This is a programme called 60 Minutes, apparently the flagship documentary series of US broadcaster CBS, telling its audience about the “daring” and “sophisticated” pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon in September. [1] The anchor is keen to tell her audience that Hezbollah is a “terrorist organisation”. She explains that the “pager plot” was a “modern take on the Trojan horse”. The anchor claims that “Hezbollah fighters” were “tricked”. There is no mention of the Hezbollah medics or other civilians being hit. Play is made about how the devices would only harm the person wearing them; but no mention of the fact that in some cases e.g. children could have picked up a beeping pager. On this last point, even the BBC, hardly a bastion of Palestinian or Arab resistance, has this to say: “But Israel could not know where they would be when the bombs inside the pagers were triggered, which was why civilians and children in homes, shops and other public places were wounded and killed.” [2]
Hezbollah is on the list of terrorist organisations of various countries, e.g. the US. But, media organisations, are not, in the US at least, obliged to simply repeat this as fact. It would be more accurate journalism to say, “which is designated a terrorist organisation in the US and other countries”. At any event the point of this line right at the start of the piece is to justify what follows. The whole programme is based on two masked people/actors who are said to be former Mossad agents. They could be. They could be current Mossad agents, still taking orders from Mossad. There is absolutely zero corroborating evidence and no sign at all that these masked men were not working an intelligence disinformation operation. The programme is, in journalistic terms, worthless.
I was, of course, struck by the “daring” and “sophisticated”. This makes this horrible terrorist act which, at least as far as the pagers went, involved no risk at all for Mossad agents, sound like a scene from a James Bond movie. It is sickening.
Despite all this, there are some interesting movements in the dialogue. It may be 100% fake – but we are told that the Hungarian owner of the Gold Apollo partner or licensee was already supplying pagers to Hezbollah, and was turned. If true, that would explain how they managed to penetrate the supply chain.
One of the masked men makes a great play about how they took care to prevent bystanders being hurt. This is all part, of course, of the “most moral army in the world”, mythology. However; a revealing moment gives the lie to this:
the day after the pagers uh exploded people were afraid to turn on the air conditioners in Lebanon because they were afraid that they would explode so there was there is real fear was that an intention we want them to feel vulnerable [from the auto-generated transcript]
The “they” in this text is not Hezbollah fighters but civilians in Lebanon. Clearly; they are talking about terrorising an entire population. This is more in line with what Israel actually does; wages war on entire peoples. In Gaza it has reached the point of genocide according to the world’s two leading Human Rights NGOs.
The whole point of this programme is to glorify this sordid operation and to present it as a bold and daring act. CBS is acting rather like the media arm of ISIS here.
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