Wednesday, August 16. 2006
By Kevin O'Brien (Cleveland Plain Dealer) The Propaganda Value of Death
The child is dead.
Even had it not been covered with the light gray dust of pulverized concrete, the dark gray pallor of death would have been clear to see.
It's hard to imagine anything more soul-wrenching than the death of a child. It's a tragedy that resonates with almost everyone. We find ourselves thinking of people we've known who died young. We look back over our own lives, and reflect on all of the wonderful things we've experienced that some poor, lost little one never will. We think of our own kids, and how terrible it would be to lose one of them. We think of the parents and can't help putting ourselves in their place.
The rubble that the child was pulled from was a building that once stood in Qana, Lebanon, a city that Israel's air force has pounded repeatedly over the last month, trying to clean out an infestation of Hezbollah rocket launchers that have rained destruction on Israel.
Where were this child's parents?
Maybe they're dead, too. Maybe they were just deeper under the rubble than the child was. Maybe the rescuers just hadn't gotten to them yet. And in any case, dead adults are not nearly as - believe me, this word is carefully chosen - photogenic as dead children.
And this, the photos and the video on the Internet make abundantly clear, was a photo op.
Perhaps it would be better if, indeed, this child's parents are dead. If they're alive, they should be not only tormented with grief but consumed by fury that their child has become a trophy when the cameras are rolling, and a mere prop on Hezbollah's stage - a piece of useful meat - when the cameras are off.
The most powerful, most destructive weapon Hezbollah wields is not a rocket launcher or even the more powerful and accurate missiles supplied by Syria and Iran. The "big gun" in this war is the camera.
For a behind-the-scenes look at how Hezbollah's stage managers and directors do their work, check out http://youtube.com/watch?v=4vPAkc5CLgc and http:%%cat%%euref%%endcat%%erendum.blogspot .com/2006/08/qana-directors-cut.html .
Fortunately, we have regular news media people there, in the war zone, to give us an unbiased, unvarnished measure of the truth.
Unless, of course, they should happen to be biased, too. Like the photographer whose services Reuters is no longer using, since he was found to be doctoring his photos to make a bad situation in Lebanon look even worse.
When the truce was called the other day in southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah's rockets and Israel's aircraft stood down, the armchair scorekeepers here on these relatively safe shores declared that Israel hadn't won the war on the ground and had been decisively defeated in the airwaves.
True on both counts.
So now what?
What will happen when - if it hasn't already happened by the time you read this - Hezbollah decides it has re-armed and reorganized sufficiently that it doesn't need a truce anymore?
Israel will once again be under attack. Once again, it will respond in the only way a government can when its citizens are facing annihilation. That response will rain down on Lebanese neighborhoods where Hezbollah hides behind the innocent, the ignorant and the complicit. And there will be more dead children.
How will they be mourned? How will they be used?
Israel's adversaries, who are also our adversaries, know us so much better than we know them. They understand that well-presented footage of innocents won't change any minds in Israel, where innocents are dying, too - and as primary targets rather than collateral damage.
But they know that in Europe and the United States, where most people haven't figured out that we're fighting for our lives every bit as much as the Israelis, such scenes are powerful. But we need to think this all the way through. That child in Lebanon was where some Israeli pilot hoped he wouldn't be. And right where Hezbollah wanted him.
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