HASBARA: Terminators Loose In Lebanon!

.Hi Everyone,

Like many of you out there, I've been following the events in the Israel-Hezbollah War. And it's not so much the fighting that I'm been following, but how the mainstream media has been reporting the conflict, which has been, as usual, pretty one-sided in favor of the terrorists.

If you simply resorted to watching television (...with the exception of FOX and a few others), you'd think that all of Lebanon was a flaming ruin and that "evil Jewish helicopters" were hunting down innocent Lebanese civilians like the Terminators from the famed sci-fi film of the same name.

And that's simply not what's happening. Israel has pulled off the kid gloves, but they're only going after areas where the un-uniformed Hezbollah terrorists are operating from, which unfortunately is behind every civilian they can find. Israel has been very specifically targetting terrorists. No ifs, ands or buts about it. If you want indiscriminate murder of civilians, you'll have to look to Hezbollah's rocket attacks.

Here are two links with satellite photos of Beirut showing that the damage is very localized (...as in localized to buildings and areas used by Hezbollah):

http://arabist.net/archives/2006/08/02/beiruts-southern-suburbs/

http://briefurl.com/Large_View_Beirut

Israel has even warned the local populations where they're going and to evacuate or, at the very least, avoid all Hezbollah members and facilities. What terrorist organization every warned the people it went after? Here's what the note looks like that has been dropped across Lebanese areas where the IDF is targetting Hezbollah:

And that leaves Israel with a choice between the lesser of two evils. Go after the terrorists and have them exploit any accidents in the media or don't go after them and put up with rockets raining down on your people. And I'm glad that Israel made the choice it did. And, as expected, Hezbollah has been doing its utmost to present its propaganda as fact...

In one case, the killings at Qana, it's starting to look like Hezbollah manufactured the supposed "Israeli attrocities" and not only killed those poor children and women, but also carted in other dead bodies in a refridgerated truck from other areas to inflate the body count. And this is on top of passing off dead Hezbollah fighters as civilians since they don't wear uniforms or otherwise identify themselves as combatants as the laws of warfare demand.

If there was one film that I could recommend you watch, it would be:

"Obsession: What The War on Terror Is Really About"

http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/

It was originally produced by HonestReporting.Com, but it has now been released to the public via Google video. I'm not the first to have noted it, but I'm certainly happy to pass it along to those of you who need to see that the War on Terrorism is very real and it affects all of us.

Abba Gav is one of the many folk who is recommending the film. His blog can be found here:

http://briefurl.com/Abba_Gav_Obsession

My friend, Yehuda, a fellow gamer, is also upset and has mentioned the most current round of terrorist propaganda that the mainstream media is gullibly and more likely deliberately trying to pass on to the public. You can find his blog here:

http://briefurl.com/Yehuda_Pallywood

And, Yael AKA Oleh Girl, a very kind soul, has also noticed the false Jihadist propaganda that CNN, BBC and other unethical mainstream media sources are trying to pass off to the public:

http://olehgirl.blogspot.com/

Yael has an amazing number of links to bloggers around the Middle East. In fact, she corresponds with many of them regularly. If anything, the Internet will probably be one of the greatest contributors to a future peace in the Middle East. It's opened up dialogue between real folks, not the ones who occupy political positions and try to pass off their opinions as those of everyone else's. It might just be the only way that the Arab peoples and others suffering under the yokes of dictatorships in the region might eventually be heard.

I highly recommend that you check out some of the many blogs written by Arabs, Lebanese and others in the region. You might be surprised what many "regular people" on the "Arab street" think...

Hint: It's not what Al Jazeera would have you beleive.

I'm linking to two notable bloggers from the region. One in Iraq:

http://briefurl.com/ITM_Arab_Media

And another in Egypt:

http://www.sandmonkey.org/

But above all else, watch the film, "Obsession." It goes a lot farther to explaining what groups like Hezbollah want and why they act as attrociously as they do than any one article in the mainstream media ever can.

As always, check out www.DryBonesBlog.com if you haven't already.

Wishing for peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

P.S.
I've been receiving a huge number of telephone calls and E-mails from friends and supporters letting me know that they stand with Israel. Among the most heartening calls have come from the many WWII veterans I know. Their's was a generation that had moral clarity and never worried about the "proportionality" of their war against the Nazis (And make no mistake, the Nazis were allied to Jihadists that we are currently fighting). They rightly saw it as a war of right vs. wrong and did their duty for which we, the future generations, can still be thankful. I wish that more of that generation, the "Greatest Generation," was around today. God bless them.