Death Toll Rises in Mideast Fight:
The deadliest day yet in the deepening two-front Middle East crisis claimed more than 70 lives on Wednesday in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and northern Israel, with no immediate cease-fire in sight.Mouwad-Erlanger/NYTimes 19.Jul.06
"The country has been torn to shreds," a desperate Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, said at a meeting he had called of foreign diplomats, including the American ambassador.
"Is this the price we pay for aspiring to build our democratic institutions?" he asked in a bitter and emotional speech. "Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?"
Here in the Lebanese capital, bombs and rockets fell throughout the day. Israeli military officials said a wave of aircraft had dropped 23 tons of explosives on a suspected Hezbollah bunker in the south. The attack appeared to be part of the ongoing effort to kill Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah said no members had been hurt in the attack.
In the first land combat in Lebanon during the conflict, two Israeli soldiers were killed and nine wounded when they were set upon by Hezbollah guerrillas near Naqura. A tank that came to rescue them met with fierce shelling.
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The only people that died in those paragraphs in the Times are Israeli soldiers.
Those are the first five paragraphs of a story headlined "Death Toll Rises in Mideast Fight".
"Death toll" and "Mideast fight" are completely neutral terms.
Israel is bombing Lebanon, Lebanon is not bombing Israel.
Israel is invading Lebanon, Lebanon is not invading Israel.
"A tank that came to rescue them..."
About 300 Lebanese, most of them civilians, have been killed in the violence. Thirty Israelis, including 15 civilians, have also been killed.That's the BBC.
Here's Jonathan Cook at electronic Lebanon on the BBC's coverage of the war crimes that have caused those deaths, relative to its coverage of the evacuation of foreign nationals:
If anyone doubted the racism of our Western media, here it was proudly on display. The BBC apparently considers their Beirut reporter's first duty to find out what meals HMS Gloucester's chef will be preparing for the evacuees. Lebanese and Palestinian civilians die unnoticed by the Western media (though not by the Arab channels) while we learn of onboard sleeping arrangements on the ship bound for Cyprus.Electronic Lebanon
Did we really need to hear a lengthy live speech from the commander of HMS Gloucester telling us how "delighted" he was to be in Beirut? With the long minutes of rolling news to fill this might have been justified had the other minutes been stuffed with reports from the areas where civilians are dying by the dozen each day. But such reports are the mean filling in the thick sandwich of the main story of the evacuees.
In the 4pm GMT broadcast, I watched 45 mins of coverage, most of it dedicated to "live" footage of the British warship's arrival and the relieved faces of the Brits about to leave.
Even so, the BBC still managed to squeeze in other bits of reporting in the lulls in the drama of evacuation. At different points there was a interview from Tel Aviv with former Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Beilin and a live link-up between Ben Brown and Lyse Doucet in Haifa. She informed us of the "barrage" of 50 Katyushas that had landed on northern Israel that day, killing one man. Supportively, Ben Brown, added that there was "shock" at the death and destruction spread by Hizbullah's rockets and opined that what the Israeli army was "really after" was Hizbullah's long-range missiles.
So we had the BBC in Haifa and Beirut speaking with one voice - that of Israel.
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Jeffrey Feltman is the US Ambassador to Lebanon
Jeffrey Feltman was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon on July 22, 2004 and took up his duties there on August 20, 2004.
Before becoming Ambassador to Lebanon, Mr. Feltman volunteered to serve at the Coalition Provisional Authority office in Irbil, Iraq, from January-April 2004. Prior to his work in Iraq, his most recent assignment was at the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem, where he served first as Deputy (August 2001-November 2002) and then as Acting Principal Officer (November 2002-December 2003).
Mr. Feltman joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1986, serving his first tour as consular officer in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He has spent much of his career dealing with Eastern Europe and the Near East. He served in Embassy Tel Aviv as Ambassador Indyk's Special Assistant on Peace Process issues (2000-2001). Before that, from 1998-2000, Mr. Feltman served as Chief of the Political and Economic Section at the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia. He served in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv from 1995 to 1998, covering economic issues in the Gaza Strip.
