Whenever there’s a crisis in Lebanon, the “mainstream” media hauls out Michael Young, to give events the right spin, and this time he has really outdone himself. His op ed piece in the New York Times this morning, “Israel’s Invasion, Syria’s War,” is dizzying in its illogic. Young ignores the ruthless invasion of Gaza, and the slaughter of Palestinian beachgoers, and swallows whole the pretext proffered by the Israelis that they are striking because their soldiers were captured — oh, wait, I mean “kidnapped.” Hezbollah, says he, and not Israel, has “crossed the line.” He should tell that to the relatives and loved ones of the fifty-plus Lebanese civilian victims of Israeli aerial bombardment.
“A second line that Hezbollah crossed was its evident coordination of strategy with Hamas; this went well beyond its stated aim of simply defending Lebanon and left Israel feeling it was fighting a war on two fronts.”
The rest of the region must lay prone, and passively accept getting f*cked by the IDF as they bomb, strafe, and slaughter their way through the occupied territories. Anything more is “crossing the line.” Israel, you see, has a “right” to “defend itself,” as our President puts it, but those Ay-rabs most certainly do not. And the beat goes on:Â
“The third line crossed was domestic. By unilaterally taking Lebanon into a conflict with Israel, Hezbollah sought to stage a coup d’état against the anti-Syrian parliamentary and government majority, which opposes the militant group’s adventurism.”
It is Israel, and not Hezbollah, that has taken Lebanon into a conflict with Israel: Tel Aviv knows perfectly well that the canton-ized “confessional” state of Lebanon is a fiction, held together by a watery glue that could easily dissolve, and the Israelis are doing their best to achieve just that. The Lebanese government is in no way responsible for the actions of Hezbollah, and Young — a resident of Beirut, by the way — is in the unenviable position of explaining to his neighbors that the Israelis are perfectly justified in bombing them all to perdition. A fifth-columnist’s lot in life is surely hard, but Young surpasses himself in this instance.
The reality is that the Israelis are targeting a government supported not only by the U.S., but aso by the Lebanese people; They are bombing tourists at Beirut airport, stranding thousands of Americans and Europeans, and — under the thinnest of pretexts — starting a war that can only end in a regional conflagration. And Young, the single-note ideologue, blames …. Syria. If Young was caught in a traffic jam on the Golden Gate Bridge, he would doubtless ascribe blame to Bashar al-Assad.
In the Bizarro World of Young and his Aounist-Likudnik confreres, it is Syria, and not the invading Israelis, who “continue to eat away at Lebanese independence.” Israel’s blitzkrieg strikes at civilians in Lebanon and the occupied territories, but it is Syria that is “the nexus of regional instability.” And the solution? No mention that the Israelis should get out of Lebanon — it is Hezbollah, not the voracious Israelis, who must disarm.
Young’s whole argument amounts to saying to the Israelis: Hey, don’t bomb over here — go after the Syrians (and the Iranians) instead! Yet surely even he realizes that Lebanon will be swept up in any Israeli-Syrian conflict, and that his own city will become a battleground in a regional war.
Not until the very last line of his screed does Young manage to say that Israel “must cease its attacks” — an odd position for someone who has spent the previous fourteen paragraphs justifying them.