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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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 Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 7:15 pm Post subject: Israelis and Lebanese chatting during the war |
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This is an interesting article about how people from the two sides would chat and post online while their respective countries (well, Hezbollah's not a country but whatever) tried to blow each other up.
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Blogging Under The Radar
As War Raged, Lebanese and Israelis Found Common Ground
By Delphine Schrank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 28, 2006; Page C01
The fragile cease-fire still holds, but for wary Lebanese and Israelis the barrage of noise continues -- in cyberspace. By provoking a trade in words, the 33-day war in Lebanon didn't just wreak death and destruction. It also helped knock down a wall of silence.
"I think it's the start of something. In a way, it's a revolution," said Mustapha Hamoui, the blogger behind Beirut Spring. "Communication is never bad. It's better to tell someone, 'I hate you.' Then you have to ask, 'Why do you hate?' Then you have to have a conversation."
The Lebanese government forbids its citizens contact with Israelis. But keeping a lid on the Internet is a bit like trying to shovel sand with a sieve. And in the midst of war, scouring online for views from the other side has been one way for Lebanese and Israelis to alleviate the terrible sense of the impotence of standing by as their countries bled. Thousands of people, often posting in English, seem compelled to try to make some sense of the chaos -- or, through personal narratives, to help debunk stereotypes and misperceptions.
"Bloggers from both sides of the border . . . have been providing live updates, commenting on one another's blogs and sometimes linking to posts by bloggers on the other side of the border," wrote Lisa Goldman, a Canadian-Israeli blogger and journalist, on her site On the Face six days into the war. "Will this turn out to be the first time that residents of 'enemy' countries engaged in an ongoing conversation while missiles were falling?"
The war, paradoxically, provided the common ground, and blogging -- a roughly three-year-old medium unavailable in previous conflicts -- offered the space for it.
"After more than four weeks (seasoned with a couple of short home leaves of a few hours each), my dear man is back home!!!" wrote Anat El Hashahar, a 34-year-old mother of two and the blogger behind Israeli Mom, which she started last month soon after her husband was called up to his reserve post in the Israel Defense Forces. "He surprised us this morning and just showed up at the door, looking extremely tired, his face covered with stubble, but very very happy to see us," she wrote of her husband's return to their home in Pardes Hana, northern Israel.
"Hey, wanna try something funny?" answered Jean Souc, a Lebanese 25-year-old who works for the Red Cross in Paris. "let's test his military reflexes. tell him you are speaking with a lebanese on the computer! make sure you empty his rifle from bullets before, if you love your screen. [smiley face] After you tell him that, you will experience fist-hand [sic] military reflexes. he'll need time to loose them [sic]."
Souc and El Hashahar are new friends. Eager to seek a Lebanese and Arab perspective, El Hashahar had actively sought out and commented on Lebanese sites, generating a regular correspondence with several people from Australia to Iran, and enough trust with Souc and another Lebanese man to invite them to visit her and her family in Israel, she said in a phone interview from Pardes Hana.
"It's been very refreshing for me to talk to them," said El Hashahar, which means "toward the dawn" in Hebrew. "I wasn't that familiar with Lebanese people, their history or politics."
For his part, Souc surfed only the Lebanese blogosphere "to get an idea about street opinion" when the conflict erupted. But, he said in an e-mail, he was "hit by the intense presence of Israeli people commenting on those Lebanese blogs." With that in mind, he started his own space, The Middle East Exception, inviting Israelis to comment on how they perceived Lebanese.
It generated a thread of 92 comments, with 32 Israelis offering long responses that veer from accusatory to apologetic. At their suggestion, Souc invited Lebanese to post on how they perceived Israelis.
"Actually before this, the Israeli society was a big question mark for me," Souc said in an e-mail. "This blog helped me assert a little bit more the idea that all the fuss and all the propaganda in the Middle East are really plain lies when it comes to the 'historical animosity,' or 'the bad Jews' or 'the deadly Arabs.' "
This is a common theme.
