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May 24, 2012

Jeff Jacoby: The peace process battered Israel's reputation
Clifford D. May: What Iran's Rulers Want
Michael Muskal: 'Pro-choice' position hits record low, according to poll
Chris Farrell: Are We in a Tech Bubble?
Kimberly Lankford: Switching Medicare Advantage Plans Mid-Year
Bryan McIver, M.B., Ch.B., Ph.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Understanding hyperthyroidism and its variety of treatment options
The Kosher Gourmet by Penelope Wall: PHILLY CHEESE STEAKS --- hold the steak!
May 23, 2012
Ex-CIA spy in Iran's Revolutionary Guard: Baghdad talks highlight Western naivete
Tony Pugh: More private colleges offering tuition discounts
Lisa Gerstner: 4 Money-Etiquette Questions Answered
Mary Beth Franklin: How to Choose the Right Annuity for You
Art Markman, Ph.D.: Get smart: How to bulk up your creativity muscles
Tina Susman: The wig wasn't enough: Man gets 13 years for posing as his dead mom
The Kosher Gourmet by Emma Christensen:A simple way to do fish right
May 22, 2012
David S. Cloud and Kathleen Hennessey: Obama changes mind on Pakistan invite to NATO summit --- and then gets dissed by country's president
Warren Richey: Can US group challenge overseas surveillance act? Supreme Court to decide
Thomas M. Anderson: Walking Away From a Mortgage
Environmental Nutrition editors: The lowdown on a low-acid diet
The Kosher Gourmet by Megan Gordon: Enjoy a celebration of the most rich and layered flavors: Black bean, sweet potato and quinoa chili
May 21, 2012
Mark Clayton: Cybersecurity: How US utilities passed up chance to protect their networks
Howard LaFranchi: NATO summit: Who will foot the bill for long-term Afghanistan security?
Chris Farrell : Earn Dividends in Emerging Markets with This WisdomTree ETF
James K. Glassman: 5 Stock Picks Among Online Retailers
Stephen Whiteside, Ph.D. : Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Social anxiety disorder --- or just shy?
Guy Jackson : Victim's father regrets death of Lockerbie bomber
The Kosher Gourmet by Mario Batali: Famed chef's veal shoulder farsumagru: A festive meat course for late spring
May 18, 2012
Rabbi Berel Wein: Striving: The People of the Book's Book for (All of) the People
Caroline B. Glick: Embracing dangerous delusions and not our friends
Steven Goldberg: 5 Great Stock Picks and the Exchange-Traded Fund that Owns Them
Janet Bodnar: How to Teach Kids to Handle Credit Cards
Mary Pickett, M.D.: Ask the Harvard Experts: Don't be forced into gluten-free lifestyle based merely on a doctor's false-positive test
The Kosher Gourmet by Carolyn Malcoun: DIY healthy lunchbox treats: HOMEMADE FRUIT BARS for kids and brown-bagging adults alike
May 17, 2012
Warren Richey: Teacher fired for being unwed and pregnant can sue religious school, court rules
Josh Mitnick: Netanyahu's 'centrist' coalition is already proving it's anything but
Steven Goldberg: Earn Dividends in Emerging Markets with This WisdomTree ETF
Mary Beth Franklin: Retirement Savings Tips for New Grads
Amina Khan: Research links coffee to lower death rates
Chelsea Sheasley: Social media: Is it too feminine?
The Kosher Gourmet by Faith Duran : Cheesy Potato Breakfast Casserole with Cheddar and Sun-Dried Tomatoes
May 16, 2012
Jackson Holahan: The Aleppo Codex
Jonathan Tobin : Iran Declares Victory in Nuclear Talks
Anne Kates Smith: 7 Stocks That Let You Sleep Tight
Carmen Terzic, M.D., Ph.D. : Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: A variety of exercises can help improve balance
Melissa Healy: National strategy on Alzheimer's disease aims to halt it by 2025
The Kosher Gourmet by Joyce White : GOODNESS GRACIOUS: GREENS! 4 winning recipes that are no longer just for down-home folks (Includes expert tips & techniques)
May 15, 2012
Dennis Prager: God and Man at (and for) Liberty
Kristen Chick: Obama administration resumes arms sales to Bahrain despite serious unresolved human rights issues. Activists feel abandoned
Pat Mertz Esswein: Homes are now affordable again and mortgage rates are low. What you need to know before you buy
Kathy Kristof: Our Practical Investor Fights Inflation with These 6 Investments
Sue Hubbard, M.D.: The Kid's Doctor: Lactose intolerant young child? Check again
Environmental Nutrition Editors: Get the facts on palm sugar sweetening
The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Hunt: Spread a Little Excitement with EXOTIC CONDIMENTS (4 RECIPES)
May 14, 2012
Richard Simon: Purple Hearts for domestic terror victims?
Nando Pelusi, Ph.D.: The privacy paradox: Surrounded by strangers, we risk isolation, anxiety
Chris Farrell: Investing Lessons from the Great Recession
Lisa Gerstner: How to Protect Your Identity, Finances If You Lose Your Phone
