Behind CNN's Octavia Nasr, a Media Army Of Lawrence of Arabias

Terrific piece here by Lee Smith in the Weekly Standard, filling in the background on the recent firing of Octavia Nasr, a Lebanese Christian Arab, by CNN for her Twitter expressing admiration for one of Hezbollah’s recently deceased ayatollahs:

… why is Nasr being singled out for openly expressing the U.S. media’s default position on Hezbollah, Fadlallah’s one-time colleagues? For instance, does anyone doubt that the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh “respects” the late cleric’s even more vicious rival, Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, whom he interviewed in the pages of the New Yorker?

The Western press delights in rattling the bourgeois sensibilities of its audience by showing the multifaceted aspects of Hezbollah–it’s not just a militia with an appetite for slaughtering Jews, it’s also a social welfare outfit that provides educational opportunities!–and even collaborates with the Party of God by publishing doctored photographs of Israeli “war crimes.” The op-ed pages of America’s dailies are replete with articles promoting Hezbollah’s “pragmatism” and “moderation” (which also happens to be the position of the president’s counter-terrorism czar John Brennan, and a recent CENTCOM analytical exercise), while reported pieces from Lebanon pass along Party of God press releases as objective analysis. If every U.S. journalist who quoted Hezbollah mouthpiece Amal Saad Ghorayeb as a respected “scholar” was fired, the bars of East Beirut would lose 25 percent of their business.

Smith, an expert on the Middle East whose views and insights deserve a wide audience, goes on to lay out the cozy relationship between the western media and Hezbollah, which is often romanticized as Third World freedom fighters by the Lawrence of Arabia wannabees in the press corps:

This infatuation with Hezbollah has been going on for years, and it’s not just because the party established a formidable style of press criticism by kidnapping journalists back in the ’80s. The U.S. media actually likes Hezbollah–it is an impressive thing, after all, to be able to kill your enemies–whether they are Jews or fellow Lebanese–whereas liberalism, non-violent resistance, rule of law, and opposition to political murder lacks sex appeal.

Read the whole thing.