"I had little idea about Lebanon until I started checking their blogs," said Oskar Svadkovsky, 36, a Russian-born Israeli in Tel Aviv who hosts a blog that parodies the Arab press. He posted on Souc's blog and, like El Hashahar, struck up enough of a friendship with Souc to invite him to Israel. "Lebanon is a very complex country. Actually it's not complex, it's just a total mess. Nobody, including the Lebanese themselves, understands what's going on there as far as I can see. We are all guessing."
It is, though, hardly a great cyber peace-fest; angry rants are as likely to advance civilized dialogue as graffiti scrawled on a wall. Many comments generate a frenzy of back-and-forth vitriol. Others get deleted entirely, and bloggers such a Souc or Hamoui say they censor a lot of venomous commentary from both sides.
But shrill or reasoned in tone, the surge in comments still astounds Hamoui. "For myself, I'm 28 and I've never had communication with Israelis" with a single exception, he said by phone from Eheen, in the mountains of northern Lebanon. "Now I'm personally in e-mail contact with several." His site's stat tracker, he said, showed a sevenfold increase in his audience during the war to about 4,000 individual views per day, with 32 percent of readers from within Israel. Even after the cease-fire, the tide doesn't appear to be abating.
"We Israelis moved against our own people in order to withdraw from Gaza. Why won't the Lebanese people move against their own people to kick out Hezbullah from Southern Lebanon??" asked Dan K on Beirut Spring in a post-cease-fire thread of comments that includes some heavy Israel-bashing. He added a link to his own bilingual English-Hebrew blog. "I love your blogs. But you gotta stop blaming your government in egnlish [sic] and take your movement to the streets in Arabic. And coordinate with each other. Like kicking out Syria. If you don't like your government, make marches, make protests."
Charles Chuman, the 24-year-old co-blogger of the Lebanese Political Journal, has had much the same experience. Since the war started, he said, he's received well over a thousand messages to his blogger e-mail address, many of them personal e-mails from Israelis. "It's overwhelming the amount that people are contacting me as I try to establish a new life for myself. I don't even have a place of my own yet," he said from Chicago, shortly after evacuating Beirut in mid-conflict.
"You do get extremes of positions on either side, but what has been surprising and recent is the number of Israeli bloggers who are reaching out to the Lebanese blogs and putting comments there," said the Lebanese host of blog-aggregator Open Lebanon, who tracks more than 100 blogs a day in real time. (He asked to remain anonymous, citing conflicts of interest with his public profile at a large global firm.) "The majority of them could be classified as conciliatory. It is obvious Israelis will not favor a Hezbollah win, but would rather see a moderate, modern, democratic, strong type of government in Lebanon, so they gently 'push' the Lebanese bloggers towards these directions."
English is a convenient lingua franca. The Lebanese blogosphere, drawing from a trilingual Arabic-, French- and English-speaking population, is chiefly English. So when the war broke out, many Hebrew-language bloggers switched to English in a deliberate attempt to reach across the border, according to Goldman, who provides a regular roundup of the Israeli blogosphere for global blog aggregator Global Voices Online.
Many bloggers are students, work in technology, like El Hashahar and Svadkovsky, or are expatriates, like Souc. Hamoui, a graphic designer and business executive, studied at the American University of Beirut. Chuman and Goldman studied in U.S. colleges.
Underrepresented are outright supporters of the Shiite militia Hezbollah, who draw from Lebanon's mainly Arabic-speaking Shiite population.
"If social revolutions are led by elites, then I'll accept that," said Goldman.
Beirut Spring and Lebanese Political Journal were founded among a first wave of blogs in the midst of the Cedar Revolution, the youth-infused political ferment that followed the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005. With hundreds of new blogs springing up since July, the war with Israel has proved itself to be the second wave in the development of a politically cacophonous alternate media space for many young, tech-savvy Lebanese, at home and abroad.
