Prepping Readers to Accept
Mass Slaughter in Lebanese ‘Strongholds’
Belén Fernandez / Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
(November 9, 2024) — Back in May 2015, the New York Times’ Isabel Kershner decided to moonlight as an Israeli military propagandist by penning an alleged exposé (5/12/15)—headlined “Israel Says Hezbollah Positions Put Lebanese at Risk”—in which she diligently conveyed all that Israel had to say about Hezbollah’s infrastructure in south Lebanon.
The minuscule hamlet of Muhaybib, for example, was said to contain no fewer than “nine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three anti-tank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah command post.” In the village of Shaqra, home to approximately 4,000 people, the Israeli army had meanwhile identified some “400 military sites and facilities belonging to Hezbollah.”
Only after 11 full paragraphs of transmitting the Israeli line did Kershner manage to insert the disclaimer that “the Israeli claims could not be independently verified.” But by that time, of course, the damage had been done, the reader having already been persuaded that south Lebanon was one big Hezbollah military installation, where Israel could not afford to concern itself with civilian lives in any future conflict.
Driving the point home was former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, who informed Kershner that “many, many Lebanese will be killed” in the next showdown with Hezbollah.
I happened to be in south Lebanon at the time of the article’s publication, and drove over to Muhaybib and Shaqra to check out the fearsome landscape. Though I did not encounter any Hezbollah command posts, I did see some schoolchildren, elderly folks, bakeries, farms, clothing shops and, in Shaqra, a colorful establishment offering “Botox filling.”
Legitimizing Destruction
Nine years have now passed since Kershner’s bout of weaponized journalism, and Amidror’s words have certainly rung true: Many, many Lebanese have been killed in Israel’s latest war on Lebanon.
From October 2023 through November 5, more than 3,000 people have been slaughtered in the country—among them 589 women and at least 185 children. The vast majority were killed in September through November of 2024, when Israel ramped up its assault on Lebanese territory as a sideshow to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
More than 800,000 people have been displaced. Muhaybib has literally been blown up in its entirety, and much of Shaqra has been pulverized as well. Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly a quarter of all buildings along the entire southern border.
And while the United States newspaper of record and other Western corporate media outlets have not exactly been preemptively calling in the strikes, à la Kershner, they have nonetheless done a fine job of legitimizing mass killing, displacement and destruction in other ways.
For starters, as FAIR has written about recently (10/10/24), there’s the insistence on following the US/Israeli lead in branding Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization and a “proxy” for Iran. Never mind that the Shia political party and armed group emerged as a direct consequence of the 1982 US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people and constituted a textbook case of terrorism, including the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
When Israel in September staged an unprecedented terrorist attack in Lebanon by detonating personal electronic devices across the country — killing 12 people, including two children—CNN (9/17/24) spun the episode thusly: “Exploding Pagers Injure Members of Iran-Backed Terror Group.”
Converting Communities into Targets
Then there is the matter of the term “Hezbollah stronghold,” to which pretty much every corporate media outlet has proved itself hopelessly addicted when describing the densely populated neighborhood of Dahiyeh in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Devastated in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, Dahiyeh is now once again under maniacal bombardment by the Israeli military, which on September 27 leveled a whole residential block in order to assassinate Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Sure enough, the New York Times (9/27/24) was standing by with the headline: “Israel Strikes Hezbollah Stronghold in Attempt to Kill Leader.”
Just google “Hezbollah stronghold” and you’ll see what I mean — that the press is apparently incapable of talking about Dahiyeh any other way. Or, if you’re not in the mood for googling, here are some illustrative links to the Washington Post, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, NBC News, Reuters and Associated Press. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
To be sure, there is substantial public support in Dahiyeh for Hezbollah—not that support for an anti-Zionist resistance organization should make anyone fair game for extrajudicial slaughter. There is also support for numerous other Lebanese parties and groups in this neighborhood of nearly 1 million people, although the “stronghold” designation tends to erase the diversity that exists.
But the real problem with the terminology is that, when deployed in the context of war, a “stronghold” is more likely to be interpreted as “a fortified place”—the first definition of the word appearing in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In that sense, then, Dahiyeh is effectively converted into a legitimate military target, its inhabitants dehumanized by the linguistic arsenal of a media establishment that is ultimately committed to validating Israeli massacres of civilians.
And it’s not only Dahiyeh. The press has now expanded its obsessive use of the “stronghold” descriptor in accordance with Israel’s current killing spree in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, both of which regions we are now continuously reminded are also “Hezbollah strongholds.” When the Lebanese health ministry reported 60 killed in airstrikes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on October 29, the BBC noted that “rescue efforts were still under way in the valley, which is a Hezbollah stronghold.”
Back in July, the same outlet had warned that the south Lebanese city of Tyre would “be in the firing line in the event of all-out war, along with the rest of southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.” Four months later, Tyre and the rest of southern Lebanon are an unmitigated horrorscape, blunted for a Western audience by media euphemism.
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