A War of Images by Stella Jatras

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Jewish World ReviewAugust 22, 2006 / 28 Me nachem-Av, 5766

A War of ImagesBy Stella Jatras

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |Will the same weapon that

defeated the Serbs also defeat Israel?

They say that truth is always the first victim in war. Such is the case in the

Israeli/Hezbollah war.

It appears that Hezbollah has taken a page out of the Bosnian Muslim playbook: Win the

PR battle, and you win the war. What better example of media disinformationthan the

Bosnian War, where images of civilians "slaughtered" at Sarajevo's Markale market

place, allegedly by Serb forces, were so instrumental? If it worked for theBosnian

Muslims, why not for Hezbollah? Will Qana, Lebanon, become Israel's Markalemarket

place?

Yossef Bodansky, author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War onAmerica, wrote

the following in his 1995 book Offensive in the Balkans:

"Phase Three started with the self-inflicted major terrorist provocation. On Friday 5,

1994, a major explosion rocked the Markale -- Sarajevo's main market place -- causing

heavy casualties. What was immediately described as the ubiquitous 'Serb mortar shell'

was actually a special charge designed and built with help from HizbAllah experts and

then most likely dropped from a nearby rooftop onto the crowd of shoppers. Video

cameras at the ready recorded this expertly-staged spectacle of gore, while dozens of

corpses of Bosnian Muslim troops killed in action (exchanged the day before in a 'body

swap' with the Serbs) were paraded in front of cameras to raise the casualty counts.

"This callous self-killing was designed to shock the West especially sentimental andgullible Washington, in order to raise the level of Western sympathy to the Bosnian

Muslims and further demonize the Serbs so that Western governments would be more

supportive of Sarajevo's forthcoming aggressive moves, and perhaps even finally

intervene militarily." (Emphasis added)

Some headlines that Americans never saw were "Muslims 'slaughter their own people',"

The [London] Independent, 22 Aug. 1992, and "Serbs 'not guilty' of massacre," The

Sunday [London] Times, 1 Oct. 1995.

In 1992, Peter Maher, Professor Emeritus of Linquistics, visited Dubrovnik, Croatia, to

see for himself the truth about the war. He wrote, "A few months earlier, the press wasfilled with stories that the Pearl of the Adriatic had been reduced to rubble. The stories

were fakes." Professor Maher goes on to explain just how it happened: "The dramatic

'Dubrovnik burning' pictures were shot with long lenses. . . .But the smoke was from the

fuel tanks of two pleasure boats burning in the Old Harbor ... Dubrovnik's Old City never

Columnists

Mitch Albom

Jay Ambrose

Bruce

Bialosky

Lori Borgman

Ben Carson

Mona Charen

Linda

Chavez

Richard Z.

Chesnoff

Al ici a Col on

Ann Coul ter

Greg Crosby

Diane

Dimond

Larry Elder

Suzanne

Fields

Christine

Flowers

Michael

Gerson

Bernie

Goldberg

Jonah

Goldberg

Paul

Greenberg

Argus

Hamilton

Victor Davis

Hanson

Froma Harrop

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A. Ba rton

Hinkle

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Jack Kelly

Ch.

Krauthammer

David

Limbaugh
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burned and was never even targteted by the federal forces.....The only building in the Old

City of Ragusa to be gutted by explosives and fire was the library and treasure of the

Serbian Orthodox church, which housed a priceless collection of medieval manuscripts

and icons. It was not navy guns that did the damage, but plastic and incendiary devices

planted on the spot by Croatian forces."

Who can forget the horrific pictures that were repeatedly shown on CNN of the two deadMuslim babies on a bus in Bosnia, allegedly killed by a Serb sniper? I would never have

known the truth if I had not been watching France 2 TV, which showed the funeral ofthese innocent babies. Officiating was a Serbian Orthodox priest. These were not

Muslim babies; they were Serbian babies, but for American consumption, the Serbian

Orthodox priest was cropped from the film so that the American people would continue

to believe that the babies were Muslim. This kind of reporting is not just yellow

journalism. It goes beyond the pale, the same kind of "journalism" that Israel is

experiencing today -- manipulation, distortion, staging, forgery and the doctoring of

photos by anti-Israeli media. Welcome to the club!

Hopefully, in the current Israeli/Hezbollah conflict, the media distortions will not sell. At the

beginning of the Balkan conflict we did not have the Internet and bloggers to expose

CNN and its ilk. Today is different. Almost immediately after photos of damage from anIsraeli air strike on Beirut were posted, outrage from bloggers who recognized that the

photos were doctored forced Reuters to admit that two or more photos were altered.

The company stated, "A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut

has been withdrawn after coming under attack by American web blogs. The blogs

accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage."

Was this simply one person's mistake, or is a pattern being exposed in the present

Israeli/Hezbollah war of the biased or even co-belligerent media that was at work in the

war against the Serbs?

Israel is accused of indiscriminately killing civilians, as in the Qana incident. It is difficult

to find any suggestion in all of the articles on the subject that Qana was staged.Questions should have been raised. For instance, how is it that the IDF air attack was

between midnight and 1:00 AM, but when the building blew up (or collapsed) at 8:00 AM

there were approximately 50 women and children (reported numbers vary) sleeping in

the building? Why is no one asking what was in that building that caused it to blow up

seven or eight hours after the air strike? Why is no one in the mainstream media asking

why those people were still in the building or why there were only women and children?

