Now You Bomb It, Now You Don’t
Why no reaction from Syria to Israeli violation of its airspace, dropping of ordnance? It never happened. Or if it did, it didn’t hit anything. Syria engages in subtle disinformation campaign. NYT:
“You see — around us are farmers, corn, produce, nothing else,” said Ahmed Mehdi, the Deir ez Zor director of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands, a government agricultural research center, as he led two of the journalists around the facilities.
It was here at this research center in this sleepy Bedouin city in eastern Syria that an Israeli journalist reported that Israel had conducted an air raid in early September.
Ron Ben-Yishai, a writer for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, grabbed headlines when he suggested that the government facility here was attacked during the raid, snapping photos of himself for his article in front of a sign for the agricultural center.
He said he was denied access to the research center, which sits on the outskirts of the city, and he did not show any photos of the aftermath of the raid, though he said he saw some pits that looked like part of a mine or quarry, implying that they could also be sites where bombs fell.
His claims have compelled the Syrian government, already anxious over the rising tensions with Israel and the United States, to try to vindicate itself after a recent flurry of news reports that it may have ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons.
President Bashar al-Assad, in a BBC interview, played down the Israeli raid, saying that Israeli jets took aim at empty military buildings, but he did not give a specific location. His statement differed from the initial Syrian claim that it had repulsed the air raid before an attack occurred.
OK, it did happen, after it didn’t. Maybe. Somewhere. But nothing was hit.
On Monday, journalists toured the agricultural center at the government’s invitation to prove, Mr. Mehdi said, that no nuclear weapons program or Israeli attacks occurred there. “The allegations are completely groundless, and I don’t really understand where all this W.M.D. talk came from,” Mr. Mehdi said, referring to weapons of mass destruction.
“There was no raid here — we heard nothing,“ he added.
OK, so it didn’t happen. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:50 am on Thursday, October 11, 2007
5 Responses to “Now You Bomb It, Now You Don’t”
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October 11th, 2007 at 9:56 am
What, no bombed hospital full of babies? No bombed milk factories or schools, and no wrinkly old bags in black tents waving their arms and wailing? Not even a lousy ambulance with a round hole in the roof? There must have been something really bad there, and the Israelis took it out, whatever it was. The sheer absence of car swarms is a dead giveaway.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Whatever the nytimes “piece” says (and it’s hard to tell, tho’ the tone is definitely warm and fuzzy towards Syria)…
I like the theory that the Israeli mission was a test of the Defense System the Syrians purchased from the Russians.
My theory is backed up by the fact that Russia sells to Syria and there have been high level exchanges of people between the 2 countries and Russian sells a lot of hardware/armaments to Syria.
My speculation further expands to the idea that, as is wont to happen with Russian “stuff”, the incoming Israeli planes were neither detected nor fired upon.
oops
October 11th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
tanstaafl - I wouldn’t normally defend the Times, but I got the opposite impression:
An entourage of the center’s employees lined up with him to greet the journalists. In a seemingly choreographed display, they nodded in agreement and offered their guests recently picked dates as tokens of hospitality.
The word “choreographed” shows a level of skepticism I’m not used to when the MSM deals with Arab claims.
October 11th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
I guess I’m not terribly interested in journalistic speculation as to what took place as I am in what actually did take place.
The nytimes article also states, ( somewhat interestingly although not terribly interestingly) that Assad changed his story.
As for orchestration, choreography, re-invention after the fact, ALL the players in that neck of the woods indulge in that game. “events” are choreographed regularly in Gaza for the benefit of the rolling cameras. And in the news right now is the controversy over the “French story” of the killing of a child in Gaza.
Remember the photographic choreography that accompanied last summer’s Lebanon fiasco ?
October 11th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Took’em quite a while to sanitize that site. Freaking amateurs.