Chuman, the Beirut man who fled for Chicago, had sampled the Israeli blogosphere in April and found it a nuanced and informed contrast to what he could glean from traditional news outlets. "The lack of news about Israel -- not an unimportant country in the region -- is astounding," wrote the political consultant, under his then-nom-de-Web, Lebanon Profile. "Not knowing about 'them' is the worst crime we can commit. It invalidates them as humans, as if they don't even matter. They are Stalin's faceless enemy, the rabid dog, the evil blood suckers whom it is righteous to kill. Our papers definitely need to start covering more than major political events in Israel."
Several Israeli bloggers contacted him. "It was around the time of Holocaust Remembrance Day and memorials for soldiers and I was learning a lot. I'd never read that before. A lot of people were touched by what I wrote, and we developed quite a community," he said.
Over the next few weeks, a fragile community of a handful of Lebanese and Israeli bloggers sprang up. "We came to realize how alike we were culturally, as secularized, westernized residents of Beirut and Tel Aviv," Goldman, the Canadian-Israeli journalist, said in a phone interview from Tel Aviv. She blogged about the surreal experience of a Beirut-Tel Aviv instant messaging chat with Chuman as he sat on the roof of his apartment building in Beirut and watched missiles from Israeli planes fall on his city. And Chuman wrote in his Lebanese Political Journal about the treacherous route out of Beirut through Damascus.
Virtual contact translated into real contact when Goldman met up separately with Chuman and the Perpetual Refugee, the pseudonym of a Dubai-based blogger and another member of their circle who had been visiting Israel semi-clandestinely for months in his capacity as regional manager of a major European food conglomerate, Goldman said. He subsequently wrote a series of what Goldman described as moving and conciliatory posts; then came war.
Perpetual Refugee now "writes that he does not want to rebuild the bridge with Israelis. He has closed the comments option and deleted the comments that were left in previous posts," Goldman said. "He and I are still in irregular contact, but our relationship is very fragile." The Perpetual Refugee declined to respond to requests for comment.
In the quickly evolving cyberspace of the Middle East, one dialogue abruptly ends, but another one bursts forth.
El Hashahar, the Israeli mother and soldier's wife, was sufficiently inspired by the contacts she's struck up across the Arab world to start an online Middle East forum. "It's just a shame," she said, "we had to have war to get to know each other." |
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Junior
Joined: 18 Nov 2005
Location: the eye
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| Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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UNIFIl troops were happy to post the latest Israeli troop movements and locations on their website every half hour. Detailed information, quickly viewed by hesbollah, included weapon type and number or troops.
Sadly for the Israelis, UNIFIL did no such service for them. Details of hesbollah fighters were vague at best and usually posted at least one day later.
They even lent their ambulances to hesbollah to use as rocket launchers.
Not surprising the Israelis blew up one of the "neutral" UN command posts then is it? |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 7:44 pm Post subject: |
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Sorry but I think that's total BS.
As UN Observers, that was their job- to monitor and report cease fire violations and incursions into Lebanon.
You can argue that the UN should have shut down and pulled out UNIFIL observers as soon as the shit started to hit the fan, but you can't say that they shouldn't have been following the orders given to them (they've been there and mandated to do just that since 1978) and that Israel was justified in targeting international observers.
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/unifil/mandate.html |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 7:49 pm Post subject: |
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| Countdown to someone doing the totally unoriginal and predictable thing by bringing up that Christmas soccer game in World War I. Oops. |
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Junior
Joined: 18 Nov 2005
Location: the eye
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| Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 7:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Bulsajo wrote: |
Sorry but I think that's total BS.
As UN Observers, that was their job- to monitor and report cease fire violations and incursions into Lebanon.
You can argue that the UN should have shut down and pulled out UNIFIL observers as soon as the *beep* started to hit the fan, but you can't say that they shouldn't have been following the orders given to them (they've been there and mandated to do just that since 1978) and that Israel was justified in targeting international observers.