While western democracies try to keep civilians, especially their own, safe from ongoing

hostilities, Islamic forces have a history of using their own civilians as human shields.

Israel claims that Hezbollah deliberately puts its weapons and fighters in civilian

neighborhoods, keeping residents hostage and not caring if they are killed or not. One

interesting fact can be found in the book by Lord David Owen, titled Balkan Odyssey, in

which he writes, "In Sarajevo it became ever clearer that there were in fact two sieges of

the city: one by the Bosnian Serb army, with shells, sniper fire and blockades, and the

other by the Bosnian government army, with internal blockades and red tape

bureaucracy which kept their own people from leaving. In a radio broadcast the army --

not the government -- said that able bodied men aged 18-65 years and women aged

18-60 years were forbidden to leave because they were needed for the city's defence;

but their main reason was different. In the propaganda war, the Serbian siege arousedthe sympathy of the world, and for this they needed the elderly and the children to stay. It

was their most emotive propaganda weapon for bringing the Americans in to fight the

war, and they never wanted it to be weakened."

For those who think accusing Muslims of deliberately killing their own civilians or putting

them where they are sure to be "collateral casualties" is farfetched, I would ask, why is

Rich Lowry

Michelle

Malkin

Ann

McFeatters

Dana

Milbank

Jeanne Moos

Dick MorrisJim Mullen

Judge A.

Napolitano

Kathleen

Parker

Star Parker

Dennis

Prager

Wesley

Pruden

Tom Purcell

Sharon

Randall

Michael

Reagan

Robert Robb

Dave Ross

Debra J.

Saunders

Martin

Schram

Culture

Shlock

David

Shribman

Roger Simon

Lenore

Skenazy

Michael

Smerconish

Thomas

Sowell

Mark Steyn

John Stossel

Cal Thomas

Dan

Thomasson

Bob Tyrrell

Diana West

Dave

Weinbaum

George Will

Walter

Williams

Byron York

Cathy Young

Mort

Zuckerman
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that any more unthinkable than encouraging one's own child to be a suicide bomber?

One noticeable difference between the reporting in the Israeli/Hezbollah war and the

Balkan war is balance. Although the media coverage is primarily one-sided in the

Israeli/Hezbollah conflict, nearly four to one showing civilian casualties in Lebanon vs.

those in Israel, the Balkan war news of Serbian casualties and suffering was almost non-

existent.

In 1995, the journal World Affairs published the following quote from John Ranz, U.S.chairman of Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp: "The gigantic campaign to

brainwash America by our media against the Serbian people is just incredible, with its

daily dose of one-sided information and outright lies....What is today's reality? The

murderers of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies are back [in Croatia] from the U.S., Canada,

Argentina where they fled after World War II. The Serbs fought the Nazis, they paid a

terrible price for standing at the side of the allies against Hitler. Humanity owes them a

debt of gratitude."

Yohanan Ramati, Director of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense, seconded the

notion: "This organized anti-Serb and pro-Muslim propaganda should cause anyone

believing in democracy and free speech serious concerns. It recalls Hitler's propaganda

against the allies in World War II. Facts are twisted and, when convenient, disregarded."

Most disturbing is a 1992 observation by Gregory Copley, who wrote in his Defense &

Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy report, "Pictures of dead or wounded (or raped) Serbs

often fill the screens of the world's television and print media, only to be re-labeled as

dead or wounded or raped Croats or Muslims. Many Serbian victims -- and the bulk of

the victims of the conflict, contrary to popular reports, have been Serbs either from

Bosnia and Herzegovina or from Croatia -- not only suffer the indignity of defeat in death;

they also are used in death as models in the macabre image manipulation operation of

the Croatians and the Muslim Bosnians. If the Vietnam War was lost to the United Statesby the negative television images of its own reporters, then the Balkan war against the

Serbs are being won by Ustashi Croatia and the Muslim Bosnians by an active, planned

manipulation of international television."

Like any sovereign nation, Israel has the right to defend itself against Muslim

terrorists.The Serbian people should have had the right to defend their sovereignty

against the same Muslim terrorists whom we are fighting today.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media

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As a career military officer's wife, Stella Jatras has traveled widely and has

lived in many foreign countries where she not only learned about other

cultures but also became very knowledgeable regarding world affairs and

world politics. With the advent of the war in Bosnia, Mrs. Jatras immediately

recognized the bias of the Western media and the Clinton administration's

flawed foreign policy in the Balkans and began her efforts to present to the

American people a more accurate view of that tragic situation. Her letters and

articles have been published in The Washington Times, The Washington Post,

The Arizona Republic, The Patriot- News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania),Chronicles, The Stars and Stripes, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as a

number of magazines and periodicals. In addition her writings have had

worldwide distribution via the Internet such as Citizen Soldier and Jihad

Watch. Stella Jatras lived in Moscow for two years (where her husband,

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George, was the Senior Air Attach), and while there, worked in the Political

Section of the US Embassy. Stella has also lived in Germany, Greece and

Saudi Arabia. Her travels took her to over twenty countries. 2006 , Stella Ja tras

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A War of Images by Stella Jatras