As our craven, incurious media does its predicable best to manufacture sympathy for Israel and censor images of the massacre of Lebanon, the Internet is showing itself to be the premier source of real news.

What else could you expect, since the North American media’s “coverage” of the Middle East amounts to little more than regurgitating dispatches from Zionist and Anglo-Saxon news services like Associated Press (U.S.), Reuters (U.K.) and CanWest (Canada).

How about Arab news sources, like Al-Jazeera? “We don’t subscribe to them,” was how a combative assistant managing editor at the Vancouver Sun responded when I asked. The absurdity and prejudice in his answer obviously didn’t faze him, assuming he even noticed.

Perhaps this lacuna of objectivity explains why we haven’t been told that the two Israeli soldiers that Hezbollah captured were found in the area of Ayta Al-Chaab— inside Lebanon, according to Lebanese police. Strange, but this nugget of information, which refutes the lie that Hezbollah crossd into Israel, was reported by Asia Times, Hindustani Times, and the Bahrain News Agency. * (see below)

Fact is, Hezbollah retaliates against aggression; it does not start it. Even the 1983 attack on the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut during Israeli first invasion was retaliation for U.S. a naval off-shore bombardment that destroyed two villages in the Shouf Mountains.

In this case, Hezbollah’s actions must be seen in the context of Israel’s butchery of Palestine, beginning with the bombing of the family on the beach in Gaza. As is always the case, Israel brings these attacks on itself and then finds away to blame Muslims for aggression. That’s the inconvenient, demonstrable fact our media does not want us to know.

As a result of the Jewish prism that gives us a distorted, demonized impression of Arab and Iranian resistance movements—along with sanitized impressions of Zionist war atrocities—you don't see detailed accounts like that of Simon Fraser University professor Dr. Laura Marks who was in Beirut on July 19 and wrote the following:

“This morning, Israel bombed a tourist bus and an truck carrying medical aid from the UAE. Israel is dropping illegal phosphorous incendiary bombs on civilians. As of this morning 230 people have been killed: 208 civilians, many of them children; 22 Lebanese Army soldiers (who are forbidden to fight); and 5 members of Hezbollah. The Lebanese infrastructure has been bombed back at least 20 years: all roads, airports, ports, bridges, power plants, gas storage, gas stations, a milk company, a medicine supply company, a paper plant, a plastics plant—everything useful.”

Doubtless it's because of inconvenient candour like this that the U.S. wants to control the Internet, but for the time being the worldwideweb is free, and so here is a point of view the Zionists don’t want you to see. The accompanying photo essay of the destruction of Lebanon betrays the anti-Arab hatred and brutality that is the essence of the Jewish democracy. [sic]

* Update:
Since this column came out, the UN has stated that the capture took place inside Israel, not outside Aita al-Chaab, but serious doubts about this claim persist. In “Operation ‘Change of Location’—How Reports of the July 12th Capture of IDF Soldiers Soon Shifted From Lebanon to Israel,” (counterpunch.org, Aug. 15, 2006) Trish Schuh shows how reporters placed the capture in Lebanon and then altered their reports to place it in Israel. For further details on debunking the Israeli claim that Hezbollah started the war, see my Aug. 8 column and George Monbiot, “Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong,” The Guardian, Aug. 8, 2006.