Tag: israel/palestine

Hizbullah’s psy-ops in Israel?

Hossam beat me to posting about the great BBC article on Israeli psy-ops (the stuff about Al Manar’s satellite feed being hacked is especially fascinating, since they are all Arab or Iranian owned), but I will beat him at his own game:

Dozens of Israeli customers of the Orange cellular service provider received unexpected SMS messages on their phones Wednesday evening, with the English message:

“Now Now Now…Go out from your home Hizballah willing shelling of the area, Israel Government Cheating you And refuse recognition Defeat.”

It was not yet clear whether Hizbullah operatives were in fact behind the messages of intimidation, or whether the messages were no more than a joke in poor taste by other network subscribers.

. . .

Rani Rahav, a spokesperson for Orange, responded that the text messages were coming from a small service provider “somewhere out there in the Pacific Ocean. We are working right now to block the provider from transmitting further messages to Orange customers.”

This will be remembered in Israel as “the Micronesian betrayal.”

Sadr to send Hizbullah more troops from Iraq?

Does anyone know whether this has any credibility?

A senior member of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Iraqi Shi’ite militia, the Mahdi Army, says the group is forming a squadron of up to 1,500 elite fighters to go to Lebanon.
The plan reflects the potential of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah to strengthen radical elements in Iraq and neighboring countries and to draw other regional players into the Lebanon conflict.
“We are choosing the men right now,” said Abu Mujtaba, who works in the loosely organized following of radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. “We are preparing the right men for the job.”

It is the Washington Times after all…

Misr Digital on resistance week

Wael Abbass of MisrDigital has posted a fantastic virtual coverage of solidarity demos in Cairo accross last week. As always, Wael takes good pix and videos of the protests, clashes, portraits of security officials present when abuses happen. The most interesting video this time was one taken of a CSF conscript mumbling “Amen” as pro-resistance demonstrators were praying for Israel’s and America’s defeat.

Wael also said his blog has been recently coming under attacks from Israeli hackers, so he sent them the following post card…

Thousands demonstrate in support of resistance

Thousands of Muslim Brothers activists took part in demos following Fri prayers today in Giza and Shoubra.
Around five thousands supporters of Egypt’s largest Islamist opposition group prayed and demonstrated in front of Istiqama mosque in Giza, according to Photographer Nasser Nouri. The protestors were surrounded by CSF, who banned them from marching to the nearby Israeli embassy, but no arrests were reported.
In el-Khazendar mosque in Shoubra, around a thousand MB supporters, half of them children, demonstrated for an hour after the Friday prayers, according to a photographer present in the scene. The mosque was surrounded by CSF, who made sure the demo did not turn into a march. Ten children were detained by security, according to Ikhwan Web.

(You can find a slideshow of the two demos here.)

Here’s a good dpa roundup by Jano Charbel of the protests in (the above-mentioned) Giza, and another two in Al-Azhar Mosque and Mansoura province. Jano puts the number of Giza demonstrators at less than what Nasser Nouri said, however. Continue reading Thousands demonstrate in support of resistance

Israeli psy-ops in Lebanon

The BBC ran a report on the current Israeli psyops in Southern Lebanon…

Israel steps up “psy-ops” in Lebanon
By Peter Feuilherade
BBC Monitoring

From mass targeting of mobile phones with voice and text messages to old-fashioned radio broadcasts warning of imminent attacks, Israel is deploying a range of old and new technologies in Lebanon as part of the psychological operations (“psyops”) campaign supplementing its military attacks.

According to US and UK media outlets, Israel has reactivated a radio station to broadcast messages urging residents of southern Lebanon to evacuate the region.

Some reports have named the station as the Voice of the South.

Continue reading Israeli psy-ops in Lebanon

The war on Lebanon and the battle for oil

I received this interesting article form my friend Ryan O’Kane, a postgraduate historian in London, who specializes in the strategic framework behind US foreign interventions. The article, followed by Ryan’s comment, exposes some facts that can in part explain the current Israeli war on Lebanon, with some more far-reaching contribution to Rice’s recently announced (Not-That)-New-Middle-East plan.

