South Beirut's Divine Victory
Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:
"So . . . I went to Bourj Brajneh and Haret Hreik in the southern suburbs today. No need for words; the pictures say it all. The divine victory seems to have caused quite a bit of destruction: a good thing it wasn't a defeat, eh? The first pictures show some street scenes indicating that, in the suburbs, no one knows who owns the land, who pays the electricity, and that--like the rest of Beirut, there is a vibrant mixture of the secular and the religious/modern."
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/25/2006 12:02:00 AM
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RE: "So... I went to Bourj Brajneh and Haret Hreik in the southern suburbs today. No need for words; the pictures say it all."
Pakistani man accused of providing Hezbollah TV to New Yorkers : [the accused] "Javed Iqbal, 42, allegedly offered to provide an undercover agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with satellite broadcasts by Arabic-language Al Manar, according to court documents...
...He faces up to five years in jail if convicted of charges under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act...
...Al Manar [television] is seen as a mouthpiece of the Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah, and was categorised by US authorities in March as a terrorist entity, making it a [Federal] crime to conduct any business with it."
including, apparently ~ just watching it :-/
Having toured occupied Lebanon in 1999, and post-Israeli withdrawal Lebanon in 2000, the sight of Hizbollah billboards is familiar...
There is no denying that Hizbollah has a strong propaganda network that uses all types of media to portray the 'strength' and 'values' of the organization... While their methods seem comical to us, they are quite effective...
In Ummrikka, on the other hand, El Presidente Arbusto has only to mumble about how future historians will recall this as Hizbollah's great defeat and it gets into millions of households through the network of the lapdog media...
Propagandists here do not have to waste time and money on rigging up billboards when the media provides it for free and without any worthwhile examination of merit...
On the larger issue of whether there was either divinity or victory at play in the aftermath of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon the matter is pretty easily settled - Hizbollah had to survive this onslaught and they did... Israel had to destroy or disarm them, which they couldn't.
Mission Accomplished, says Bush.
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