I just visited Iran’s national TVnews website at the suggestion of Google News. The article there blew me away. It takes lying, embellishing, and omission of facts to a whole new level.
The first thing I noticed when I clicked through was the caption of the image, which is completely incorrect.
The United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was formed after the 33-day conflict and is tasked with maintaining security of Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.
Yes, UNIFIL was formed to keep peace on the Lebanon/Israel border. However, there is an error and clearly biased statement in this caption. First, UNIFIL was not formed after the 2006 Lebanon war. UNIFIL was created in 1978 to assist in keeping southern Lebanon free from terrorists (the reason Israel invaded in the first place) and help the Lebanese government take control of the area. Well, Hezbollah controls the area, not the government. And, they were off by about 28 years on the founding of UNIFIL. It also lasted 34 days, not 33, but I won’t fight about that.
Amid new reports that Israel is getting ready for another war against Lebanon, people in Lebanon have marked the fourth anniversary of Israel’s assault on the country.
Israel did not “assault” Lebanon, as is spelled out here. Israel responded to an unprovoked cross border raid by Hezbollah (while using UN marked vehicles allegedly taken from UNIFIL) and murdered two soldiers. Hezbollah made the first aggression of the war by firing the first of thousands of rockets into Israel on July 12th, 2006.
In 2006, Israel’s devastating 33-day war against Lebanon claimed the lives of more than 1,200 Lebanese civilians, many of them women and children.
According to the best reports I found, Lebanon reported that 1,191 civilians were killed in addition to 500-600 terrorists. While there is nothing completely wrong in this sentence, it is misleading.
However, the Israeli military faced fierce Hezbollah resistance and was eventually forced to leave Lebanon without achieving any of its objectives.
“Fierce resistance” is an interesting way to refer to an aggressive terrorist group. As is noted above, Hezbollah started the war. Based on that fact, Israel was really the fierce resistance, not Hezbollah. Israel was simply defending itself and trying to rescue its soldiers and stop the rocket attacks. Also, Israel did achieve many of its objectives. It was not a clear cut win like 1967, but Israel did kill hundreds of terrorists, stop the attacks, and severely damaged Hezbollah’s infrastructure.
The Israeli withdrawal came after the UN Security Council issued Resolution 1701, which ended the conflict and formed the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to maintain security of Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.
UN Resolution 1701 did lead to the cease fire, but UNIFIL was formed in 1987 with resolutions 425 and 426. Resolution 1701 was designed to end the current 2006 conflict and had nothing to do with a new security force. Even Ehud Olmert, who I hate, said something I can agree with on UNIFIL: “We didn’t like very much UNIFIL which was very useless and very helpless. Look what happened. Did you hear of any particular efforts of the United Nations UNIFIL force in the south of Lebanon to prevent the attacks against Israel in the first place. So they were not useful and that is why we were unhappy with them.” I would say they failed at their mission.
In all, this is just one more evidence of Iran’s hatred and bias against Israel and the quality reporting of the media in Muslim countries.
This post was written by
Eric – who has written 1527 posts on The Israel Situation.
Eric is the founder and editor of IsraelSituation.com. You can follow him on Twitter as @DenverEric and read his personal blog at EricJRosenberg.com
Comments on this entry are closed.