IT'S bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance. Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof -- leaving not even a scorch mark. But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists.
It is this refusal to admit that suggests there was an agenda, after all, to so much of the hysterical reporting of the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah. No wonder Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer damned that coverage at a conference in Brisbane this week of Australian newspaper publishers: "What concerns me greatly is the evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon." Downer could have picked half a dozen examples of that dishonesty -- or of incompetence married to a bias. But few are as good as the Case of the Holey Ambulance.
It started on July 24, when Israel was already being accused by much of the Western media of carelessly killing Lebanese civilians. And it started with a cautious paragraph in a media release from the Lebanese Red Cross:"According to Lebanese Red Cross reports, two of its ambulances were struck by munitions, although both vehicles were clearly marked by the Red Cross emblem and flashing lights that were visible at a great distance. The incident happened while first-aid workers were transferring wounded patients from one ambulance to another." | Read the whole thing for a good laugh. Or a good tooth grit, depending on your mood... |
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