A Boston-Richmond Jet Blue flight went back to the airport after passengers complained about suspicious behavior by two men of Middle Eastern appearance.
BOSTON (AP) - JetBlue Airways says one of its planes bound for Virginia returned to the gate at Boston’s Logan Airport today after two passengers refused to comply with flight crew instructions. Flight 1281 — headed to Richmond — had pushed back from the gate and was taxiing when the captain decided to return to the gate and have the male passengers removed. The men were turned over to Massachusetts State Police for questioning and the flight eventually left about 40 minutes later than scheduled.
But CBS 6 reporters found two passengers who said what happened. One woman said that she saw the men taking many pictures, and asked them why. She said they said this was going to be a “memorable” flight. When she saw them take pictures of their IDs, she told the flight attendants. The captain told security, and was instructed to taxi back to the airport, where the two men were removed.
Authorities told CBS 6 that they had released the men and they were on a later flight, but the reporter said they weren’t on the flight when it landed.
It could have been a “dry run” for future terrorist flights. Or it could be another one of those false alarms. But coming as it does on the heels of the plot to blow up a dozen 747s, well—it’s newsworthy.
A German TV news show segment on YouTube is racing around the blogosphere. Why? Because it is absolute proof that Hezbullah manipulates the media for their benefit.
Watch it, and be horrified, as you see “Green Helmet Guy” direct the taking of pictures of the victims of Qana.
The mainstream media insist they are far too savvy to fall for crude manipulation like this. And yet, proof keeps coming up that that is exactly what is happening: The media are falling utterly for all of the images coming out of Lebanon, and their critical thinking abilities aren’t even in gear. Lame excuses are offered for serious breaches of editorial oversight.
When even the pictures of bodies being taken out of the rubble are turned into propaganda victories for Hezbullah, you have to wonder—how many pieces of rocket launchers and other evidence were removed from the sites of such bombings?
This is standard operating procedure in the jihadi manuals. That is not rhetoric. We have their manuals on record, and there are whole sections that discuss the manipulation of the media. And our media plays along, always.
A few days ago, the world press accused Israel of killing a child while going after terrorists. Surprise—the palestinians lied.
Also Thursday, doctors said that a 5-year-old Palestinian girl initially believed to have been killed by an Israeli military strike Wednesday apparently died after sustaining head injuries during a fall from a swing.
The girl suffered a fractured skull and there were no signs of shrapnel, said Kazim Abu Libda, a doctor at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital.
Yasser Arafat learned his lesson well, and taught it to his successors. He learned it at the feet of the Russians, who also had a field day manipulating world opinion against America and her allies whenever the choice was between them and the Soviet Union.
And they have the advantage in the fact that the average person does not like to engage critical thinking. Skepticism is not incumbent on intelligence. Some of the smartest people I know are absolutely unable to see beyond the surface of a situation that does not fit their worldview. One of my closest friends falls for virtually all of the lies the palestinians have uttered, and when the truth contradicts her worldview, she simply shunts aside the facts for something that fits more closely to how she thinks the situation should be.
If I were to show her this video, no doubt her response would be, “So? Israel still killed civilians.”
Yes, she did. By accident. The bombs that dropped on that building in Qana were meant for Hezbullah rocket launchers that are threatening the civilian population of Israel. Israeli civilians are dying, too, and yet there is no outrage from the UN. I have been waiting daily to hear Kofi Annan express his profound sorrow at the deaths of innocent civilians in Israel. He has finally broken his silence—to condemn civilian deaths in Gaza.
The message is clear. Jewish lives have never counted for much in the history of the world, except to Jews. Israeli lives—even Israeli Arab lives, apparently—don’t muster a whit of sympathy from the world. Part of it is due to the losses in the propaganda war. Part of it is due to the hatred of Jews the world cannot seem to abandon.
But the effects would be lessened, I think, if the media did their jobs more thoroughly, and stopped playing into the enemy’s hands by publishing their propaganda so readily, and so uncritically.
The Jihadis don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. They have threatened journalists in Lebanon on more than one occasion. I don’t think they’d hesitate to kill reporters, and if they did, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they then put the body in a site hit by Israeli shelling. And get Green Helmet Guy to direct the video.
This war has many fronts, and the propaganda front is not the least of them.
The Jihadis are winning.
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If you doubt in any way that employing the Lebanese army in the south—a move that has been accepted by Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbullah (which should immediately make you suspicious)—then take a look at this.
