{"id":115914,"date":"2024-09-24T17:00:50","date_gmt":"2024-09-24T15:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=115914"},"modified":"2024-09-21T14:06:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-21T12:06:17","slug":"24-00-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=115914","title":{"rendered":"What Is Hezbollah? Even After Three Tries, the New York Times Is Stumped"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>What Is Hezbollah? Even After Three Tries, the New York Times Is Stumped<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ira Stoll<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

How many tries, by how many reporters, will it take the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0to explain accurately what Hezbollah is?<\/span><\/p>\n

The newspaper has been fumbling and bumbling its way toward an answer in a way that illuminates some of the challenges the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0has faced in covering the wars of Iranian aggression.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our story begins in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. \u201cWhat Is Hezbollah, the Group That Poses a Threat to Israel From the North?<\/a>\u201d a\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0article published on Oct. 19 tried to explain. That article, by a Beirut-based British freelancer for the\u00a0Times<\/em>, Euan Ward, and a staff writer for the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0magazine, Nicholas Casey, did not use the word \u201cterrorist\u201d or describe the US government\u2019s designation of Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization. Instead the newspaper described the group as having \u201can expansive security apparatus and social services network.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Then the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0Cairo bureau chief, Vivian Yee, took a fresh attempt at answering the question, for a piece published on Sept. 17, 2024. That article appeared under the headline, \u201cA Look at Hezbollah and What a Wider War Would Mean for Lebanon<\/a>.\u201d What a wider war would mean \u201cfor Lebanon\u201d seems a somewhat narrow framework for analysis in a war with wide international consequences on everything from oil prices to the US-Iran conflict and the American presidential election. For our purposes, though, the Yee piece was a modest improvement over the October 2023\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0effort. This time around, at least, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0acknowledged that Hezbollah is \u201cconsidered a terrorist group by the United States and other countries.\u201d It also noted that \u201cmany Lebanese see the group as an obstacle to progress that keeps threatening to drag the country into an unwanted war\u201d and that the group uses \u201cauthoritarian tactics\u201d to \u201cquell any dissent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps concern about those \u201cauthoritarian tactics\u201d helps to explain why the Beirut-based Ward was reticent about using the term \u201cterrorist.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

On Sept. 18, 2024, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0tried yet again, with a piece by an Israeli-born reporter fluent in Hebrew, Ephrat Livni. That one appeared under the \u201cJeopardy\u201d-game-show-style headline \u201cWhat Is Hezbollah, the Militant Group Based in Lebanon?<\/a>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Livni\u2019s article calls the group an \u201cIran-backed militia \u2014 which the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization decades ago.\u201d The \u201cdecades ago\u201d makes it sound like Hezbollah\u2019s terrorism is a thing of the past rather than an ongoing problem. Later, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0offers some more detail: \u201cHezbollah was involved in the suicide bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, drawing the enmity of the United States. The United States designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in 1997, and has long sanctioned people and companies with ties to the group to try to cut off its funding.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Livni\u2019s piece also credits Neil MacFarquhar and Ben Hubbard as having \u201ccontributed reporting,\u201d bringing to a whopping six the grand total of\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0journalists \u2014 Ward, Casey, Yee, Livni, MacFarquhar, Hubbard \u2014 mustered into action to attempt to answer the \u201cWhat is Hezbollah?\u201d puzzler.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even on the third try, even after having rustled up a half dozen bodies to tackle the issue, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0can\u2019t quite seem to get a grip on the facts of the situation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Neither Yee\u2019s article nor Livni\u2019s, for example, makes any mention of Hezbollah having killed a dozen Druze, mostly children, in July 2024 in an attack on a soccer field in Majdal Shams in northern Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Livni\u2019s article, after a subhead asking \u201cWhy are Hezbollah and Israel fighting now?\u201d reports, \u201cHezbollah\u2019s military wing has been targeting northern Israel for nearly a year in solidarity with Hamas and its war with Israel in Gaza.\u201d Yet the Hamas war with Israel hasn\u2019t been only \u201cin Gaza\u201d but included rocket attacks and deadly raids into Israel. The same article describes Hezbollah as having been \u201cformed in the 1980s from the chaos of Lebanon\u2019s long civil war to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000.\u201d The Lebanon civil war began not to fight the Israeli occupation but rather Palestinian domination. The Council on Foreign Relations\u00a0explains<\/a>, \u201cHezbollah emerged during Lebanon\u2019s civil war, which broke out in 1975 when long-simmering discontent over the large, armed Palestinian presence in the country reached a boiling point.\u201d The\u00a0Times<\/em>, because of its anti-Israel tilt, can\u2019t bring itself to talk about armed Palestinians in Lebanon. Instead it has to frame everything as a response to Israeli \u201coccupation,\u201d even if that\u2019s inaccurate.<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea that Hezbollah is mainly a response to \u201cthe Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon\u201d or to the Hamas \u201cwar with Israel in Gaza\u201d is a misunderstanding. Like revolutionary Iran, Hezbollah has a goal of imposing its version of militant Islam worldwide and wiping Israel off the map. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah,\u00a0has<\/a>\u00a0stated<\/a>\u00a0that if Jews \u201call gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world-wide.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe by the fourth or fifth or sixth try, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0might work its way up to including that Nasrallah quotation in its explanation to its readers of what Hezbollah is. Maybe the seventh or eighth or ninth\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reporter assigned to the job will figure it out. Until then, readers will be better off looking elsewhere, to more trustworthy sources than the\u00a0Times<\/em>, for an explanation of the terrorist organization and its goals.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Ira Stoll<\/strong> was managing editor of\u00a0<\/i>The Forward\u00a0and North American editor of\u00a0<\/i>The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular\u00a0<\/i>Algemeiner\u00a0feature, can be found\u00a0<\/i>here<\/a>.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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What Is Hezbollah? Even After Three Tries, the New York Times Is Stumped Ira Stoll The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons How many tries, by how many reporters, will it take the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0to explain accurately what Hezbollah is? The newspaper has been fumbling and bumbling its way toward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115914"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115933,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115914\/revisions\/115933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}