Why Aren’t ’Israeli’ F-16s over Beirut Headline News?

Moe Ali Nayel

Recently there has been a sound coming from the skies over Beirut triggering unpleasant recollections: the distant roar of "Israeli" fighter jets as one lies in bed at night.

This noise brings with it images and memories from the last war "Israel" waged on Lebanon, the 33-day war during the summer of 2006. Even as I write this from my office near the center of the city, the ominous rumbling of "Israeli" fighter jets, announcing their illegal incursions into Lebanese airspace, can be heard over the capital.

But this threatening behavior above Lebanon is non-existent, or so the Western media corporations would have us believe. While information-sharing web tools have broken the mainstream media's monopoly over covering and analyzing world developments, there is still a long way to go. The "Israeli" politics of dispossession enjoy near unconditional support in the editorial rooms of New York, London and Paris, a bias still undetected by most of the Western audience they claim to serve.

On 25 April, these editors saw to it that one story dominated the front pages: reports of an alleged unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV], or drone, that flew from Lebanon to historic Palestine, with accompanying reportage and commentary treating information given by "Israeli" government and military sources as the definitive truth of the incident.

The "Israeli" Air Force said it shot down a UAV several miles off the coast of the northern city of Haifa after it entered "Israeli" airspace from Lebanon. "Israel's" deputy war minister Danny Danon accused Hizbullah of sending the drone: "We're talking about another attempt by Hizbullah to send an unmanned drone into "Israeli" territory," he told army radio
Shortly after the "Israeli" announcement, Hizbullah issued a statement denying this was the case "Hizbullah denies responsibility for drone shot down by "Israel"," Al-Akhbar English, [26 April 2013].

This is in contrast to October last year, when "Israel" said it had shot down a drone over al-Naqab. In that case, Hizbullah proudly claimed the drone as its own and celebrated this demonstration of its technological prowess ["Hizbullah admits launching drone over "Israel"," BBC].

For its part, a spokesperson with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) announced after the "Israeli" statement on 25 April: "We learned from the media that the "Israeli" Air Force has shot down a drone and we're investigating these reports."
As part of its peacekeeping mandate, UNIFIL has radars along the coast to monitor Lebanon's entire airspace, and a few hours later UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said the UN force could not confirm that a drone had flown from its area of operations in southern Lebanon

Inconvenient facts

So Hizbullah denied responsibility and the UNIFIL couldn't confirm that a drone flew over south Lebanon into "Israeli"-controlled airspace, but far be it for these inconvenient facts to get in the way of a good story. This newest threat to "Israel" burned like wildfire across the pages of major Western media outlets like The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, France 24, The Daily Telegraph and the BBC, which dutifully reported the worries over "Israel's" security being breached.

Poor "Israel": one of the strongest armies in the world, sitting on a nuclear arsenal.

These news reports demonstrate the systematic bias of Western corporate media when it comes to "Israel". While the reports all spoke of Hizbullah's violation of "Israel's" "borders and sovereignty and the threat this posed to "Israelis", none mentioned the daily "Israeli" violations of Lebanon's sovereignty and the threat this poses to Lebanese citizens. Without this, a reader might easily mistake the aggressor for the victim.

Then there was the one-sided sourcing of "facts" to back up the story and the rush to judgment. On 26 April - the day after the alleged drone was downed - the "Israeli" government itself began to shift its narrative to more ambiguous finger-pointing at Iran, rather than directly blaming Hizbullah ("Israel" points finger at Iran over drone from Lebanon," The Daily Telegraph, 27 April 2013).
Meanwhile, a 8 May story in Lebanon's daily As-Safir newspaper claims it was actually an "Israeli" drone that had been intercepted by resistance fighters en route to Lebanon.

According to unnamed sources close to Hizbullah and Western diplomatic circles cited by the paper, when the "Israeli" Air Force noticed that its UAV was out of its control, it shot it down over the Mediterranean. This suggestion seems at least plausible when stacked next to the UNIFIL report and Hizbullah's denial.

But taking this into account or following up on it would have required understanding Arabic, which few foreign journalists do.

Daily terror

"Israel" inflicts different methods of terror on Lebanon daily: F-16s and F-15s stage mock raids and drones stalk our skies - all in violation of UN resolution 1701. Lebanese citizens are kidnapped near the border, "Israeli" landmines and cluster bombs continue to await their victims on Lebanese soil, not to mention the "Israeli" army's continued occupation of parts of Lebanon.

While the UN occasionally condemns these acts of "Israeli" aggression, the fact that they continue unabated reminds us in Lebanon that accountability and international law end at our southern border. So too does objective journalism, it seems, given that in the past month "Israeli" violations of Lebanese airspace have heavily intensified, but none of this has made it into the Western press.

As a journalist, I've tried to pitch stories to mainstream media outlets on the constant "Israeli" violations of Lebanese sovereignty and have been lucky enough, from time to time, for an editor to bother to reply, if only to say that the story is irrelevant.

The adage goes that real journalism is publishing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations. By publishing "Israel's" claims as fact, and ignoring the reality on the ground in Lebanon and Palestine, mainstream journalists show how well practiced they are in the art of PR.

Source: Electronic Intifada