Veteran Guardian* foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall unleashed a torrent of lies, distortions and clichés in an effort to blame Jerusalem for defending itself from the Iranian backed terror group that’s been firing rockets on Israeli communities in the north. The piece (“Netanyahu’s lethal bombs will turn Lebanon into another Gaza. He must be brought down now“, Sept. 24) blames Israel entirely for the current war, while letting Hezbollah off the hook.
Tisdall, in fact, frames the illegal Shiite militia as the reasonable party in the dispute, writing that “Hezbollah has been clear all along. It says it will stop firing missiles when a Gaza ceasefire deal is agreed, not before“, which he contrasts with what he falsely alleges is the refusal of Israeli leaders to reach a deal. He also evokes Al-Manar-style propaganda by characterising the last two days of IDF strikes on Hezbollah military targets as a “massacre”, despite the fact that Lebanese authorities reported that the overwhelming majority of those killed have been adult males.
The Guardian journalist even mocks Israeli ‘claims’ that Hezbollah has been terrorising the north, writing that “Israel’s ambassador to the UK insists on the BBC’s Today programme that it’s all about the terror threat in the north“, before asking, “Whose terror, Tzipi Hotovely?”.
At one point in the op-ed, Tisdall offers his sage advice for how not to facilitate the return of 60,000 Israelis, writing that the IDF assault will not allow the “Displaced residents” to “safely return“, before offering up the mind-numbingly banal and ahistorical platitude that “Violence begets violence. It does not bring security, just more hatred and vengeance“.
The fact that this pearl of wisdom (‘war, what is it good for?‘) isn’t directed towards Hezbollah – the vengeful group committed to Israel’s annihilation and the murder of Jews abroad, and which has fired over 8,000 rockets on Israel since launching its unprovoked war on Oct. 8th, despite having no territorial dispute with Jerusalem – but, instead, is offered to the Jewish target of these malign jihadists, is a quintessentially Guardian take.
If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide. – Hasan Nasrallah, Oct. 23, 2002
Let’s remember that, in addition to waging near-constant war against Israel, Hezbollah, CAMERA researchers have documented, also has targeted both Israeli and Jewish people and institutions abroad. On March 17, 1992 Hezbollah—aided by Iranian operatives—bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring more than 200. On July 18, 1994, Hezbollah and Iran bombed the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 86 and wounding more than 200.
In the 1980s through the early 1990s, the group kidnapped—and frequently murdered—numerous Westerners, among them, journalists, academics, CIA officials and the head of the U.N. truce monitoring group in Lebanon, U.S. Marine Col. William Higgins.
On April 18, 1983 Hezbollah attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut with a truck bomb, killing 63 people. A subsequent terrorist attack, employing a truck bomb, killed 241 US military personnel on Oct. 23, 1983 stationed in Beirut as part of a peace-keeping force. The complex operation also included a nearly simultaneous attack on the French military compound in Beirut, killing 58.
Other Hezbollah terror operations include plane hijackings and the April 12, 1984 bombing of a restaurant near the U.S. Air Force Base in Torrejon, Spain, which killed 18 servicemen and injured 83 people.
Naturally, Tisdall doesn’t offer any actual, real-world solutions to solving the Hezbollah problem. His column represents another illustration of the imperious moral preening and virtue signaling that passes for serious thought at the Guardian.
The use of pleasant sounding rhetoric and seemingly high-minded ideals when writing about Israel and its enemies avoids having to grapple with the unpleasant reality that was again proven by Hamas’s barbarism on Oct. 7th: that when individuals, groups or nations state their intention to murder Jews, they should be taken at their word, and that the only genuinely moral response to pogromists and aspiring pogromists is to lend support to their intended victims.
*(Tisdall is the foreign affairs commentator for The Observer, which is a Guardian sister publication.)
