Friday, April 15, 2011

Fisk Attempts To Fake It

Robert Fisk, whose alcohol-breath almost overcame me in our only face-to-face meeting at the offices of the Israell Government Press Office in the late 1980s, lends of new meaning to the verb "to fisk" in this story, entitled 'The Arab awakening began not in Tunisia this year, but in Lebanon in 2005':-

...On 31 March, the Israelis – who have steadfastly opposed the overthrow of the Middle East's dictators (???) – published a series of photo-reconnaissance pictures of southern Lebanon, supposedly marking the exact locations of 550 Hezbollah bunkers, 300 "monitoring sites" and 100 weapons storage facilities run by Syria's Lebanese Shia militia allies in the country. They had been built, the Israelis claimed, next to hospitals, schools and public utilities. The documentation was fake. Visits to locations marked on the map uncovered no such bunkers. Indeed, the real Hezbollah bunkers known to the Lebanese are not marked on the map. The Hezbollah quickly understood the meaning.

"They are setting us up for the next war," a veteran Hezbollah ruffian from the village of Jibchit told me. If Israel had really discovered our positions, the last thing they would have done is inform us they knew the locations – because we'd immediately move them!"

Exactly, - move them far away from our border. A humanitarian gesture to avoid civiliuan casualties in the next, if it happens, conflict. That doesn't count by Fisk?

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