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/unifil/mandate.html |
What did you do in the war, UNIFIL?
You broadcast Israeli troop movements.
by Lori Lowenthal Marcus, Weekly Standard
DURING THE RECENT month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. "peacekeeping" forces made a startling contribution: They openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon.
UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.
Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got. |
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Junior
Joined: 18 Nov 2005
Location: the eye
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| Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 7:56 pm Post subject: |
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The Red Cross Ambulance Incident
How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War
http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/
THIS never actually happened.! |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 7:59 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| What did you do in the war, UNIFIL? |
They didn't post about Hezbollah because they didn't want to- as you and the article posted imply- or because they couldn't?
Blame Hezbollah for not wearing uniforms, blending in with civilians, and concealing the location and movements of their weapons. |
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happeningthang
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
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| Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 1:12 am Post subject: |
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Great to see blogging and the internet being used to open up dialogues instead of virtual screeching, a la little green footballs, and atlas shrugs.
That's hard to argue with. I still don't believe the western media is biased in it's coverage. Lazy, opportunistic, and gullible, however, I don't have any trouble believing in... A real problem for a system that reports on other people's reports. |
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happeningthang
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
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| Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 1:45 am Post subject: |
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| Junior wrote: |
What did you do in the war, UNIFIL?
You broadcast Israeli troop movements.
by Lori Lowenthal Marcus, Weekly Standard
DURING THE RECENT month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. "peacekeeping" forces made a startling contribution: They openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon.
UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.
Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got. |
You present a dilemma Junior - do we believe the mainstream media or not??? Let's just call this article an editorial given there's reason to consider the author biased.
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Lori Lowenthal Marcus is president of the Zionist Organization of America, Greater Philadelphia District.
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http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/622bqwjn.asp?pg=2
Meanwhile, the section of your quote, highlighted in bold above, is an obivous lapse considering that the same post the author quotes has this piece of information...
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This morning, Hezbollah opened small arms fire at a UNIFIL convoy
consisting of two armored personnel carriers (APC) on the road between
Kunin and Bint Jubayl. |
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/unifil/pr09.pdf
It's on the same page!! |
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Junior
Joined: 18 Nov 2005
Location: the eye
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| Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 2:42 am Post subject: |
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[quote="happeningthang"]
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| You present a dilemma Junior - do we believe the mainstream media or not??? |
Well..we already have reuters admission of photoshopped images, and several other similar scandals. The thing in common with all of it has been to paint israel in a bad light.
lets have a look at some: Here, reuters photoshops a picture of an Israeli jet dropping a defensive flare to make it look like it is firing a missile at the innocent Lebanese.
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/184206.php
here is the series of photoshopped images with the emotive lies attached "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut�s suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj"
Blatantly misleading photos and captions.
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21956_Reuters_Doctoring_Photos_from_Beirut&only
Of course the famous red cross missile photo is clearly a fraud. What we have is the hole where the ventilator has been removed. It was enough to swing public opinion against Israel of course, not least launch Yu bum Suk into an angry tirade of posts.
The rusty ambulance was damaged long before the war even started. i don't think anyone can deny the clear evidence of this. Link again..
http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/
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| Let's just call this article an editorial given there's reason to consider the author biased. |
How about calling the original fantastic claim for what it was: an outright lie by a biased lebanese...?
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Lori Lowenthal Marcus is president of the Zionist Organization of America, Greater Philadelphia District.
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this is true, but do you honestly expect a hizbullah spokesman to have owned up and debunked the story?
