Judging from Western coverage of the fighting in Lebanon, YNet News columnist Sever Plocker says the media hasn’t learned all the lessons from Jenin:
The fairytale about the “Jenin massacre” may have died, but were lessons learned? Some were. The European media, especially the electronic media, has given some expression to the suffering of Israeli civilians under attack. It has not (usually) supported Hizbullah.
But in other cases, no lessons were learned from the blood libel of the Jenin massacre. During the second week of fighting, Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon is currently being portrayed as the total destruction of Lebanon, of essential civilian infrastructure, as a human tragedy on the level of the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia.
Reading reports from left-leaning field reporters, one gets a picture that Beirut has been destroyed at least as badly as Dresden was during the Second World War. Foreign television channels use one section of footage over and over, showing the destruction of one neighborhood in south Beirut, to “show” what has happened throughout the city….
As of this writing, some 360 Lebanese have been killed by Israeli military action, about half of them Hizbullah fighters (as opposed to official Lebanese statistics). After two weeks of bombing, these numbers tell the story of low-level war. There is no “destruction of Lebanon,” just like there was no “Jenin massacre.”
