…and the Egyptian Sandmonkey translates:

Ok, he talked for 15 minutes. Here are the main points:

1) This is not our fault. The Israelis were planning this. I repeat, don’t blame us. We just got them to do this earlier than planned. We are actually blessed that this happend on an early stage. Imagine how bad it would’ve been then. We stopped that by having them attack us now! They way I see it, we did y’all a favor. You should thank us. Really!

…

3) What is important is dignity. Our country’s dignity, our people’s dignity, and our dignity. We won’t accept anything that affects our-the resistance- diginity. We have low self esteem as it is.

…

7) We have different parameters of winning. If they take over everything, but we still kill some of them, that means we are winning. Doesn’t matter if they have every village under their control, as long as we kill some of them every now and then, you should consider us winning.

Hold steadfastness. We know you are getting screwed right now, because of their plan that we hastened by kidnapping their soldiers, but you should keep steadfastness. You really have no choice and nowhere to go. Should be easy.

Read the whole thing.

Now that the actual war has picked up pace and all the networks have staff on the ground, media coverage is improving—it’s getting more informative and a lot less entertaining. Gone are the flashy graphics and melodramatic voice-overs. The reporters look…exhausted.

Last night, after I posted about the Anderson Cooper 360 reporters’ group blog, I watched Cooper’s report from the Hezbollah “stronghold” in Beirut. He pulled no punches in describing the constraints put on him and his crew/cameraman by Hezbollah during their guided tour.

I’ll let Kevin Aylward at Wizbang describe it (he also sets it up in the context of Nic Robertson’s Excellent Adventure, which I wrote about here):

Hezbollah, like most of our enemies in the war on terror, has a very sophisticated spin machine presenting the media with exactly the story they want told. Yesterday Kim had a piece on CNN’s Nic Robertson being played for a fool by Hezbollah spin merchants….

Perhaps Anderson Cooper learned from his colleague’s mistake, but last night on 360 he took his viewers inside Hezbollah controlled territory and the report was very different from Robertson’s. Combined -or should I say contrasted- with the Robertson report, it gives us a good look inside Hezbollah’s well controlled media sphere. I’m looking for a video but I clipped the relevant part of the the transcript.

There are 2 important things worth noting. Cooper ran this piece right after he welcomes CNN international viewers, so it appears this was intentionally meant for international distribution. Second, much of the video is shot at the same locations as the Nic Robertson piece but the reporting is very different. Anderson Cooper had a stunning narration.

The piece opens with Cooper in van driving thru the Hezbollah controlled area of Lebanon.

COOPER (voice-over): Drive into southern Beirut, and you quickly discover another city entirely. A heavily bombed state within a state, beyond the control of the Lebanese government.This is Hezbollah territory. Along the road posted like billboards, pictures of so-called martyrs, Hezbollah fighters who died battling Israel.

(on camera) You can drive around. It doesn’t seem like there’s anybody around. All of a sudden your eyes, it’s almost like adjusting to the darkness. Suddenly, you realize there are people who are watching you and guys on motorcycles talking on cell phones who pass you by, watching very closely what you’re doing.

(voice-over) Tension in this neighborhood is high. Many here are convinced Israel is sending in agents to help guide their aerial attacks.

(on camera) Not allowed to enter Hezbollah territory really without their permission. They control this whole area, even after the sustained Israeli bombing campaign. We’ve arranged with a Hezbollah representative to get permission to come here. We’ve been told to pull over to the side of the road and just wait.

(voice-over) We’d come to get a look at the damage and had hoped to talk with a Hezbollah representative. Instead, we found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. Young men on motor scooters followed our every movement.

They only allowed us to videotape certain streets, certain buildings. Once, when they thought we’d videotaped them, they asked us to erase the tape. These men are called al-Shabab, Hezbollah volunteers who are the organization’s eyes and ears.

That was good reporting. Read the rest here.

By the way, Robertson was called on the carpet by Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources.

Kurtz: “To what extent do you feel like you’re being used to put up the pictures that they want — obviously, it’s terrible that so many civilians have been killed — without any ability, as you just outlined, to verify, because — to verify Hezbollah’s role, because this is a fighting force that is known to blend in among the civilian population and keep some of its weapons there?”