TWELVE trucks crossed the Syrian border into Lebanon and rumbled south. When they were stopped at a checkpoint a few days later, the Lebanese Armed Forces found the trucks were brimming with ammunition and weapons, including Katyusha rockets that have been raining down on Israel since July 12.
What happened next, in this little-reported incident in late January, goes to the heart of the conflict between Israel and Lebanon. The convoy was waved on and travelled unhindered to its final destination: Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon.
The Lebanese army said the transportation and storage of ammunition belonged to the “resistance”. Once inside Lebanon it was subject to a ministerial policy statement of the Lebanese Government, which considers the “resistance” to be legitimate.
“As the Government of Lebanon has confirmed, the Lebanese Armed Forces has thus not been authorised to prevent further movement of the ammunitions, which had been a common practice for more than 15 years,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a letter to the Security Council in April. “Hezbollah publicly confirmed that the arms were destined for the group.”
Interesting, isn’t it, how Kofi Annan knew that weapons were flooding into Hezbullah’s hands and did nothing about it—until the Israelis came under attack and responded in kind. Then Kofi leaped into action. Against Israel, of course.
There is also evidence that the Lebanese army helped Hezbullah kill Israelis.
Just two days into the war, an Israeli Sa’ar 5 class missile corvette, enforcing the naval blockade off Lebanon, was struck by a C-802 radar-guided anti-ship cruise missile, an Iranian-made version of a missile known as the Chinese silkworm. The explosion claimed the lives of four soldiers and the ship had to return to port.
It was the first time the missile had been used in the war with Israel and military officials reported that the Israeli ship’s radar system was not calibrated to detect the missile, which is equipped with an advanced anti-tracking system.
Iran denied any involvement and US and Israeli officials say there was no evidence that Iranian operatives working in Lebanon launched the missile themselves. That made the incident even more curious, observes Schenker.
“It was assumed broadly that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corp personnel stationed in Lebanon would assist Hezbollah in the technical operation of this equipment,” says Schenker. “That would not have been a surprise. What was a surprise is that according to Israelis, a Lebanese Armed Forces naval radar station was used and it was used to lock on the ship.”
It meant the land-based radar post communicated with the missile, which allowed the incoming missile to avoid detection.
“This enhanced capability is why the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) destroyed the Lebanese Armed Forces radar station,” says Schenker, referring to an IDF strike north of Beirut a few days later.
The incident points to the many sympathies within the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Government to Hezbollah and why the present conflict is so precarious and raising concerns of another civil war in Lebanon.
So does Siniora’s WaPo oped. The man is a Syrian sympathizer/stooge, and has no intention of disarming Hezbullah.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has played a delicate act in avoiding the use of the word “militia”, which is the definition in UN resolution 1559 that calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah. In fact just as news of that intercepted convoy of arms was breaking in Lebanon, Siniora told Beirut parliament on February 6: “We have never called, and will never call, the resistance by any name other than resistance.”
The deployment of the Lebanese army in the south will benefit only Hezbullah. Israel needs to go in and root out the rocket launchers, and the terrorists firing them.
Hundreds more were fired today, and two more civilians were killed. It’s not going to stop by deploying the Lebanese army, who are responsible for allowing Hezbullah to arm itself with the bombs currently raining down on Israel.
TYRE, Lebanon - When Dr. Fouad Fatah emerged bleary-eyed from the ruins of his hospital during a pause in Israeli air strikes last week, it felt like the first time in forever.
He counted himself as the last living soul in the five-room clinic, the only hospital serving this devastated swath of Lebanon’s south. His surviving patients had already been evacuated.
The surgeon led a group of journalists over what remained: mangled debris, shredded walls and a roof punched through by an Israeli shell.
“Look what they did to this place,” Dr. Fatah said, shaking his head. “Why in the world would the Israelis target a hospital?”
The probable answer was found a few hours later in a field nearby. Hidden in the tall grass were the burned remnants of a rocket-launcher.
Confronted with the evidence, Dr. Fatah admitted his hospital could have been used as a site from which to fire rockets into Israel.
“What choice to we have? We need to fight back from somewhere,” he said, tapping his foot on the ground.
“This is Hezbollah’s heartland.”
[...] Military experts say that over the past five years, Hezbollah fighters have steadily stockpiled weapons funnelled from Iran and Syria. They buried rockets in tunnels, houses and, according to Israeli officials, in hospitals.
Many of those civilians are complicit in hiding and supplying the rocket launchers.
