Deception Or Not?

In the anniversary of the Hezbollah Israel war, an argument about Lebanese attitudes has caused a tussle in the Blogosphere.

Amal the spinner?

Here’s what happened: 

Last year, as the Israelis were bombing Lebanon, a Lebanese pollster was asking Lebanese citizens the question: “Do you support the resistance’s opposition to the Israeli aggression against Lebanon?”

Of course, you have to be either insensitive or cruel to deny anyone the right of self defense, hence the outcome: 87% of the Lebanese said yes.

But then, the political spin machine retouches the findings and gets quoted in all international news media (excerpt from Democracy now):

“Basically, 87 percent of all Lebanese support Hezbollah’s resistance against Israel today. And that includes 80 percent of all Christian respondents, 80 percent of all Druze respondents, and 89 percent of all Sunnis. And this, of course, is non-Shiite groups, so those which have supported the March 14 pro-American — the March 14, sorry, alliance, which is seen as being pro-American, pro-French, anti-Syrian.”

The interpretation of the findings, where ‘resistance’ ( lowercase ‘r’ ) became ‘the Resistance’ (capital ‘R’, meaning Hezbollah) and wording the outcome to imply general sympathy with Hezbollah, completely discredits the pollster, Amal Saad Ghoraib, a Hezbollah Sympathizer.

Naturally, When Michael Young, a Lebanese columnist, brings up the topic, he gets an immediate attack from Syria. 
Joshua Landis, a Syrian regime propagandist, immediately dismissed Young’s article and calls him a Neocon:

Young’s attempt to smear Saad-Ghorayeb and the Beirut Center is unfair: The question — “Do you support the Resistance’s opposition to the Israeli aggression against Lebanon?” — was a good one, particularly as it was asked when Israeli bombs were falling on Lebanon. Neocons, naturally enough, want to discredit the results because they showed, once again, how wrong their presuppositions are about the effectiveness of the use of force. Refusing to learn from history, neocons supported Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon in the belief that pain would split the Lebanese and turn the majority against Hizbullah. The Beirut Center’s statistics show that this did not happen. On the contrary, the bombing forced Lebanese together in opposition to Israel and the US. Even Siniora was forced to announce his government’s support for the resistance and thank Hizbullah for frustrating Israel’s plan to hold a strip of land along the border

Fortunately, due to my personal experience, I’m in a position to agree with Young. Although I did side with Hezbollah against Israel, that does not make me in anyway a “Hezbollah supporter”, as Amal Saad Ghoraieb would have liked to classify me.