the human province

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Via Chris, NRO fabulist W. Thomas Smith Jr. quits doing freelance work for NRO. Kathryn Jean Lopez has this to say in an editor's note.

This is what I had to say about the affair earlier this month when it broke.

Good riddance, I say.

I generally try to stay away from the National Review. This explains why I didn't see the inane and meretricious "reporting" done by W. Thomas Smith Jr. until today. I've commented here before on ridiculous and sensationalist accounts of Lebanon, but this guy really takes the cake. Smith wrote last September:

Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here. Not sure what or when. But a few days ago, between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling “show of force,” positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city.

It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the "Christian areas of Beirut," and I can guarantee that Smith's account is laughably untrue. On the day that Smith says Hezbollah "deployed" to East Beirut, I was doing some shopping. I live on the border of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mkhail and went to Sassine and ABC that day (all of which are Christian neighborhoods), and rest assured, there were no Hezbollah militants, much less armed ones, to be seen anywhere.  Had what he described been true, there would most likely have been a civil war, or at the very least isolated street fighting. As it was, not only was there no fighting, but not a single journalist in Beirut, foreign or Lebanese, picked up on Hezbollah's alleged "show of force." There's a very simple reason for this: it never happened. If Hezbollah were to deploy a dozen armed militants to Achrafieh, that would be crossing one of Lebanon's red lines. Saying that there were 4,000-5,000 gunmen here is beyond farfetched; it's in the realm of the outlandishly comic. 

I've had neither the time, nor the stomach, to wade through all of this guy's Lebanon "coverage," but the few pieces I've opened are risible in their ridiculousness. Here's another example:

Hezbollah are not the only terrorists operating here in Lebanon: There are also Al Qaeda affiliates like Fatah Al Islam (they were not totally wiped out at Nahr al Bared), as well as Jund al Sham (Soldiers of Damascus), Jundallah, Hamas, and — though few Americans are aware of this — operating elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Syrian border. These are just a few of the problem groups here: All operating under the auspices of Hezbollah.

Despite his mistranslation of "Sham," which in this context means Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) and not Damascus, this little excerpt is absurd in that it explicitly says that all of the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Palestinian camps, as well as Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are "operating under the auspices of Hezbollah." First of all, no one knows who is connected to the various groups operating in the Palestinian camps. And second of all, anyone who believes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is "under the auspices" of Hezbollah, and not the other way around, obviously knows nothing about either organization.

Smith's scattergun approach to various armed groups in Lebanon is symptomatic of a larger, mostly American, approach to the Middle East, where al-Qaeda equals Hezbollah equals Hamas equals al Qaeda in Iraq equals Jund al-Sham ,etc. This is the kind of thinking that led most Americans to believe that Baghdad had something to do with 9/11 and leaves the defenders of the free world (see also: Reyes and Sarkozy) incapable of distinguishing between Sunnis and Shi'a.

Another fun read is this post, in which Smith brags about doing "reconnaissance" in the Dahiye, the suburbs where Hezbollah is based in Beirut. Or rather this would be funny if it were a satire and I were reading it to friends in Beirut. This guy seems to think that he's in a Chuck Norris movie, which would be fine except for a couple of things. First, this "journalism," in which Smith writes about spying on Hezbollah for pro-Government groups not only makes him sound like a macho asshole, it also casts a shadow of doubt on legitimate journalism done by actual reporters in a country where foreign correspondents are already viewed with an air of suspicion. Second, it makes Beirut sound like a war zone, which it's clearly not.

And then there's this gem. According to Smith, there were "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen — positioned between the parliament and the Serail." As it happens, I've spent a fair amount of time downtown, and this is not the first time I've written about Americans talking about the sit-in protest without knowing what they're talking about. For the last few months, it's been hard to find more than a couple of dozen people at the protest, much less hundreds of armed militants. I have never, I repeat: never, seen any Hezbollah weapons downtown. They may have them down there, but if they do, they're hidden so well that someone who regularly strolls through the camp would not see them. To suggest that he surprised 200 armed militants out in the open while driving over the bridge that connects East and West Beirut is ridiculous.   

Finally, Jack Bauer -- I mean W. Thomas Smith Jr. -- gives us a post from an "undisclosed neighborhood":

Lebanon is extremely dangerous for Americans right now. In fact, some top officials within the 1559 Committee (essentially the heart and soul of the Cedars Revolution ... for a free Lebanon) believe some sort of dramatic terrorist event is going to take place here in Lebanon between now and mid-October. This is not a gut feeling, but a calculation based on intelligence analysis and chatter from the street.

Tony Nissi, the 1559 Committee chief here in Beirut (whom you'll recall from previous entries), has reason to believe Hezbollah knows who I am. So I am deliberately not staying in hotels: Instead, I'm spending nights in friends' houses — safe houses if you will — and always with bodyguards.

This one is the funniest of the bunch. If there are only half of the number of Americans in Lebanon now as there were during the July war, there'd still be over 10,000 Americans here, myself included. Beirut is decidedly not unsafe for Americans, unless of course they decide to go play G.I. Joe by arming themselves and doing "reconnaissance." But even if Smith were to get picked up by Hezbollah or the Army for spying (which is basically what he claims he's doing), they'd immediately recognize him for the  buffoon that he plainly is. He sounds more like a hapless character out of a Harry Mathews novel than an actual spy, or, God forbid, a journalist.

