Lebanon: Hizbullah kidnaps two foreign journalists in Beirut

[sabra]

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3279058,00.html

Lebanon: Hizbullah kidnaps two foreign journalists in Beirut

According to local police in Beirut, Hizbullah operatives kidnapped two foreign journalists in the center of the city Thursday.

No further details are available at this time. (AFP)

[allemand]

1. 'Kidnapped' TV crew freed (were detained by police)

20/07/2006 19:40 - (SA)

Beirut - Lebanese police said on Thursday that two British TV journalists thought abducted by Hezbollah in Beirut were in fact briefly detained by officers and released.

They identified the pair as Dave Mason and Richard Gaisford, working for the British morning news programme GMTV.

They said they had been taken away by police after a scuffle broke out while they were filming Lebanese refugees in Beirut.

A Lebanese internal security forces officer had earlier said that the crew had been filming when "Hezbollah elements seized them on suspicion of being spies".

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Middle_East/0,,2-10-2075_1971120,00.html

[sabra]

2. thanks for the update!

[MrPrax]

3. So Ynet is posting propaganda...

Ynet: No further details are available at this time.(07.20.06, 19:10) (AFP)
News24 'Kidnapped' TV crew freed 20/07/2006 19:40 - (SA)

No details...but then a mere thirty minutes later...lots of details including a refutation of the original story?

I like this Ynet story though...

In Spain, anti-Semitism is new leftist trend

Madrid: Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Prime Minister of Spain and Secretary General of the Socialist Party, arrived to power at a time nobody expected, not even inside the Party.

Keen on populist tirades against the United States "Dickhead Bush" and "Ketchup Queen Kerry", his whole campaign did not bring much attention until the moment Al-Qaeda decided to blow up Madrid trains, killing almost 200 people and bringing to an end Spain's membership of the West.

From that moment on, everybody knew nothing would be the same, and Spanish Jews knew there were hard times ahead. Prime Minister Zapatero has not disappointed them.

(snip - the Spanish PM wore a kayyifah once and Nazi is mentioned 4 times)

If the United States does not want to see the American embassy in Madrid full of Jews fleeing Spain, President Bush will do well in isolating Spain in the international arena while pressing, and asking European members to press, the new Socialist government of Spain. The American Rep's belonging to Moratino's Caucus of Friends of Spain should be reminded its elections time too.


The Sepharad story is clearly over, but nobody expected it would be by accident. If you are thinking about visiting Spain, think it twice. You may not leave easily.


Ynot

LOL...

Well Judge Juan del Olmo who lead the Spanish investigation didn't find any direct link to Al Queda, but Ynet is sure there is one anyway. They did find three informants though, one (Trashorras) provided all the dynamite and had phones numbers to the head of Tedax (Spain's Civil Guard bomb unit), which couldn't under 'expert' testimony figure out what kinds of bomb they were in the first place...they could have just asked their informer...

But I digress...

But apparantly according to Ynet (and it's fans) leftwing governments who even criticize rightwing American politicians like Bush is 'anti-semitism'...LOL

Why is Ynet even posted in LBN?

[IndianaGreen]

4. They obviously have an agenda, like MEMRI

There are a lot of agendas at play here, but they all lead to a Great War engulfing the entire Middle East.

Selective Memri

Brian Whitaker investigates whether the 'independent' media institute that translates the Arabic newspapers is quite what it seems

Monday August 12, 2002

For some time now, I have been receiving small gifts from a generous institute in the United States. The gifts are high-quality translations of articles from Arabic newspapers which the institute sends to me by email every few days, entirely free-of-charge.
The emails also go to politicians and academics, as well as to lots of other journalists. The stories they contain are usually interesting.

<snip>

The organisation that makes these translations and sends them out is the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), based in Washington but with recently-opened offices in London, Berlin and Jerusalem.

Its work is subsidised by US taxpayers because as an "independent, non-partisan, non-profit" organisation, it has tax-deductible status under American law.

Memri's purpose, according to its website, is to bridge the language gap between the west - where few speak Arabic - and the Middle East, by "providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media".

Despite these high-minded statements, several things make me uneasy whenever I'm asked to look at a story circulated by Memri. First of all, it's a rather mysterious organisation. Its website does not give the names of any people to contact, not even an office address.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,773258,00.html

[daleo]

5. I generally assume translations are iffy

Even with the best of intentions, it is easy enough for the nuances, idioms, and cultural assumptions of another population to be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But "London based" Arabic news organizations or translations supplied by groups like MEMRI are best taken with a large dose of salt. They provided a fair bit of the propaganda in the lead-up to the Iraq war (especially the London based Iraqi "news organizations").

Imagine if we were given English translations of Knesset debates in Hebrew, courtesy of an Iranian government agency. Everyone would scoff, and for good reason. These things deserve the same critical analysis.