on CNN at the moment Anderson Cooper is reporting on how

[breakaleg]

difficult it is for Israel to put out all the fires from the Katushya rockets landing in Israel.

Not casualties, just bush fires from the rockets landing in the dirt and missing all targets.

Is there nothing more pressing to report on?

sorry, no link, it's on tv.

[aquart]

1. Sorry there aren't sufficient bodies.

Fires breaking out all over a desert nation are always safe.

[breakaleg]

3. unfortunately, there are plenty of deaths to report on...

and I think all of them take precedence over the fires.

[me b zola]

2. Actually I find it no coincidence that cnn placed CA in Israel

...and not in Lebanon. Anderson did some good reporting from the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina--the period of time/disaster that I have termed "KatrinaBush", Cooper totally advocated for the victims and did not take it easy on bushCo. I think that the producers were scared to have Cooper in Lebanon for more than a day.


Having a difficult time with the brush fires, eh? Might be a good tactic--Israel may have to divert their troops to fight the fires. Sounds like it could save lives on both sides of the fence.

[Karmakaze]

4. Are they REALLY missing all targets?

Or is the Israeli censorship not allowing you to know what targets were hit *cough*IDF emplacements*cough*?

Although we should not romanticise Hizbullah, equally we should not be quick to demonise it either: unless there is convincing evidence suggesting it has been firing on civilian targets. The problem is that Israel has been abusing very successfully its military censorship rules governing both its domestic media and visiting foreign journalists to prevent meaningful discussion of what Hizbullah has been trying to hit inside Israel.

I live in northern Israel in the Arab city of Nazareth. A week into the war we were hit by Hizbullah rockets that killed two young brothers. The attack, it was widely claimed, was proof either that Hizbullah was indiscriminately targeting civilians (so indiscriminately, the argument went, that it was hitting fellow Arabs) or that the Shiite militia was so committed to a fanatical war against the Judeo-Christian world that it was happy to kill Nazareth's Christian Arabs too. The latter claim could be easily dismissed: it depended both on a "clash of civilisations" philosophy not shared by Hizbullah and on the mistaken assumption that Nazareth is a Christian city, when in fact, as is well-known to Hizbullah, Nazareth has a convincing Muslim majority.

But to anyone living in Nazareth, it was clear the rocket attack on the city was not indiscriminate either. It was a mistake -- something Nasrallah quickly confirmed in one of his televised speeches. The real target of the strike was known to Nazarenes: close by the city are a military weapons factory and a large military camp. Hizbullah knows the locations of these military targets because this year, as was widely reported in the Israeli media at the time, it managed to fly an unmanned drone over the Galilee photographing the area in detail -- employing the same spying techniques used for many years by Israel against Lebanon.

Jonathan Cook: War of Media Deception