Saturday, May 12, 2007

The battle for hearts and minds

Dr. Reuven Erlich sends this diatribe against Hizbollah - and perhaps he has a point - certainly with regard to explicitly ant-semitic Al Manah TV. Reuven states:

The flagship of Hezbollah's media empire is its TV satellite channel, Al-Manar , which was set up in 1991 with aid from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The channel's broadcasts are slanted toward propaganda and reflect Hezbollah's Iranian-inspired ideology and political agenda. From the very beginning Hezbollah specialized in mixing propaganda with factual information, including visual material from the battlefield . To that end, it established a body called “ battle information, ” which embedded professional photographers in the squads attacking the IDF and the South Lebanese Army. Al-Manar is professional and effective, and it is extremely popular not only in Lebanon but throughout the entire Arab-Muslim world, the Middle East (including the Palestinian Authority) and abroad.