I could go on for pages about the factual inaccuracy of Smith's reports, but it would just be more of the same. It's amazing to me that NRO published any of Smith's "reports." They are so obviously bullshit that someone must have been asleep at the wheel over there. One of my pet peeves is the writing of partisan hacks who only travel for rhetorical flair, and Smith seems to be more of the same. The difference is that his case is so egregious that he's getting called out on it. There are well respected journalists here in Lebanon and elsewhere who not only know the country intimately but are good writers to boot. Anthony Shadid, Annia Ciezadlo and Mohamad Bazzi are only a few of the names that come to mind. So why is there a need to send Chuck Norris wannabe hacks like Smith who evidently don't know anything about the countries they're ostensibly covering? If NRO wants coverage of Lebanon, there's no dearth of talent already here in Beirut. Insisting on publishing Smith's fabrications in order to toe an ideological line that pays no heed of Lebanon's complex politics only makes NRO look stupid and dishonest.

If you're interested in NRO's response to similar allegations, you can see that here and here.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez, online editor of the National Review has another statement up about Smith (emphasis mine):

With regard to the two posts in question, it is my belief, based on an investigation in which NRO discussed the matter with three independent sources who live and work in Lebanon (as well as other experts in the area), that Smith was probably either spun by his sources or confused about what he saw.

...the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn't always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas." While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That's why we're revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt.

So let me get this straight. Lopez publishes Smith's ridiculous posts that betray a fundamental ignorance of Lebanon and the political situation here, posts which were either made up entirely or fed to him by pro-Government forces, and the problem here is the "Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate."

Wow. I almost don't even know where to start with this one. Maybe she should just throw in another couple of lines about America's mission civilisatrice and the white man's burden and be done with it.

In any case, someone should send her message to Tom Harb, a rabid March 14 supporter in the US, who's supporting Smith wholeheartedly (from Florida, no less) and accusing all of the journalists who have contradicted Smith of being on the Hezbollah payroll. Someone should remind him that his neo-conservative comrades in arms at NRO and elsewhere are fair weather friends to whom, at the end of the day, a wog is a wog, regardless of his political usefulness.

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Via Chris, NRO fabulist W. Thomas Smith Jr. quits doing freelance work for NRO. Kathryn Jean Lopez has this to say in an editor's note.

This is what I had to say about the affair earlier this month when it broke.

Good riddance, I say.

I generally try to stay away from the National Review. This explains why I didn't see the inane and meretricious "reporting" done by W. Thomas Smith Jr. until today. I've commented here before on ridiculous and sensationalist accounts of Lebanon, but this guy really takes the cake. Smith wrote last September:

Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here. Not sure what or when. But a few days ago, between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling “show of force,” positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city.

It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the "Christian areas of Beirut," and I can guarantee that Smith's account is laughably untrue. On the day that Smith says Hezbollah "deployed" to East Beirut, I was doing some shopping. I live on the border of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mkhail and went to Sassine and ABC that day (all of which are Christian neighborhoods), and rest assured, there were no Hezbollah militants, much less armed ones, to be seen anywhere.  Had what he described been true, there would most likely have been a civil war, or at the very least isolated street fighting. As it was, not only was there no fighting, but not a single journalist in Beirut, foreign or Lebanese, picked up on Hezbollah's alleged "show of force." There's a very simple reason for this: it never happened. If Hezbollah were to deploy a dozen armed militants to Achrafieh, that would be crossing one of Lebanon's red lines. Saying that there were 4,000-5,000 gunmen here is beyond farfetched; it's in the realm of the outlandishly comic. 

I've had neither the time, nor the stomach, to wade through all of this guy's Lebanon "coverage," but the few pieces I've opened are risible in their ridiculousness. Here's another example:

Hezbollah are not the only terrorists operating here in Lebanon: There are also Al Qaeda affiliates like Fatah Al Islam (they were not totally wiped out at Nahr al Bared), as well as Jund al Sham (Soldiers of Damascus), Jundallah, Hamas, and — though few Americans are aware of this — operating elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Syrian border. These are just a few of the problem groups here: All operating under the auspices of Hezbollah.

Despite his mistranslation of "Sham," which in this context means Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) and not Damascus, this little excerpt is absurd in that it explicitly says that all of the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Palestinian camps, as well as Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are "operating under the auspices of Hezbollah." First of all, no one knows who is connected to the various groups operating in the Palestinian camps. And second of all, anyone who believes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is "under the auspices" of Hezbollah, and not the other way around, obviously knows nothing about either organization.

Smith's scattergun approach to various armed groups in Lebanon is symptomatic of a larger, mostly American, approach to the Middle East, where al-Qaeda equals Hezbollah equals Hamas equals al Qaeda in Iraq equals Jund al-Sham ,etc. This is the kind of thinking that led most Americans to believe that Baghdad had something to do with 9/11 and leaves the defenders of the free world (see also: Reyes and Sarkozy) incapable of distinguishing between Sunnis and Shi'a.

Another fun read is this post, in which Smith brags about doing "reconnaissance" in the Dahiye, the suburbs where Hezbollah is based in Beirut. Or rather this would be funny if it were a satire and I were reading it to friends in Beirut. This guy seems to think that he's in a Chuck Norris movie, which would be fine except for a couple of things. First, this "journalism," in which Smith writes about spying on Hezbollah for pro-Government groups not only makes him sound like a macho asshole, it also casts a shadow of doubt on legitimate journalism done by actual reporters in a country where foreign correspondents are already viewed with an air of suspicion. Second, it makes Beirut sound like a war zone, which it's clearly not.

