
 |
|
Nov, 21, 2008
Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Money matters?
Caroline B. Glick:
Civilization walks the plank
Nov, 20, 2008
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Bronfman's blindness
The Kosher Gourmet
By Linda Gassenheimer: Portobellos add a hearty flavor to pasta with pesto
Nov, 19, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Spread the wealth? Jewish tradition and income equality
Elliot B. Gertel:
'Mad Men': Tackling prejudices or reinforcing them?
Nov, 18, 2008
Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn: The End of the Age of Reason
Jonathan Tobin: Does Barack + Bibi = Disaster?
Nov, 17, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The End of the Age of Reason
Diana West: Gulling Americans into making terror legit?
Nov, 14, 2008
Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: The Power of Spiritual Inertia
Caroline B. Glick: The perils ahead
Nov, 13, 2008
Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: How Bush and Obama together could change the Middle East dynamic
The Kosher Gourmet
by JeanMarie Brownson: Sweet and savory, crispy and meltingly tender bestilla
Nov, 12, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Tyrannical Co-Workers
Michael Doyle: High Court to consider today donated monuments that may have religious messages in public parks
Nov, 11, 2008
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?
Jonathan Tobin: They Will Decide Their Own Fate
Nov, 10, 2008
Rabbi Avi Shafran: $8 billion, modern-day Tower of Babel being built?
Barry Rubin: A letter to the president-elect from a Middle East realist
Nov, 7, 2008
Rabbi Francis Nataf: Of Children and Immortality
Caroline B. Glick: Livni's Obama strategy
Nov, 6, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: How I tricked a classroom of apathetic students into grasping the fallacy of moral relativism
The Kosher Gourmet
By Gina Kim: Tips for making the perfect soup --- includes recipes
Nov, 5, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Destitute Debtors
Bruce Weinstein: 'Religulos': Bad title,even worse movie
Nov, 4, 2008
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Treasury Dept. submits to Shariah law
Frida Ghitis: A surprise for Obama in the Middle East
Nov, 3, 2008
Jonathan Rosenblum: Who says Jews are Smart?
Jonathan Tobin:
Was He Wrong About Everything?
Oct. 31, 2008
Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Our Immutable Noble Essence
Caroline B. Glick: Running against Bush
Oct. 30, 2008
Jonathan Rosenblum: The End of the Special Relationship?
Steve Lipman: 'Kid Kosher' Gets A Title Shot
Oct. 29, 2008
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: GET US THE TAPE THE L.A. TIMES REFUSES TO RELEASE, AND WE'LL GIVE YOU CASH!
Dr. Ari Korenblit: Making The Write Choice for President
Oct. 28, 2008
Mona Charen: Denial runs through American Jewry
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Sell-off to capitalism or sell-out to Islam?
Oct. 27, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Are tax deductions for charitable donations moral?
Jonathan Mark: The Mystery Of The Arab-American Vote
Oct. 24, 2008
'Why aren't all religious people vegetarians?': Response by Miriam Kosman
Caroline B. Glick: Testing Obama's mettle
Oct. 23, 2008
Daniel Pipes: Obama Would Fail Security Clearance
The Kosher Gourmet
by Linda Gassenheimer: A fast chicken dish with an Asian accent
Oct. 20, 2008
Gary Rosenblatt: Still One Torah
Jonathan Tobin:
Government 'Gifts' Are Not Free
Oct. 17, 2008
Jonathan Rosenblum: Sukkos and the Great Meltdown
Caroline B. Glick: The disappearance of law
Oct. 16, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Copying DVDs: RIP OR RIPOFF?
Cal Thomas: Blaming the Jews (again)
March 22, 2007
J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)
|
| |
Jewish World Review
August 22, 2006
/ 28 Menachem-Av, 5766
A War of Images
By
Stella Jatras
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Will 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?
Israel is accused of indiscriminately killing civilians, as in the Qana
incident. It is difficult to find any suggestion in all of the articles on
the subject that Qana was staged. Questions should have been raised. For
instance, how is it that the IDF air attack was between midnight and 1:00
AM, but when the building blew up (or collapsed) at 8:00 AM there were
approximately 50 women and children (reported numbers vary) sleeping in the
building? Why is no one asking what was in that building that caused it to
blow up seven or eight hours after the air strike? Why is no one in the
mainstream media asking why those people were still in the building or why
there were only women and children?
While western democracies try to keep civilians, especially their own, safe
from ongoing hostilities, Islamic forces have a history of using their own
civilians as human shields. Israel claims that Hezbollah deliberately puts
its weapons and fighters in civilian neighborhoods, keeping residents
hostage and not caring if they are killed or not. One interesting fact can
be found in the book by Lord David Owen, titled Balkan Odyssey, in which
he writes, "In Sarajevo it became ever clearer that there were in fact two
sieges of the city: one by the Bosnian Serb army, with shells, sniper fire
and blockades, and the other by the Bosnian government army, with internal
blockades and red tape bureaucracy which kept their own people from leaving.