The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil
by Michel Chossudovsky
July 26, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca

“Is there a relationship between the bombing of Lebanon and the inauguration of the World’s largest strategic pipeline, which will channel more a million barrels of oil a day to Western markets?

Virtually unnoticed, the inauguration of the Ceyhan-Tblisi-Baku (BTC) oil pipeline, which links the Caspian Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean, took place on the 13th of July, at the very outset of the Israeli sponsored bombings of Lebanon…

The BTC pipeline totally bypasses the territory of the Russian Federation. It transits through the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Georgia, both of which have become US “protectorates”, firmly integrated into a military alliance with the US and NATO. Moreover, both Azerbaijan and Georgia have longstanding military cooperation agreements with Israel. In 2005, Georgian companies received some $24 million in military contracts funded out of U.S. military assistance to Israel under the so-called ‘Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program’….

The bombing of Lebanon is part of a carefully planned and coordinated military road map. The extension of the war into Syria and Iran has already been contemplated by US and Israeli military planners. This broader military agenda is intimately related to strategic oil and oil pipelines. It is supported by the Western oil giants which control the pipeline corridors. In the context of the war on Lebanon, it seeks Israeli territorial control over the East Mediterranean coastline.�

Continue reading The war on Lebanon and the battle for oil

‘Shut up, you barefaced liar’

Here’s an article from Haaretz on the Arab journalists’ experiences in interviewing “the Israeli.� The interviewed journalists talk of mixed feelings between the need to be “professional� and letting out one’s own feelings about the subject he/she is covering. There is also the constant pressure from the viewers who expect from (and usually won’t accept anything but) the Arab journalist to “embarrass� and be critical of Israeli interviewees.

‘Shut up, you barefaced liar’
By Zvi Bar’el

“The war against Lebanon caught us completely unprepared,” an editor on Jordan’s television station told Haaretz. “All of us were focused on what was happening in Palestine or Iraq. I know that the majority of Arab stations, except for news channels like Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya didn’t even have permanent correspondents in Lebanon after the completion of the Syrian withdrawal, and after the elections in May-June 2005.

“Lebanon wasn’t an object of interest. And then all of a sudden – war. How are we supposed to relate to it? How are we supposed to define Hezbollah? What is the official line we are supposed to take on the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers? What vocabulary should we be using? Everything needed to be rethought. Even the system to which we answer didn’t quite know how to deal with it.” Yet now, even after a week and a half of warfare, no one on the Jordanian station seems too troubled by the fighting. The same is the case on the Libyan and Moroccan networks, and most especially so on the Iraqi network. After all, Iraq has a large daily dose of death, with numbers several times higher than those in Lebanon.

This war has also rekindled the question of what format the reporter’s interviews should take, and primarily how to relate to Israeli interviewees.

Continue reading ‘Shut up, you barefaced liar’

CPJ: Israel targeting TV crews in South Lebanon

Just got this:

LEBANON: TV crews allege targeting by Israeli warplanes in the south

New York, July 27, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern today over allegations by several television crews that Israeli warplanes had attacked them, effectively shutting down live television coverage from southeast Lebanon.

Crews from four Arab television stations told CPJ that Israeli aircraft fired missiles within 80 yards (75 meters) of them on July 22 to prevent them from covering the effects of Israel’s bombardment of the area around the town of Khiam, in the eastern sector of the Israel-Lebanon border

“Israeli aircraft targeted in an air raid TV crews, especially Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and Al-Manar,”said Ghassan Benjeddou, Al-Jazeera’s Lebanon bureau chief. “It’s a miracle that our crew survived the attack,” he told CPJ.

Continue reading CPJ: Israel targeting TV crews in South Lebanon