Corporate Media Is Justifying Israel's Assault On Lebanon

The corporate media is hard at work to demonize Hezbollah and encourage an all-out onsalught in Lebanon.

By Gregory Shupak, FAIR

Corporate media’s handling of the US-supported Israeli assault on Lebanon has, like all war propaganda, entailed a campaign to demonize the purported bad guys—Hezbollah, in this case. The coverage of the US/Israeli assault on Lebanon has also evinced a casual disregard for Lebanese lives, and often an outright zest for killing the country’s people.

Denouncing Hezbollah as a terrorist outfit is pervasive in corporate punditry. A Wall Street Journal editorial (9/25/24) called the group “terrorists” three times, as in, “One lesson of October 7 is that Israel can’t let terrorists build up armies.”

Another Journal editorial (9/29/24) used the T-word twice before asserting that Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader Israel recently assassinated, was “a terrorist whose killers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Europeans.” The claim that Hezbollah is liable for killing “thousands of Americans and Europeans” is extraordinary, but the authors don’t make clear who or what they’re talking about, let alone offer any evidence to support their claim.

In the New York Times (9/25/24), columnist Bret Stephens said Hezbollah is a “terrorist militia” and a “terrorist group” that “terrorizes its neighborhood.”

Max Boot of the Washington Post (9/26/24, 9/28/24) called Nasrallah a “terrorist kingpin” and referred to Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization” three times. “It would be nice to think the Lebanese government could now disarm Hezbollah and end its reign of terror,” he mused, describing the organization as “one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups.”

Two decades out from 9/11, it should be clear to honest observers that the term “terrorism” is politicized to the point of uselessness. The US, Canada and other Western states have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but there is no universally applied objective measure of whether a given group deserves that label, nor is there a neutral body that decides who is and is not a terrorist. The US put Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress on a terror list in 1988, and Mandela’s name was not removed until 2008 (NBC, 12/7/13).