Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell has a history of anti-Israel cartoons. Appearing in the paper’s 22 November edition, Bell’s take on the assassination of Lebanese politician Pierre Gemayel is simply factually and intellectually wrong.
Employing a false moral equivalence, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is pictured in the same company as Syrian President Bashar Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on top of a Lebanese flag.
Unlike Olmert, however, Assad and Ahmadinejad head non-democratic radical regimes that sponsor and fund terrorist organisations, while Iran regularly expresses its desire to see Israel wiped off the map and continues in its pursuit of nuclear weapons in order to carry out its genocidal threat.
The explicit implication that Olmert and Israel are, like the Syrians and Iranians, involved in destabilising Lebanon’s delicate political structure is false for a number of reasons:
- Israel had no involvement in the Gemayel assassination – a crime that is already being blamed on the hand of Syria.
- Israel has no reason or desire to see the fall of the current Western-oriented Lebanese government of Fouad Siniora, which is strongly backed by Britain, the US, EU and moderate Arab states. Israel has openly stated that the recent conflict was not aimed at the Lebanese state or people but against the Hezbollah terrorist organisation that operated as a state within a state, supported and armed by Syria and Iran.
- Syria and Iran are actively involved in the internal power struggle taking place in Lebanon through the proxies of Hezbollah and other pro-Syria parties. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Southern Lebanon in 2000 in the hope that it would never have to return. Syria, on the other hand, was forced, in 2005, to end its 29 year occupation of Lebanon by public outrage over the assassination of Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri, widely thought to have been carried out by Syria. Bashar Assad still wishes to regain his lost influence in Lebanon and is actively working to achieve this.
- Israel’s recent involvement in Lebanon was not out of choice but the result of an unprovoked Hezbollah border attack, which left 8 Israeli soldiers dead and two, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, kidnapped and still held hostage in Lebanon. Despite the call of UN Resolution 1701, Hezbollah shows no signs of disarming or returning the kidnapped soldiers.
HonestReporting UK is certainly not opposed to satirical cartoons. We do, however, question why the Guardian and Steve Bell found it necessary to include Israel in the complicated and violent web of Lebanese politics in the aftermath of Gemayel’s bloody end.
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AARONOVITCH: RECOMMENDED READING
Voices of common sense in the media are all too rare, so we are glad to highlight opinion pieces that deserve a wider audience. David Aaronovitch’s column in the Times on 21 November, examining the invective and insinuation surrounding the Palestinian issue is recommended reading:
I am not a “staunch defender of Israel” any more than I am a staunch defender of Poland, and rather less than I am a staunch defender of Spain. Nor, Mr Ingrams, for all your Boratian insinuation, do I write what I do because my secular father was born Jewish and chose to keep the name and therefore I feel I have a mystical blood bond with my racial family. My problem is that I am discovering that those who are pretending to be “friends” of the Palestinians are busily constructing the notion that Israel is the sole cause of the problems of the Middle East. And I now realise the extent to which they have poisoned the debate in Britain, especially among the young.
Click here to read the full article.
to media bias.
