A War of Images
By Stella Jatras
August 22, 2006 / 28 Menachem-Av, 5766
http://www.JewishWorldReview.comWill the same weapon that defeated the Serbs also defeat Israel?
They say that truth is always the first victim in war. Such is the case in the Israeli/Hezbollah war.
It appears that Hezbollah has taken a page out of the Bosnian Muslim playbook: Win the PR battle, and you win the war. What better example of media disinformation than the Bosnian War, where images of civilians “slaughtered” at Sarajevo’s Markale market place, allegedly by Serb forces, were so instrumental? If it worked for the Bosnian Muslims, why not for Hezbollah? Will Qana, Lebanon, become Israel’s Markale market place?
Yossef Bodansky, author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, wrote the following in his 1995 book Offensive in the Balkans:
Phase Three started with the self-inflicted major terrorist provocation. On Friday 5, 1994, a major explosion rocked the Markale — Sarajevo’s main market place — causing heavy casualties. What was immediately described as the ubiquitous ‘Serb mortar shell’ was actually a special charge designed and built with help from HizbAllah experts and then most likely dropped from a nearby rooftop onto the crowd of shoppers. Video cameras at the ready recorded this expertly-staged spectacle of gore, while dozens of corpses of Bosnian Muslim troops killed in action (exchanged the day before in a ‘body swap’ with the Serbs) were paraded in front of cameras to raise the casualty counts.
This callous self-killing was designed to shock the West especially sentimental and gullible Washington, in order to raise the level of Western sympathy to the Bosnian Muslims and further demonize the Serbs so that Western governments would be more supportive of Sarajevo’s forthcoming aggressive moves, and perhaps even finally intervene militarily.” (Emphasis added)
Some headlines that Americans never saw were “Muslims ‘slaughter their own people’,” The [London] Independent, 22 Aug. 1992, and “Serbs ‘not guilty’ of massacre,” The Sunday [London] Times, 1 Oct. 1995.
In 1992, Peter Maher, Professor Emeritus of Linquistics, visited Dubrovnik, Croatia, to see for himself the truth about the war. He wrote, “A few months earlier, the press was filled with stories that the Pearl of the Adriatic had been reduced to rubble. The stories were fakes.” Professor Maher goes on to explain just how it happened: “The dramatic ‘Dubrovnik burning’ pictures were shot with long lenses. . . .But the smoke was from the fuel tanks of two pleasure boats burning in the Old Harbor … Dubrovnik’s Old City never burned and was never even targteted by the federal forces…..The only building in the Old City of Ragusa to be gutted by explosives and fire was the library and treasure of the Serbian Orthodox church, which housed a priceless collection of medieval manuscripts and icons. It was not navy guns that did the damage, but plastic and incendiary devices planted on the spot by Croatian forces.”
Who can forget the horrific pictures that were repeatedly shown on CNN of the two dead Muslim babies on a bus in Bosnia, allegedly killed by a Serb sniper? I would never have known the truth if I had not been watching France 2 TV, which showed the funeral of these innocent babies. Officiating was a Serbian Orthodox priest. These were not Muslim babies; they were Serbian babies, but for American consumption, the Serbian Orthodox priest was cropped from the film so that the American people would continue to believe that the babies were Muslim. This kind of reporting is not just yellow journalism. It goes beyond the pale, the same kind of “journalism” that Israel is experiencing today — manipulation, distortion, staging, forgery and the doctoring of photos by anti-Israeli media. Welcome to the club!
Hopefully, in the current Israeli/Hezbollah conflict, the media distortions will not sell. At the beginning of the Balkan conflict we did not have the Internet and bloggers to expose CNN and its ilk. Today is different. Almost immediately after photos of damage from an Israeli air strike on Beirut were posted, outrage from bloggers who recognized that the photos were doctored forced Reuters to admit that two or more photos were altered. The company stated, “A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut has been withdrawn after coming under attack by American web blogs. The blogs accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage.” Was this simply one person’s mistake, or is a pattern being exposed in the present Israeli/Hezbollah war of the biased or even co-belligerent media that was at work in the war against the Serbs?…
I knew what would happen!
Back in 1999, when Clinton was bombing the Christian Serbs on behalf of the jihadis in the Balkans, I warned people of what was to come. I delivered my warning both in person and on the Internet, on the huge mailing list that I ran back in those days, before the blogosphere existed. I told everyone who would listen that the Serbs were being bombed now, and that Israel would be next.
Practically no one believed me.
I never claimed to know how those bombs would be delivered, nor by whom. I had no way of knowing that the bombs would not be delivered by airplane, but rather by suicide vest and IED. Nonetheless, I knew that Israel and the Jews would become the next target. Given what I knew of the proclivities of the jihadis and their leftist collaborators, I could figure out that harm was about to come to the innocent in Israel, and that the Jewish people would be next to suffer.
And so it was.
Oh, and by the way, I have personally spoken with Professor John Peter Maher many times, and he did indeed recount the same eyewitness evidence to me about the fabrication of the supposed destruction of Dubrovnik.
Then it was CNN; now it is Pallywood
The deliberate staging of fake crimes to draw the sympathy – and the economic and military intervention – of the US and other western nations, on behalf of thoroughly undeserving Muslim powers and factions, has burgeoned into an industry.
See According to Palestinian Sources on The Second Draft for some video examples:
The MSM use Palestinian sources constantly, and even when they mention the provenance of the information, they rarely explore its reliability. In a series of studies, we explore the culture of Palestinian journalism (Pallywood), its greatest product (Al Durah), its impact on the world via MSM validation (Icon of Hatred), and the Gaza Beach Tragedy that took place six years later. Further studies to come.