And then there's this gem. According to Smith, there were "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen — positioned between the parliament and the Serail." As it happens, I've spent a fair amount of time downtown, and this is not the first time I've written about Americans talking about the sit-in protest without knowing what they're talking about. For the last few months, it's been hard to find more than a couple of dozen people at the protest, much less hundreds of armed militants. I have never, I repeat: never, seen any Hezbollah weapons downtown. They may have them down there, but if they do, they're hidden so well that someone who regularly strolls through the camp would not see them. To suggest that he surprised 200 armed militants out in the open while driving over the bridge that connects East and West Beirut is ridiculous.   

Finally, Jack Bauer -- I mean W. Thomas Smith Jr. -- gives us a post from an "undisclosed neighborhood":

Lebanon is extremely dangerous for Americans right now. In fact, some top officials within the 1559 Committee (essentially the heart and soul of the Cedars Revolution ... for a free Lebanon) believe some sort of dramatic terrorist event is going to take place here in Lebanon between now and mid-October. This is not a gut feeling, but a calculation based on intelligence analysis and chatter from the street.

Tony Nissi, the 1559 Committee chief here in Beirut (whom you'll recall from previous entries), has reason to believe Hezbollah knows who I am. So I am deliberately not staying in hotels: Instead, I'm spending nights in friends' houses — safe houses if you will — and always with bodyguards.

This one is the funniest of the bunch. If there are only half of the number of Americans in Lebanon now as there were during the July war, there'd still be over 10,000 Americans here, myself included. Beirut is decidedly not unsafe for Americans, unless of course they decide to go play G.I. Joe by arming themselves and doing "reconnaissance." But even if Smith were to get picked up by Hezbollah or the Army for spying (which is basically what he claims he's doing), they'd immediately recognize him for the  buffoon that he plainly is. He sounds more like a hapless character out of a Harry Mathews novel than an actual spy, or, God forbid, a journalist.

I could go on for pages about the factual inaccuracy of Smith's reports, but it would just be more of the same. It's amazing to me that NRO published any of Smith's "reports." They are so obviously bullshit that someone must have been asleep at the wheel over there. One of my pet peeves is the writing of partisan hacks who only travel for rhetorical flair, and Smith seems to be more of the same. The difference is that his case is so egregious that he's getting called out on it. There are well respected journalists here in Lebanon and elsewhere who not only know the country intimately but are good writers to boot. Anthony Shadid, Annia Ciezadlo and Mohamad Bazzi are only a few of the names that come to mind. So why is there a need to send Chuck Norris wannabe hacks like Smith who evidently don't know anything about the countries they're ostensibly covering? If NRO wants coverage of Lebanon, there's no dearth of talent already here in Beirut. Insisting on publishing Smith's fabrications in order to toe an ideological line that pays no heed of Lebanon's complex politics only makes NRO look stupid and dishonest.

If you're interested in NRO's response to similar allegations, you can see that here and here.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez, online editor of the National Review has another statement up about Smith (emphasis mine):

With regard to the two posts in question, it is my belief, based on an investigation in which NRO discussed the matter with three independent sources who live and work in Lebanon (as well as other experts in the area), that Smith was probably either spun by his sources or confused about what he saw.

...the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn't always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas." While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That's why we're revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt.

So let me get this straight. Lopez publishes Smith's ridiculous posts that betray a fundamental ignorance of Lebanon and the political situation here, posts which were either made up entirely or fed to him by pro-Government forces, and the problem here is the "Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate."

Wow. I almost don't even know where to start with this one. Maybe she should just throw in another couple of lines about America's mission civilisatrice and the white man's burden and be done with it.

In any case, someone should send her message to Tom Harb, a rabid March 14 supporter in the US, who's supporting Smith wholeheartedly (from Florida, no less) and accusing all of the journalists who have contradicted Smith of being on the Hezbollah payroll. Someone should remind him that his neo-conservative comrades in arms at NRO and elsewhere are fair weather friends to whom, at the end of the day, a wog is a wog, regardless of his political usefulness.

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Via Chris, NRO fabulist W. Thomas Smith Jr. quits doing freelance work for NRO. Kathryn Jean Lopez has this to say in an editor's note.

This is what I had to say about the affair earlier this month when it broke.

Good riddance, I say.

I generally try to stay away from the National Review. This explains why I didn't see the inane and meretricious "reporting" done by W. Thomas Smith Jr. until today. I've commented here before on ridiculous and sensationalist accounts of Lebanon, but this guy really takes the cake. Smith wrote last September:

Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here. Not sure what or when. But a few days ago, between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling “show of force,” positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city.

It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the "Christian areas of Beirut," and I can guarantee that Smith's account is laughably untrue. On the day that Smith says Hezbollah "deployed" to East Beirut, I was doing some shopping. I live on the border of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mkhail and went to Sassine and ABC that day (all of which are Christian neighborhoods), and rest assured, there were no Hezbollah militants, much less armed ones, to be seen anywhere.  Had what he described been true, there would most likely have been a civil war, or at the very least isolated street fighting. As it was, not only was there no fighting, but not a single journalist in Beirut, foreign or Lebanese, picked up on Hezbollah's alleged "show of force." There's a very simple reason for this: it never happened. If Hezbollah were to deploy a dozen armed militants to Achrafieh, that would be crossing one of Lebanon's red lines. Saying that there were 4,000-5,000 gunmen here is beyond farfetched; it's in the realm of the outlandishly comic. 

I've had neither the time, nor the stomach, to wade through all of this guy's Lebanon "coverage," but the few pieces I've opened are risible in their ridiculousness. Here's another example:

Hezbollah are not the only terrorists operating here in Lebanon: There are also Al Qaeda affiliates like Fatah Al Islam (they were not totally wiped out at Nahr al Bared), as well as Jund al Sham (Soldiers of Damascus), Jundallah, Hamas, and — though few Americans are aware of this — operating elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Syrian border. These are just a few of the problem groups here: All operating under the auspices of Hezbollah.

