The rockets Hezbollah is raining down on Haifa and much of northern Israel are distinctly different from the Soviet-built katyushas of earlier wars, Israeli officials say.And, it goes on.
Instead of standard military fragmentation warheads – deadly enough – Hezbollah's rockets are packed with thousands of tiny ball-bearings, which burst out from the warhead in every direction like so many bullets.
The curious thing about this article however, is that its objectivity is more than a little questionable. The author, for one thing, is less a reporter and more an extreme right-wing political activist than most people may understand.
Kenneth R. Timmerman, who wrote the article for NewsMax, is not an objective journalist. He is a connected Republican and neo-con. In 2000 he made a bid for the Maryland Republican nomination in a run for a Senate seat. He didn't make it past the primaries.
NewsMax promotes Timmerman as a Middle East expert. That description should raise an immediate suspicion in any rational person. There simply is no such thing outside the natives of the Middle East.
But Timmerman, a prolific right-wing author, has been called into question on other earth-shaking revelations in his journalistic products. In this March 2006 article he announced that North Korea had delivered Russian-made nuclear missiles to Iran, citing Jane's Defense Weekly as a source.
Except that Jane's didn't say that at all. In fact Jane's provided that Iran had acquired 40 year-old SS-N-6 SLBM from North Korea. There was no mention of warheads in either the subscriber or non-subscriber version. There was however, a statement that the SS-N-6 is a complicated missile, difficult to copy and not in keeping with Iran's current defense efforts.
Timmerman's article was long on assumptions and short on actual facts. NewsHog delved a little further and received an answer from Jane's which clearly stated that they had not discussed warheads at all and indicated that Timmerman had misquoted their article.
It gets better. Anyone who has seen the movie Syriana might recall an organization which figured prominently in the film - The Foundation for Democracy in Iran. It's not a part of the fiction of that movie. The organization exists and its founder and executive director is none other than Kenneth R. Timmerman. The FDI has one objective - regime change in Iran, by any means necessary.
Just to get an even clearer picture of Timmerman, there's this little tidbit from NewsHog as well:
More surprising, perhaps - and not mentioned in any official bio - is his presence on the Advisory Board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) - an honor he currently shares with Rep. Eric Cantor, Michael Ledeen, Jack Kemp and Richard Perle. Past Board members include Vice President Dick Cheney, US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and Undersecretary of Defence for policy Douglas Feith. A heady and powerful grouping. JINSA, it has been alleged, is closely allied to neoconservative advocates of pre-emptive regime change...Hardly someone who could be relied upon to provide an objective report.
Oh yes. Something Timmerman didn't report. The resultant casualties from the so-called Hezbollah "ball-bearing" missiles are minimal when compared to number of civilian casualties suffered by Lebanon at the hands of Israeli munitions.
If Hezbollah is using a shrapnel anti-personnel weapon against civilian targets they are wrong. No question about that. And, given the poor accuracy of the rockets they are using, it amounts to indiscriminant attacks with no consideration for the safety of non-combatants.
It would be the same as Israel using inaccurate cluster munitions against targets in Lebanon. Something Timmerman didn't include in his report.
But these guys did.
No comments:
Post a Comment