Harvard Health Letters: Heart disease and dementia
Tiffany O'Callaghan: New hormone mimics effects of exercise without the sweat
The Kosher Gourmet by Megan Gordon: MANGO COCONUT OAT MORNING MUFFINS are a bright but hearty delight
May 11, 2012
Rabbi B. Shafier: Why happiness will always be elusive
Charles Krauthammer: Echoes of '67: Israel unites
Howard LaFranchi: With G8 snub, US-Putin 'reset' off to stumbling start
Jeremy J. Siegel: Investors, Relax About Rising Interest Rates
Jessica L. Anderson: Get the Best Deal on a Used Car
Jett Stone: Forget face-lifts and fake knees. Scientists have seen the fountain of youth --- and it's broccoli
The Kosher Gourmet by Chef Mario Batali: The famed chef's vegetable dish that tastes true to the season: FAVAS AND SUGAR SNAP PEAS WITH POTATOES AND TARRAGON
May 10, 2012
Clifford D. May: The Real Palestinian Refugee Problem
Sergei L. Loiko: Putin sends warning to U.S., NATO in Victory Day speech at Red Square
Mary Rourke: How being a 'mentch' got Vidal Sasoon his start and fighting in Israel's War of Independence provided him with confidence and a strong sense of his own identity
Harvard Health Letters: Palliative care: Underused therapy yields surprising benefits
Jeff Bertolucci: Get Home Phone Service for Less Than $10 a Month
Rachel L. Sheedy and Susan B. Garland : Make the Right Moves to Boost Benefits
The Kosher Gourmet by Betty Rosbottom: Gleaming with its golden, crimson, and snowy white hues, this silken smooth and creamy STRAWBERRY ORANGE TRIFLE looks impressive, but is easy to prepare
May 9, 2012
John Rosemond: Parents, stop destroying the American male
Valerie J. Nelson: Maurice Sendak, author of 'Where the Wild Things Are,' dies at 83
Bob Frick: Angst Over Annuities
Sharon Palmer, R.D. How you can reduce your risk -- or delay -- chronic diseases associated with aging
Howard LeWine, M.D.: Ask the Harvard Experts: Why did my blood pressure suddenly shoot up?
Lisa Gerstner: Lower the Rate on All Your Loans
The Kosher Gourmet by Emily Ho : Springtime soba with miso sauce offers a coloful mix of fresh textures and flavors
May 8, 2012
Edmund Sanders: Netanyahu suddenly cancels new elections, forms unity government
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: Farewell to European superstate
Anne Kates Smith: 4 Stocks That Mimic Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway
Gaia Vince and Clare Wilson The Rise of Miniature Medical Robots: Fantasy Fast Becoming Reality
Paul Takahashi, M.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Never suffer night leg cramps
Jessica L. Anderson: Extended-Warranty Warning
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: Celebrate National Chocolate Chip Day with the Best Cookie Ever (Includes techniques)
May 7, 2012
Mark Clayton: Homeland Security warns major cyber attack aimed at gas pipeline industry underway
Angus Roxburgh: Putin Decoded: World view of a Russian feeling dissed
Kimberly Lankford: Navigate a Course for Long-Term Care
Kevin McCormally How to Adjust Your Tax Withholding
Celeste Robb-Nicholson, M.D.: Harvard Health Letters: How do you treat a Baker's cyst?
Joanne Capano: Healthy Snacks for Children: The Choices May Surprise You
The Kosher Gourmet by Penelope Wall: Classic Creamy Spinach Dip with a Fraction of the Calories and Fat
May 4, 2012
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Holy 'trivialities'
Jonathan Tobin: Bibi v. Barak will be no contest this time around
Steven Goldberg: Blue Chip Stocks On Sale Worldwide
Art Pine Slow Productivity Growth a Blessing --- For Now
Sue Hubbard, M.D. : The Kid's Doctor: Are Kids Too Wired?
Kerri-Ann Jennings, M.S., R.D: Foods that are good for your smile
Amy Paturel, M.S., M.P.H.: Eating Well: Foods that are good for your smile
The Kosher Gourmet by Betty Rosbottom: Strawberry rhubarb parfaits are elegant yet simple to assemble
May 3, 2012
Michael Freund: Who's Afraid of the Messiah?
Clifford D. May: The Foggiest War
Susan B. Garland: Insurance to Cover Old Old Age
Steven Goldberg 6 Reasons to Bet on a Big Bull Market
Harvard Health Letters: Treating prostate cancer --- no rush to judgment
Larry Gordon: Harvard, MIT partner to offer free online courses
Naomi Nix : Man gets free trip to Chicago after postcard sent by mother in 1957 finally reaches him
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: Intensely Italian vegetable frittata is a seriously simple standby


Jewish World Review August 22, 2006 / 28 Menachem-Av, 5766

A War of Images

By Stella Jatras

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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.

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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

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