Despite his mistranslation of "Sham," which in this context means Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) and not Damascus, this little excerpt is absurd in that it explicitly says that all of the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Palestinian camps, as well as Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are "operating under the auspices of Hezbollah." First of all, no one knows who is connected to the various groups operating in the Palestinian camps. And second of all, anyone who believes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is "under the auspices" of Hezbollah, and not the other way around, obviously knows nothing about either organization.

Smith's scattergun approach to various armed groups in Lebanon is symptomatic of a larger, mostly American, approach to the Middle East, where al-Qaeda equals Hezbollah equals Hamas equals al Qaeda in Iraq equals Jund al-Sham ,etc. This is the kind of thinking that led most Americans to believe that Baghdad had something to do with 9/11 and leaves the defenders of the free world (see also: Reyes and Sarkozy) incapable of distinguishing between Sunnis and Shi'a.

Another fun read is this post, in which Smith brags about doing "reconnaissance" in the Dahiye, the suburbs where Hezbollah is based in Beirut. Or rather this would be funny if it were a satire and I were reading it to friends in Beirut. This guy seems to think that he's in a Chuck Norris movie, which would be fine except for a couple of things. First, this "journalism," in which Smith writes about spying on Hezbollah for pro-Government groups not only makes him sound like a macho asshole, it also casts a shadow of doubt on legitimate journalism done by actual reporters in a country where foreign correspondents are already viewed with an air of suspicion. Second, it makes Beirut sound like a war zone, which it's clearly not.

And then there's this gem. According to Smith, there were "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen — positioned between the parliament and the Serail." As it happens, I've spent a fair amount of time downtown, and this is not the first time I've written about Americans talking about the sit-in protest without knowing what they're talking about. For the last few months, it's been hard to find more than a couple of dozen people at the protest, much less hundreds of armed militants. I have never, I repeat: never, seen any Hezbollah weapons downtown. They may have them down there, but if they do, they're hidden so well that someone who regularly strolls through the camp would not see them. To suggest that he surprised 200 armed militants out in the open while driving over the bridge that connects East and West Beirut is ridiculous.   

Finally, Jack Bauer -- I mean W. Thomas Smith Jr. -- gives us a post from an "undisclosed neighborhood":

Lebanon is extremely dangerous for Americans right now. In fact, some top officials within the 1559 Committee (essentially the heart and soul of the Cedars Revolution ... for a free Lebanon) believe some sort of dramatic terrorist event is going to take place here in Lebanon between now and mid-October. This is not a gut feeling, but a calculation based on intelligence analysis and chatter from the street.

Tony Nissi, the 1559 Committee chief here in Beirut (whom you'll recall from previous entries), has reason to believe Hezbollah knows who I am. So I am deliberately not staying in hotels: Instead, I'm spending nights in friends' houses — safe houses if you will — and always with bodyguards.

This one is the funniest of the bunch. If there are only half of the number of Americans in Lebanon now as there were during the July war, there'd still be over 10,000 Americans here, myself included. Beirut is decidedly not unsafe for Americans, unless of course they decide to go play G.I. Joe by arming themselves and doing "reconnaissance." But even if Smith were to get picked up by Hezbollah or the Army for spying (which is basically what he claims he's doing), they'd immediately recognize him for the  buffoon that he plainly is. He sounds more like a hapless character out of a Harry Mathews novel than an actual spy, or, God forbid, a journalist.

I could go on for pages about the factual inaccuracy of Smith's reports, but it would just be more of the same. It's amazing to me that NRO published any of Smith's "reports." They are so obviously bullshit that someone must have been asleep at the wheel over there. One of my pet peeves is the writing of partisan hacks who only travel for rhetorical flair, and Smith seems to be more of the same. The difference is that his case is so egregious that he's getting called out on it. There are well respected journalists here in Lebanon and elsewhere who not only know the country intimately but are good writers to boot. Anthony Shadid, Annia Ciezadlo and Mohamad Bazzi are only a few of the names that come to mind. So why is there a need to send Chuck Norris wannabe hacks like Smith who evidently don't know anything about the countries they're ostensibly covering? If NRO wants coverage of Lebanon, there's no dearth of talent already here in Beirut. Insisting on publishing Smith's fabrications in order to toe an ideological line that pays no heed of Lebanon's complex politics only makes NRO look stupid and dishonest.

If you're interested in NRO's response to similar allegations, you can see that here and here.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez, online editor of the National Review has another statement up about Smith (emphasis mine):

With regard to the two posts in question, it is my belief, based on an investigation in which NRO discussed the matter with three independent sources who live and work in Lebanon (as well as other experts in the area), that Smith was probably either spun by his sources or confused about what he saw.

...the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn't always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas." While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That's why we're revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt.

So let me get this straight. Lopez publishes Smith's ridiculous posts that betray a fundamental ignorance of Lebanon and the political situation here, posts which were either made up entirely or fed to him by pro-Government forces, and the problem here is the "Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate."

Wow. I almost don't even know where to start with this one. Maybe she should just throw in another couple of lines about America's mission civilisatrice and the white man's burden and be done with it.

In any case, someone should send her message to Tom Harb, a rabid March 14 supporter in the US, who's supporting Smith wholeheartedly (from Florida, no less) and accusing all of the journalists who have contradicted Smith of being on the Hezbollah payroll. Someone should remind him that his neo-conservative comrades in arms at NRO and elsewhere are fair weather friends to whom, at the end of the day, a wog is a wog, regardless of his political usefulness.