In a radio broadcast the army -- not the government -- said that able bodied
men aged 18-65 years and women aged 18-60 years were forbidden to leave
because they were needed for the city's defence; but their main reason was
different. In the propaganda war, the Serbian siege aroused the sympathy of
the world, and for this they needed the elderly and the children to stay. It
was their most emotive propaganda weapon for bringing the Americans in to
fight the war, and they never wanted it to be weakened."
For those who think accusing Muslims of deliberately killing their own
civilians or putting them where they are sure to be "collateral casualties"
is farfetched, I would ask, why is that any more unthinkable than
encouraging one's own child to be a suicide bomber?
One noticeable difference between the reporting in the Israeli/Hezbollah war
and the Balkan war is balance. Although the media coverage is primarily
one-sided in the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict, nearly four to one showing
civilian casualties in Lebanon vs. those in Israel, the Balkan war news of
Serbian casualties and suffering was almost non-existent.
In 1995, the journal World Affairs published the following quote from John
Ranz, U.S. chairman of Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp: "The
gigantic campaign to brainwash America by our media against the Serbian
people is just incredible, with its daily dose of one-sided information and
outright lies....What is today's reality? The murderers of Jews, Serbs and
Gypsies are back [in Croatia] from the U.S., Canada, Argentina where they
fled after World War II. The Serbs fought the Nazis, they paid a terrible
price for standing at the side of the allies against Hitler. Humanity owes
them a debt of gratitude."
Yohanan Ramati, Director of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense,
seconded the notion: "This organized anti-Serb and pro-Muslim propaganda
should cause anyone believing in democracy and free speech serious concerns.
It recalls Hitler's propaganda against the allies in World War II. Facts are
twisted and, when convenient, disregarded."
Most disturbing is a 1992 observation by Gregory Copley, who wrote in his
Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy report, "Pictures of dead or
wounded (or raped) Serbs often fill the screens of the world's television
and print media, only to be re-labeled as dead or wounded or raped Croats or
Muslims. Many Serbian victims -- and the bulk of the victims of the
conflict, contrary to popular reports, have been Serbs either from Bosnia
and Herzegovina or from Croatia -- not only suffer the indignity of defeat
in death; they also are used in death as models in the macabre image
manipulation operation of the Croatians and the Muslim Bosnians. If the
Vietnam War was lost to the United States by the negative television images
of its own reporters, then the Balkan war against the Serbs are being won by
Ustashi Croatia and the Muslim Bosnians by an active, planned manipulation
of international television."
Like any sovereign nation, Israel has the right to defend itself against
Muslim terrorists.The Serbian people should have had the right to defend
their sovereignty against the same Muslim terrorists whom we are fighting
today.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
As a career military officer's wife, Stella Jatras has traveled widely and
has lived in many foreign countries where she not only learned about other
cultures but also became very knowledgeable regarding world affairs and
world politics. With the advent of the war in Bosnia, Mrs. Jatras
immediately recognized the bias of the Western media and the Clinton
administration's flawed foreign policy in the Balkans and began her efforts
to present to the American people a more accurate view of that tragic
situation. Her letters and articles have been published in The Washington
Times, The Washington Post, The Arizona Republic, The Patriot- News
(Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), Chronicles, The Stars and Stripes, and the Los
Angeles Times, as well as a number of magazines and periodicals. In addition
her writings have had worldwide distribution via the Internet such as
Citizen Soldier and Jihad Watch. Stella Jatras lived in Moscow for two
years (where her husband, George, was the Senior Air Attaché), and while
there, worked in the Political Section of the US Embassy. Stella has also
lived in Germany, Greece and Saudi Arabia. Her travels took her to over
twenty countries.
© 2006, Stella Jatras
|
|

Mitch Albom
Michael Barone
Dave Barry
Tony Blankley
Andy Borowitz
David Broder
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Rod Dreher
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
John Fund
Frank J. Gaffney
Lloyd Garver
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
David Harsanyi
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Laura Ingraham
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
James Klurfeld
Ed Koch
Ch. Krauthammer
Jonathan Last
Michael Ledeen
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
The Medicine Men
Dick Morris
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Jonathan Rauch
Celia Rivenbark
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Pat Sajak
Debra J. Saunders
Culture Shlock
Roger Simon
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Jonathan Tobin
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
Lisa Benson
John Branch
Gary Brookins
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holber
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Ranan R. Lurie
Jimmy Margulies
Rick McKee
Michael Ramirez
Jeff Stahler
Danna Summers
John Trever
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters

How 2
Lori Borgman
The Savvy Consumer
Elder matters
Fixit
Dr. Peter Gott
Marybeth Hicks
GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko
Richard Lederer
Tech Maven
Nutrition Myths
Bruce Williams
How Stuff Works
|