“We’ve been preparing ourselves for this fight for the last five years. We can fight this for much longer,” said Abu Ismail, a local Hezbollah leader near the village of Bint Jbeil who uses a nom de guerre, like most of his fellow fighters.
Residents of the cluster of villages closest to the Israeli border, Hezbollah’s most loyal supporters, helped stow the weapons away.
I think when civilians are hiding weapons used to bomb Israel, they are no longer called civilians. The new term would be collaborators, or combatants.
But not all Lebanese civilians are happy for Hezbullah.
During a pitched battle in his village of Bint Jbeil last Thursday, the 48-year-old dentist watched from his kitchen window as Hezbollah fighters dragged a rocket launcher across the torn street in front of his house.
A few minutes later, he heard four successive blasts. Kareem barely managed to cover his four-year-old son’s ears before the rockets were fired. His own ears are still ringing.
“Five minutes after they fired the rockets, the Israelis started bombing,” he recalled from the safety of a shelter in Beirut.
“They are making us magnets for the Israelis,” he said.
You won’t see this in the wire services. But the Red Cross is finding proof of rocket launchers in civilian areas. The Red Cross. I doubt they’re reporting it to HRW or the UN.
Anger boiled over last week when a shelter in Qana was hit, killing 29 people, most of them children.
“What have they done to deserve this? Is this a military target?” wept Mohamad Chaloub, clutching the lifeless body of his daughter.
Local officials said there were no weapons or rockets in the house where the children slept in Qana, no warning before the bomb fell.
But the next day, the same Lebanese Red Cross team that dug out the children’s bodies stumbled across the shreds of more rocket launchers in a village nearby.
One was found deep inside a fruit orchard. Another was found wedged between two houses.
It’s funny how Reuters and the AP can’t find evidence of rocket launchers the way that Sonia Verma of the National Post can. UNIFIL can’t find them either, it seems. Wait, sorry, I forgot—UNIFIL’s mission is simply to observe that neither side violates the peace.
Will Human Rights Watch have these items in its reports on Lebanon? Who knows?
But it is obvious that this story will remain the most underreported of the war—because the media are not interested in the whole story. Only the side that makes Israel look evil.
Gee, I could have sworn that Walt-Mearsheimer paper said that Israel is what controls U.S. foreign policy. Somehow, this story makes that seem like, well, a lie.
The IDF General Staff postponed the expansion of ground operations in south Lebanon late Wednesday night, after the security cabinet earlier in the day approved a plan for a widened offensive that would take the army to the Litani River, over 20 kilometers from the border, and beyond, in an effort to prevent the incessant Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel.
The troops were already rolling late Wednesday when they were ordered to halt. It appears heavy US pressure delayed the offensive to allow diplomacy to run its course. A senior minister said Wednesday that Israel might delay the expansion for 2-3 days for that purpose.
40,000 IDF troops and reservists were massed along the northern border Wednesday evening in preparation for Israel’s largest and deepest ground incursion into southern Lebanon since the beginning of Operation Change of Direction last month.
Everyone please cover your eyes while I swear.
WTF? WTF? WT effing F?
There will be no successful diplomacy. France has already backed down on its insistence that Hezbullah be disarmed. The Lebanese army can’t disarm Hezbullah. Nasrallah wants the Lebanese army in south Lebanon for that very reason—it is infused with Hezbullah sympathizers. Effing Saniora is an effing Hezbullah sympathizer. There is not a single reference to Hezbullah’s responsibility for the current war. It’s as if Israel, out of the blue, suddenly started attacking poor, innocent Lebanon.
Un-friggin’-believable that W. would stop the ground war in its tracks. It’s the only way to stop the katushas.
First there was a scuffle between McKinney’s bodyguards and an 11Alive news photographer, then there were remarks made to a cable network news crew, in which members of McKinney’s entourage allegedly made shocking anti-Semitic remarks.
The Anti-Defemation League says they want to hear from McKinney – they want her to disavow the anti-Semetic remarks reported by the network crew, remarks that recall the scandal that cost her the election in 2002.
“We’re seeing some Cynthia McKinney supporters are resorting to anti-Semetic and racist language and again blaming the Jews for her loss in this campaign,” said ADL southeast Associate Director Shelley Rose.
The remarks were allegedly made just moments after McKinney’s entourage passed out of earshot of 11Alive cameras, as the congresswoman left her campaign headquarters on Tuesday night.
Someone reportedly said quote, “You wanna know what led to the loss? Israel. The Zionists. You. put on your yarmulke and celebrate.”
