing with Ayatollah Fadlallah isn’t defensive or preventive. It’s offensive and outrageous.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