[quote]
| Quote: |
Meanwhile, the section of your quote, highlighted in bold above, is an obivous lapse considering that the same post the author quotes has this piece of information...
| Quote: |
This morning, Hezbollah opened small arms fire at a UNIFIL convoy
consisting of two armored personnel carriers (APC) on the road between
Kunin and Bint Jubayl. |
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Well UNIFIL could not help but know when they were attacked could they? On the other hand, the exact locations of hesbollah fighters- dressed as civilians etc would be a bit more difficult to know.
lastly..and once again..we have the video proof of terrorists commandeering a UN ambulance for use as a rocket launcher on israel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmk3BEKziJU
pretty damning stuff isn't it??
Its fairly clear the media has been slanted against israel. We heard more about the poor lebanese innocents accidentally hit, than we did about israeli civilians deliberately targetted by hizbullah rockets.
But nothing new there. |
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happeningthang
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
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| Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 6:15 am Post subject: |
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That was a rhetorical question Junior. Like I said earlier,
THERE IS NO MEDIA CONSPIRACY AGAINST ISRAEL!!!
but the media is generally lazy, opinionated, and all to ready to run with a story before all the facts are in - see the John_Benet Karr hysteria - as an example.
Your flare theory is as enthralling (scarcasm) as the "smoke - MORE smoke" debacle the little green morons embarassed themselves with earlier. Cheap ploys and lazy journalism does not equal all encompassing media conspiracy. You, and your ilk, are sounding just like some radical Islamic theories with Illuminati, and Zionist cabals ruling the world. It's just ludicrous.
What the |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 6:33 am Post subject: |
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Junior,
Your continued unbalanced posts and avatar speak volumes.....
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| Its fairly clear the media has been slanted against israel. We heard more about the poor lebanese innocents accidentally hit, than we did about israeli civilians deliberately targetted by hizbullah rockets. |
This statement is wacko. Let me state in two ways, why.............
1. There is no conspiracy to portrait either Hizbollah or Israel in any "light" or "darkness". This is just fantasy. It comes out as you see it because a) your eyes see what they want to see
2.b) . much more damage, chaos inflicted in Lebanon by Israel than visaversa......just common sense the cameras and story would be more there, there was more killing, chaos, confusion, evil......
DD
PS> Great article Mithridates........i've posted before and post again, the portal I use for news/blogs about Lebanon http://www.openlebanon.org/
Just go to ALL BLOGS for the blogs. |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 5:16 pm Post subject: |
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I do enjoy Junior's take for one reason: it is such a perfect example of bias. Now, maybe jr. is Jewish and/or a Jew and/or Israeli, in which case he can be almost forgiven his one-sided diatribes. Personally, one reason I don't get excited about this issue is that there is no right or wrong side here.
That is, th enitre Middle East mess is a manufactured one to a large extent. The crving of the ME into European-chosen chunks was just plain stupid and intended to serve their interests, not those of the people that lived in the region. So...
There really is no solution. Let's see, the Jews settled there some millenia ago... kicking out the... Caananites? Whomever... So who was really first? Then you had the diaspora. Sad, but if you are gone for 2,000 years is it realistic to expect your place to be saved for you? No. So, was carving Israel out of the lives of those that had been there some, what, 40 generations?, just shouldn't have ever happened.
All this is just to set up my basic point: it's intractable. The chicken and the egg are forever going to be indistinguishable. Thus, JUST GET THE HELL OVER IT!!!!
For those not even part of the conflict to be taking sides is beyond bizarre. So, jr. what the hell do you accomplish with highly partisan, biased rhetoric? |
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Junior
Joined: 18 Nov 2005
Location: the eye
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| Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 8:56 pm Post subject: |
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| ddeubel wrote: |
much more damage, chaos inflicted in Lebanon by Israel than visaversa...... |
How is it then ,that Israel is generally agreed to have "lost the war"?? |
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Leslie Cheswyck
Joined: 31 May 2003
Location: University of Western Chile
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| Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 1:02 am Post subject: |
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| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| I do enjoy Junior's take for one reason: it is such a perfect example of bias. |
He doesn't have to be unbiased. It's called opinion; he offers his, backs it up. You offers yours, back it up... We call that "debate".
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