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Via Chris, NRO fabulist W. Thomas Smith Jr. quits doing freelance work for NRO. Kathryn Jean Lopez has this to say in an editor's note.

This is what I had to say about the affair earlier this month when it broke.

Good riddance, I say.

I generally try to stay away from the National Review. This explains why I didn't see the inane and meretricious "reporting" done by W. Thomas Smith Jr. until today. I've commented here before on ridiculous and sensationalist accounts of Lebanon, but this guy really takes the cake. Smith wrote last September:

Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here. Not sure what or when. But a few days ago, between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling “show of force,” positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city.

It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the "Christian areas of Beirut," and I can guarantee that Smith's account is laughably untrue. On the day that Smith says Hezbollah "deployed" to East Beirut, I was doing some shopping. I live on the border of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mkhail and went to Sassine and ABC that day (all of which are Christian neighborhoods), and rest assured, there were no Hezbollah militants, much less armed ones, to be seen anywhere.  Had what he described been true, there would most likely have been a civil war, or at the very least isolated street fighting. As it was, not only was there no fighting, but not a single journalist in Beirut, foreign or Lebanese, picked up on Hezbollah's alleged "show of force." There's a very simple reason for this: it never happened. If Hezbollah were to deploy a dozen armed militants to Achrafieh, that would be crossing one of Lebanon's red lines. Saying that there were 4,000-5,000 gunmen here is beyond farfetched; it's in the realm of the outlandishly comic. 

I've had neither the time, nor the stomach, to wade through all of this guy's Lebanon "coverage," but the few pieces I've opened are risible in their ridiculousness. Here's another example:

Hezbollah are not the only terrorists operating here in Lebanon: There are also Al Qaeda affiliates like Fatah Al Islam (they were not totally wiped out at Nahr al Bared), as well as Jund al Sham (Soldiers of Damascus), Jundallah, Hamas, and — though few Americans are aware of this — operating elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Syrian border. These are just a few of the problem groups here: All operating under the auspices of Hezbollah.

Despite his mistranslation of "Sham," which in this context means Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) and not Damascus, this little excerpt is absurd in that it explicitly says that all of the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Palestinian camps, as well as Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are "operating under the auspices of Hezbollah." First of all, no one knows who is connected to the various groups operating in the Palestinian camps. And second of all, anyone who believes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is "under the auspices" of Hezbollah, and not the other way around, obviously knows nothing about either organization.

Smith's scattergun approach to various armed groups in Lebanon is symptomatic of a larger, mostly American, approach to the Middle East, where al-Qaeda equals Hezbollah equals Hamas equals al Qaeda in Iraq equals Jund al-Sham ,etc. This is the kind of thinking that led most Americans to believe that Baghdad had something to do with 9/11 and leaves the defenders of the free world (see also: Reyes and Sarkozy) incapable of distinguishing between Sunnis and Shi'a.

Another fun read is this post, in which Smith brags about doing "reconnaissance" in the Dahiye, the suburbs where Hezbollah is based in Beirut. Or rather this would be funny if it were a satire and I were reading it to friends in Beirut. This guy seems to think that he's in a Chuck Norris movie, which would be fine except for a couple of things. First, this "journalism," in which Smith writes about spying on Hezbollah for pro-Government groups not only makes him sound like a macho asshole, it also casts a shadow of doubt on legitimate journalism done by actual reporters in a country where foreign correspondents are already viewed with an air of suspicion. Second, it makes Beirut sound like a war zone, which it's clearly not.

And then there's this gem. According to Smith, there were "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen — positioned between the parliament and the Serail." As it happens, I've spent a fair amount of time downtown, and this is not the first time I've written about Americans talking about the sit-in protest without knowing what they're talking about. For the last few months, it's been hard to find more than a couple of dozen people at the protest, much less hundreds of armed militants. I have never, I repeat: never, seen any Hezbollah weapons downtown. They may have them down there, but if they do, they're hidden so well that someone who regularly strolls through the camp would not see them. To suggest that he surprised 200 armed militants out in the open while driving over the bridge that connects East and West Beirut is ridiculous.   

Finally, Jack Bauer -- I mean W. Thomas Smith Jr. -- gives us a post from an "undisclosed neighborhood":

Lebanon is extremely dangerous for Americans right now. In fact, some top officials within the 1559 Committee (essentially the heart and soul of the Cedars Revolution ... for a free Lebanon) believe some sort of dramatic terrorist event is going to take place here in Lebanon between now and mid-October. This is not a gut feeling, but a calculation based on intelligence analysis and chatter from the street.

Tony Nissi, the 1559 Committee chief here in Beirut (whom you'll recall from previous entries), has reason to believe Hezbollah knows who I am. So I am deliberately not staying in hotels: Instead, I'm spending nights in friends' houses — safe houses if you will — and always with bodyguards.

This one is the funniest of the bunch. If there are only half of the number of Americans in Lebanon now as there were during the July war, there'd still be over 10,000 Americans here, myself included. Beirut is decidedly not unsafe for Americans, unless of course they decide to go play G.I. Joe by arming themselves and doing "reconnaissance." But even if Smith were to get picked up by Hezbollah or the Army for spying (which is basically what he claims he's doing), they'd immediately recognize him for the  buffoon that he plainly is. He sounds more like a hapless character out of a Harry Mathews novel than an actual spy, or, God forbid, a journalist.