Robertson: “Absolutely. And I think as we try and do our job, which is go out and see what’s happened to the best of our ability, clearly, in that environment, in the southern suburbs of Beirut that Hezbollah controls, the only way we can get into those areas is with a Hezbollah escort. And absolutely, when you hear their claims they have to come with more than a grain of salt, that you have to put in some journalistic integrity. That you have to point out to the audience and let them know that this was a guided tour by Hezbollah press officials along with their security, that it was a very rushed affair, that there wasn’t time to go and look through those buildings.”

“The audience has to know the conditions of that tour. But again, if we didn’t get all — or we could not get access to those areas without Hezbollah compliance, they control those areas.”

Robertson didn’t spell out the conditions of the tour very clearly, and then there was a hideously stupid editorial decision at CNN to play his piece over and over and over again. Not smart at all. Cooper’s piece wasn’t just “balance.” It was the awful, unvarnished truth.

You know how Israel’s enemies always demand—and get—hundreds, if not thousands, of their prisoners back in “exchange” for one of Israel’s? (And sometimes that single one is a corpse.)

Not very proportionate, is it?

Like Kurt Andersen, who’s not so great on his facts but shines in his intellectual honesty and depth:

Concerning Israel and the Palestinian territories, all the truths tend to be truly, deeply, tragically inconvenient.

And the big one is this: Israel is a good and miraculous nation that deserves the support of civilized people, but the great unfortunate fact about its creation—being carved by the U.N. out of Arab land in 1947—cannot be ignored or wished away. We have no choice but to support Israel, even though the Israeli Defense Forces are killing civilians, dozens a day, in Lebanon. All of those deaths, one wants to believe, are unintentional, unavoidable mistakes. Yet as Richard Cohen wrote in his Washington Post column last week, “Israel itself is a mistake . . . an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable [but which] has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now.” *** Sixty years on, there can be no revising or reversing that mistake—and when the choice is Israel versus unaccommodating Islamist fanatics, we must be for Israel. Is there any more inconvenient truth? [emphasis added]

Not like Matthew Yglesias, who sees no reason why “American Jews like [him] should support [Israel] out of friendship” and then gives ample evidence why neither Americans (Jews or not) nor Israelis need friends like him.

He delivers a mixture of Hezbollah’s talking points ["If they wanted their soldiers back, they could have traded some Hezbollah captives for them"] and inane fantasies ["Were Israel's conflict with the Palestinians resolved, other challenges like Hezbollah would soon melt away"]. Read it if you want to hear a lot of ill-informed commentary and opinion that entirely misses the point.

It is a deeply inconvenient truth, for both Jews and non-Jews, that Hezbollah isn’t going to “melt away” anytime soon. It’s a global militarized Islamist terrorist organization funded and backed by Iran.
Israel is fighting the kind of war that America has lacked the courage to fight in Iraq—a full-out bloody war against an Islamist terrorist enemy that hides behind the skirts of women and children and that skillfully manipulates public opinion via the media, which has got cameras rolling and satellites transmitting 24/7, while prosecutorial reporters and anchors pass judgment.

——–

*** Richard Cohen actually walked this back today, and was widely acknowedged in the blogosphere for doing so. Here’s part of his piece:

Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy’s back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to re-establish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights.

Now Cohen has gone overboard in the other direction. Proportionality is hardly suicide. It is, however, not the point of this particular exercise. Israel has decided: enough.

Not only are Britons colluding with the U.S. in Israel’s Nazi-like war crimes

Sir Peter Tapsell, a Tory MP, said Tuesday that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was “colluding” with U.S. President George W. Bush in giving Israel the okay to wage “unlimited war” in Lebanon - a war crime he claimed was “gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.”

…they also “sleep in dirty duvets“:

Tests carried out on 10 duvets at the University of Worcester found they held up to 20,000 live house dust mites.

And a survey also revealed two-in-five Britons admitted to not washing duvets every six months.

The worst case was a duvet that had not been washed for 11 years and contained 45g of debris including skin scales and house dust mite faeces.

The secretary general of the United Nations accused Israel of deliberately targeting a UN post and killing four peacekeepers.

In a statement issued at UN headquarters in New York, Mr Annan said: “I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli defence forces of a UN observer post in southern Lebanon.

“This co-ordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked UN post at Khiyam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by prime minister Ehud Olmert that UN positions would be spared Israeli fire,” Mr Annan added.

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations responded:

“I am shocked and deeply distressed by the hasty statement of the secretary general, insinuating that Israel has deliberately targeted the U.N. post,” Gillerman said in a statement. “I am surprised at these premature and erroneous assertions made by the secretary general, who while demanding an investigation, has already issued its conclusions.”