Love of the Land: The Lebanon War's Toy Story

The Lebanon War's Toy Story

Honest Reporting/Backspin
04 January '10

Errol Morris of the NY Times Opinionator blog discusses with AP photographer Ben Curtis about toys appearing in photos from the Second Lebanon War. The interview was prompted by Slublog's 2006 post, The Passion of the Toys.

A child’s toy lies amidst broken glass from the shattered windows of an apartment block near those that were demolished by Israeli air strikes in Tyre, Southern Lebanon, Monday, August 7th, 2006.

It's worth reading because it gives a sense of the dynamic between photographers on the scene and their editors back home, what happens when a war zone is saturated with cameramen, and how photographers choose shots like this.

ERROL MORRIS: The good example, of course, is the Mickey Mouse photograph, because it is not a photograph that has been manipulated in Photoshop. And yet people find it problematic, regardless. People look at the photograph and think, “They’re trying to blame this on Israel, saying the country killed innocent children.” And then comes the follow-up thought: “How dare they! They’re anti-Semitic,” and so on and so forth. And my own two cents of opinion on posing is that often we say a picture is posed if the photograph suggests a view that we don’t like, regardless of what the intention of the photographer might have been and regardless of whether it has or has not been manipulated.

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Love of the Land: The Lebanon War's Toy Story

Love of the Land: Has Hizbullah Changed?

Has Hizbullah Changed?

Dr. Shimon Shapira
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
15 December 09

Has Hizbullah Changed? The 7th Hizbullah General Conference and Its Continued Ideology of Resistance

Some Western analysts believe the political manifesto published in the wake of Hizbullah's 7th General Conference at the end of November 2009 represented a fundamental change in Hizbullah policy.

While its link to Iran as the ultimate source of authority was not mentioned in this or any previous political manifesto, this link - that is part of Hizbullah's essence - appeared in the "Open Letter" (Resala Maftuha) of 1985, which remains the founding manifesto of Hizbullah and continues to serve as the movement's ideological basis.

The preface to the latest manifesto describes the decline of the United States as the sole superpower and the retreat of American power throughout the world. In reflection of these global changes, Hizbullah offers its resistance to Israel and the United States as the model for emulation throughout the world.

Hizbullah's vigorous insistence that it retain an army of its own that does not heed the authority of the state but rather the representative of Iran's leader in Lebanon makes a mockery of the clauses in the political manifesto about Lebanon being the eternal homeland. Furthermore, by building a state-like system parallel to that of the Lebanese state, and one that relies on aid and funding from Iran and Syria, Hizbullah does not contribute to the strengthening of Lebanon.

The decision of the Lebanese government to recognize the continued legitimate existence of Hizbullah's armed militia demonstrates less a case that Hizbullah underwent a process of "Lebanonization," but rather that the Lebanese state has undergone a process of "Hizbullazation."

Hizbullah's alleged move toward pragmatism is based to a large extent on an Iranian decision to create a new atmosphere in Lebanon that will allow it to work unmolested. Iran is looking for strict silence in the Lebanese arena in order to enable Hizbullah to reconstruct its strategic capabilities (including long-range rockets and missiles) in Lebanon in order to make use of these capabilities at a time to be determined by Tehran.

Hizbullah wound up its clandestine 7th General Conference at the end of November 2009 that took place and lasted about four months. Hassan Nasrallah was again chosen to be Hizbullah's general secretary and, as with previous conferences, the movement published a political manifesto. Some Western analysts believe the manifesto represented a fundamental change in Hizbullah policy. Indeed, a few days after it was proclaimed, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told the Beirut Daily Star, "carefully considered contact with Hizbullah's politicians, including its MPs, will best advance our objective of the group rejecting violence to play a constructive role in Lebanese politics."1 Later, British spokesmen denied they had changed their policy toward Hizbullah.

Hizbullah's 6th General Conference was convened in 2004 and, according to the movement's bylaws, the 7th General Conference was to have convened in 2007. However, due to the Second Lebanon War and the debates and internal struggles that erupted in its wake within Hizbullah, together with the death of Hizbullah military commander Imad Mughniyeh in a car bombing in Damascus in February 2008, the conference was postponed twice and was finally convened in 2009.2

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Love of the Land: Has Hizbullah Changed?