I could go on for pages about the factual inaccuracy of Smith's reports, but it would just be more of the same. It's amazing to me that NRO published any of Smith's "reports." They are so obviously bullshit that someone must have been asleep at the wheel over there. One of my pet peeves is the writing of partisan hacks who only travel for rhetorical flair, and Smith seems to be more of the same. The difference is that his case is so egregious that he's getting called out on it. There are well respected journalists here in Lebanon and elsewhere who not only know the country intimately but are good writers to boot. Anthony Shadid, Annia Ciezadlo and Mohamad Bazzi are only a few of the names that come to mind. So why is there a need to send Chuck Norris wannabe hacks like Smith who evidently don't know anything about the countries they're ostensibly covering? If NRO wants coverage of Lebanon, there's no dearth of talent already here in Beirut. Insisting on publishing Smith's fabrications in order to toe an ideological line that pays no heed of Lebanon's complex politics only makes NRO look stupid and dishonest.

If you're interested in NRO's response to similar allegations, you can see that here and here.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez, online editor of the National Review has another statement up about Smith (emphasis mine):

With regard to the two posts in question, it is my belief, based on an investigation in which NRO discussed the matter with three independent sources who live and work in Lebanon (as well as other experts in the area), that Smith was probably either spun by his sources or confused about what he saw.

...the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn't always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas." While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That's why we're revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt.

So let me get this straight. Lopez publishes Smith's ridiculous posts that betray a fundamental ignorance of Lebanon and the political situation here, posts which were either made up entirely or fed to him by pro-Government forces, and the problem here is the "Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate."

Wow. I almost don't even know where to start with this one. Maybe she should just throw in another couple of lines about America's mission civilisatrice and the white man's burden and be done with it.

In any case, someone should send her message to Tom Harb, a rabid March 14 supporter in the US, who's supporting Smith wholeheartedly (from Florida, no less) and accusing all of the journalists who have contradicted Smith of being on the Hezbollah payroll. Someone should remind him that his neo-conservative comrades in arms at NRO and elsewhere are fair weather friends to whom, at the end of the day, a wog is a wog, regardless of his political usefulness.

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Via Chris, NRO fabulist W. Thomas Smith Jr. quits doing freelance work for NRO. Kathryn Jean Lopez has this to say in an editor's note.

This is what I had to say about the affair earlier this month when it broke.

Good riddance, I say.

I generally try to stay away from the National Review. This explains why I didn't see the inane and meretricious "reporting" done by W. Thomas Smith Jr. until today. I've commented here before on ridiculous and sensationalist accounts of Lebanon, but this guy really takes the cake. Smith wrote last September:

Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here. Not sure what or when. But a few days ago, between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling “show of force,” positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city.

It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the "Christian areas of Beirut," and I can guarantee that Smith's account is laughably untrue. On the day that Smith says Hezbollah "deployed" to East Beirut, I was doing some shopping. I live on the border of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mkhail and went to Sassine and ABC that day (all of which are Christian neighborhoods), and rest assured, there were no Hezbollah militants, much less armed ones, to be seen anywhere.  Had what he described been true, there would most likely have been a civil war, or at the very least isolated street fighting. As it was, not only was there no fighting, but not a single journalist in Beirut, foreign or Lebanese, picked up on Hezbollah's alleged "show of force." There's a very simple reason for this: it never happened. If Hezbollah were to deploy a dozen armed militants to Achrafieh, that would be crossing one of Lebanon's red lines. Saying that there were 4,000-5,000 gunmen here is beyond farfetched; it's in the realm of the outlandishly comic. 

I've had neither the time, nor the stomach, to wade through all of this guy's Lebanon "coverage," but the few pieces I've opened are risible in their ridiculousness. Here's another example:

Hezbollah are not the only terrorists operating here in Lebanon: There are also Al Qaeda affiliates like Fatah Al Islam (they were not totally wiped out at Nahr al Bared), as well as Jund al Sham (Soldiers of Damascus), Jundallah, Hamas, and — though few Americans are aware of this — operating elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Syrian border. These are just a few of the problem groups here: All operating under the auspices of Hezbollah.

Despite his mistranslation of "Sham," which in this context means Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) and not Damascus, this little excerpt is absurd in that it explicitly says that all of the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Palestinian camps, as well as Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are "operating under the auspices of Hezbollah." First of all, no one knows who is connected to the various groups operating in the Palestinian camps. And second of all, anyone who believes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is "under the auspices" of Hezbollah, and not the other way around, obviously knows nothing about either organization.

Smith's scattergun approach to various armed groups in Lebanon is symptomatic of a larger, mostly American, approach to the Middle East, where al-Qaeda equals Hezbollah equals Hamas equals al Qaeda in Iraq equals Jund al-Sham ,etc. This is the kind of thinking that led most Americans to believe that Baghdad had something to do with 9/11 and leaves the defenders of the free world (see also: Reyes and Sarkozy) incapable of distinguishing between Sunnis and Shi'a.

Another fun read is this post, in which Smith brags about doing "reconnaissance" in the Dahiye, the suburbs where Hezbollah is based in Beirut. Or rather this would be funny if it were a satire and I were reading it to friends in Beirut. This guy seems to think that he's in a Chuck Norris movie, which would be fine except for a couple of things. First, this "journalism," in which Smith writes about spying on Hezbollah for pro-Government groups not only makes him sound like a macho asshole, it also casts a shadow of doubt on legitimate journalism done by actual reporters in a country where foreign correspondents are already viewed with an air of suspicion. Second, it makes Beirut sound like a war zone, which it's clearly not.

And then there's this gem. According to Smith, there were "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen — positioned between the parliament and the Serail." As it happens, I've spent a fair amount of time downtown, and this is not the first time I've written about Americans talking about the sit-in protest without knowing what they're talking about. For the last few months, it's been hard to find more than a couple of dozen people at the protest, much less hundreds of armed militants. I have never, I repeat: never, seen any Hezbollah weapons downtown. They may have them down there, but if they do, they're hidden so well that someone who regularly strolls through the camp would not see them. To suggest that he surprised 200 armed militants out in the open while driving over the bridge that connects East and West Beirut is ridiculous.   

Finally, Jack Bauer -- I mean W. Thomas Smith Jr. -- gives us a post from an "undisclosed neighborhood":

Lebanon is extremely dangerous for Americans right now. In fact, some top officials within the 1559 Committee (essentially the heart and soul of the Cedars Revolution ... for a free Lebanon) believe some sort of dramatic terrorist event is going to take place here in Lebanon between now and mid-October. This is not a gut feeling, but a calculation based on intelligence analysis and chatter from the street.

Tony Nissi, the 1559 Committee chief here in Beirut (whom you'll recall from previous entries), has reason to believe Hezbollah knows who I am. So I am deliberately not staying in hotels: Instead, I'm spending nights in friends' houses — safe houses if you will — and always with bodyguards.

This one is the funniest of the bunch. If there are only half of the number of Americans in Lebanon now as there were during the July war, there'd still be over 10,000 Americans here, myself included. Beirut is decidedly not unsafe for Americans, unless of course they decide to go play G.I. Joe by arming themselves and doing "reconnaissance." But even if Smith were to get picked up by Hezbollah or the Army for spying (which is basically what he claims he's doing), they'd immediately recognize him for the  buffoon that he plainly is. He sounds more like a hapless character out of a Harry Mathews novel than an actual spy, or, God forbid, a journalist.

I could go on for pages about the factual inaccuracy of Smith's reports, but it would just be more of the same. It's amazing to me that NRO published any of Smith's "reports." They are so obviously bullshit that someone must have been asleep at the wheel over there. One of my pet peeves is the writing of partisan hacks who only travel for rhetorical flair, and Smith seems to be more of the same. The difference is that his case is so egregious that he's getting called out on it. There are well respected journalists here in Lebanon and elsewhere who not only know the country intimately but are good writers to boot. Anthony Shadid, Annia Ciezadlo and Mohamad Bazzi are only a few of the names that come to mind. So why is there a need to send Chuck Norris wannabe hacks like Smith who evidently don't know anything about the countries they're ostensibly covering? If NRO wants coverage of Lebanon, there's no dearth of talent already here in Beirut. Insisting on publishing Smith's fabrications in order to toe an ideological line that pays no heed of Lebanon's complex politics only makes NRO look stupid and dishonest.

If you're interested in NRO's response to similar allegations, you can see that here and here.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez, online editor of the National Review has another statement up about Smith (emphasis mine):

With regard to the two posts in question, it is my belief, based on an investigation in which NRO discussed the matter with three independent sources who live and work in Lebanon (as well as other experts in the area), that Smith was probably either spun by his sources or confused about what he saw.

...the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn't always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas." While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That's why we're revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt.

So let me get this straight. Lopez publishes Smith's ridiculous posts that betray a fundamental ignorance of Lebanon and the political situation here, posts which were either made up entirely or fed to him by pro-Government forces, and the problem here is the "Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate."

Wow. I almost don't even know where to start with this one. Maybe she should just throw in another couple of lines about America's mission civilisatrice and the white man's burden and be done with it.

In any case, someone should send her message to Tom Harb, a rabid March 14 supporter in the US, who's supporting Smith wholeheartedly (from Florida, no less) and accusing all of the journalists who have contradicted Smith of being on the Hezbollah payroll. Someone should remind him that his neo-conservative comrades in arms at NRO and elsewhere are fair weather friends to whom, at the end of the day, a wog is a wog, regardless of his political usefulness.

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Via Chris, NRO fabulist W. Thomas Smith Jr. quits doing freelance work for NRO. Kathryn Jean Lopez has this to say in an editor's note.

This is what I had to say about the affair earlier this month when it broke.

Good riddance, I say.

I generally try to stay away from the National Review. This explains why I didn't see the inane and meretricious "reporting" done by W. Thomas Smith Jr. until today. I've commented here before on ridiculous and sensationalist accounts of Lebanon, but this guy really takes the cake. Smith wrote last September:

Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here. Not sure what or when. But a few days ago, between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling “show of force,” positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city.

It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the "Christian areas of Beirut," and I can guarantee that Smith's account is laughably untrue. On the day that Smith says Hezbollah "deployed" to East Beirut, I was doing some shopping. I live on the border of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mkhail and went to Sassine and ABC that day (all of which are Christian neighborhoods), and rest assured, there were no Hezbollah militants, much less armed ones, to be seen anywhere.  Had what he described been true, there would most likely have been a civil war, or at the very least isolated street fighting. As it was, not only was there no fighting, but not a single journalist in Beirut, foreign or Lebanese, picked up on Hezbollah's alleged "show of force." There's a very simple reason for this: it never happened. If Hezbollah were to deploy a dozen armed militants to Achrafieh, that would be crossing one of Lebanon's red lines. Saying that there were 4,000-5,000 gunmen here is beyond farfetched; it's in the realm of the outlandishly comic. 

I've had neither the time, nor the stomach, to wade through all of this guy's Lebanon "coverage," but the few pieces I've opened are risible in their ridiculousness. Here's another example:

Hezbollah are not the only terrorists operating here in Lebanon: There are also Al Qaeda affiliates like Fatah Al Islam (they were not totally wiped out at Nahr al Bared), as well as Jund al Sham (Soldiers of Damascus), Jundallah, Hamas, and — though few Americans are aware of this — operating elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Syrian border. These are just a few of the problem groups here: All operating under the auspices of Hezbollah.

Despite his mistranslation of "Sham," which in this context means Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) and not Damascus, this little excerpt is absurd in that it explicitly says that all of the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Palestinian camps, as well as Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are "operating under the auspices of Hezbollah." First of all, no one knows who is connected to the various groups operating in the Palestinian camps. And second of all, anyone who believes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is "under the auspices" of Hezbollah, and not the other way around, obviously knows nothing about either organization.

Smith's scattergun approach to various armed groups in Lebanon is symptomatic of a larger, mostly American, approach to the Middle East, where al-Qaeda equals Hezbollah equals Hamas equals al Qaeda in Iraq equals Jund al-Sham ,etc. This is the kind of thinking that led most Americans to believe that Baghdad had something to do with 9/11 and leaves the defenders of the free world (see also: Reyes and Sarkozy) incapable of distinguishing between Sunnis and Shi'a.

Another fun read is this post, in which Smith brags about doing "reconnaissance" in the Dahiye, the suburbs where Hezbollah is based in Beirut. Or rather this would be funny if it were a satire and I were reading it to friends in Beirut. This guy seems to think that he's in a Chuck Norris movie, which would be fine except for a couple of things. First, this "journalism," in which Smith writes about spying on Hezbollah for pro-Government groups not only makes him sound like a macho asshole, it also casts a shadow of doubt on legitimate journalism done by actual reporters in a country where foreign correspondents are already viewed with an air of suspicion. Second, it makes Beirut sound like a war zone, which it's clearly not.

And then there's this gem. According to Smith, there were "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen — positioned between the parliament and the Serail." As it happens, I've spent a fair amount of time downtown, and this is not the first time I've written about Americans talking about the sit-in protest without knowing what they're talking about. For the last few months, it's been hard to find more than a couple of dozen people at the protest, much less hundreds of armed militants. I have never, I repeat: never, seen any Hezbollah weapons downtown. They may have them down there, but if they do, they're hidden so well that someone who regularly strolls through the camp would not see them. To suggest that he surprised 200 armed militants out in the open while driving over the bridge that connects East and West Beirut is ridiculous.   

Finally, Jack Bauer -- I mean W. Thomas Smith Jr. -- gives us a post from an "undisclosed neighborhood":

Lebanon is extremely dangerous for Americans right now. In fact, some top officials within the 1559 Committee (essentially the heart and soul of the Cedars Revolution ... for a free Lebanon) believe some sort of dramatic terrorist event is going to take place here in Lebanon between now and mid-October. This is not a gut feeling, but a calculation based on intelligence analysis and chatter from the street.

Tony Nissi, the 1559 Committee chief here in Beirut (whom you'll recall from previous entries), has reason to believe Hezbollah knows who I am. So I am deliberately not staying in hotels: Instead, I'm spending nights in friends' houses — safe houses if you will — and always with bodyguards.

This one is the funniest of the bunch. If there are only half of the number of Americans in Lebanon now as there were during the July war, there'd still be over 10,000 Americans here, myself included. Beirut is decidedly not unsafe for Americans, unless of course they decide to go play G.I. Joe by arming themselves and doing "reconnaissance." But even if Smith were to get picked up by Hezbollah or the Army for spying (which is basically what he claims he's doing), they'd immediately recognize him for the  buffoon that he plainly is. He sounds more like a hapless character out of a Harry Mathews novel than an actual spy, or, God forbid, a journalist.

I could go on for pages about the factual inaccuracy of Smith's reports, but it would just be more of the same. It's amazing to me that NRO published any of Smith's "reports." They are so obviously bullshit that someone must have been asleep at the wheel over there. One of my pet peeves is the writing of partisan hacks who only travel for rhetorical flair, and Smith seems to be more of the same. The difference is that his case is so egregious that he's getting called out on it. There are well respected journalists here in Lebanon and elsewhere who not only know the country intimately but are good writers to boot. Anthony Shadid, Annia Ciezadlo and Mohamad Bazzi are only a few of the names that come to mind. So why is there a need to send Chuck Norris wannabe hacks like Smith who evidently don't know anything about the countries they're ostensibly covering? If NRO wants coverage of Lebanon, there's no dearth of talent already here in Beirut. Insisting on publishing Smith's fabrications in order to toe an ideological line that pays no heed of Lebanon's complex politics only makes NRO look stupid and dishonest.

If you're interested in NRO's response to similar allegations, you can see that here and here.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez, online editor of the National Review has another statement up about Smith (emphasis mine):

With regard to the two posts in question, it is my belief, based on an investigation in which NRO discussed the matter with three independent sources who live and work in Lebanon (as well as other experts in the area), that Smith was probably either spun by his sources or confused about what he saw.

...the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn't always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas." While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That's why we're revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt.

So let me get this straight. Lopez publishes Smith's ridiculous posts that betray a fundamental ignorance of Lebanon and the political situation here, posts which were either made up entirely or fed to him by pro-Government forces, and the problem here is the "Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate."

Wow. I almost don't even know where to start with this one. Maybe she should just throw in another couple of lines about America's mission civilisatrice and the white man's burden and be done with it.

In any case, someone should send her message to Tom Harb, a rabid March 14 supporter in the US, who's supporting Smith wholeheartedly (from Florida, no less) and accusing all of the journalists who have contradicted Smith of being on the Hezbollah payroll. Someone should remind him that his neo-conservative comrades in arms at NRO and elsewhere are fair weather friends to whom, at the end of the day, a wog is a wog, regardless of his political usefulness.

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.