Iran’s strategy of Middle East conquest by proxy has proven remarkably effective.  Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen have all turned into pawns in the Persian power’s quest for regional dominance.  The latest iteration of that playbook, Gaza, shows what happens to an Arab territory that subordinates its own interests to Iran’s hegemonic and anti-Israel aims.

Iran’s cynical strategy of “fighting Israel until the last Arab” is about to repeat itself in Lebanon, after Hezb’allah’s July 27 rocket attack murdered a dozen children playing soccer on the Golan Heights of Israel.  Iran’s strategy has been successful partly thanks to anti-Israel bias by the global media, the U.N., International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other actors that effectively abet Iran’s jihadi war on Western civilization.

Consider the media’s role in disproportionately blaming Israel for all of the Gazan misery that ensued when Hamas, the Iran-backed Islamist terror organization, chose to violate the ceasefire with Israel that was in effect up until October 7.  The resulting global demonization of Israel has sent a potent signal to Iran that the media can be relied upon to tarnish Israel’s image as it tries to do the impossible: defend itself against bloodthirsty terrorists shielded everywhere by their civilians because they hamper Israel’s actions and, even better, unleash worldwide fury whenever any die despite Israel’s best efforts to avoid harming noncombatants.

The coverage of the July 27 murder of 12 Israeli children by a Hezb’allah rocket indicates that the media will be as complicit with the strategy of Iranian proxies in Lebanon as it has been in Gaza.

Consider the Washington Post’s article, whose headline completely confused the source of the attack by combining it with the war in Gaza: “Attacks in Gaza and Golan Heights kill more than 40, many of them children.”  The subheadline reveals even more anti-Israel bias by the Washington Post: “An Israeli strike in Gaza killed at least 30 people.  In the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a rocket attack the military blamed on Hezb’allah left 11 people dead.”

Thus, for the Washington Post, when 30 people die in Gaza, that story leads, and the strike is definitively attributed, to Israel, but if 11 children in Israel die from a rocket attack, they are “people” (not minors), and the attribution is less certain and only “blamed on” Hezb’allah by the Israeli military, with the whole thing happening in “the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights,” which obscures the fact that the U.S. recognizes Israeli sovereignty over that land and, worse still, invites some readers to think the massacre might have somehow been justified.

As if the headline and subheadline didn’t do enough to hide Israeli victims of Hezb’allah aggression, the 52-word “article” about the attack on Israel is accompanied by a totally unrelated, 36-second video about an IDF strike in Gaza.

The Washington Post’s negligent reporting continued until July 30, when criticism prompted an editor’s note in the print edition, admitting that the “headline and subheadline that accompanied a July 29 Page One photo and article about Israeli strikes on Hezb’allah targets in Lebanon did not provide adequate context.”

Defective reporting by the Washington Post also includes a use of anonymous sources far in excess of any other major news organization, according to a July 29 study that found “serious professional journalistic failings.”

Now consider the New York Times’ July 27 coverage, which included two breaking news email alerts about Olympic swimming results but nothing about 12 children murdered by Hezb’allah while playing soccer in Israel.  And yet the paper’s sympathy for murdered children was reactivated just two days later, when an NYT news alert reported that “two children were killed and several others injured in a knife attack at a youth dance class in the English town of Southport.”

And just like the Washington Post, the New York Times obscures the culpability of the aggressor while downplaying the identity of Israel’s victims and Israel’s rights to the territory where the attack occurred: “Rocket From Lebanon Kills at Least 12 in Israeli-Controlled Golan Heights.”  The subheadline notes that “Israel blamed Hezb’allah, which denied responsibility,” and the article describes the war crime as just “a rocket from Lebanon” whose victims are “mostly teenagers and children, according to the Israeli military,” as if none of the details is certain because the source is the Israeli military. 

Had “a rocket from Israel” killed 12 Gazan children playing soccer, it would have sparked massive global condemnations prompted by headline news about a callous Israeli air strike.  The reports would spotlight the dead children to maximize sympathy for Gazans and anger at Israelis, and the Olympic soccer games now underway would hold a moment of silence for the Gazan children killed for playing football.

Such lopsided “reporting” and reactions explain how global opinion ends up so misinformed about Israel’s immensely complicated and vulnerable geopolitical situation, whether in Gaza or Lebanon.  There has been virtually no coverage of the 80,000 Israelis from northern Israel who have been refugees in their own country, forced to abandon their homes after Hezb’allah’s frequent rocket attacks began unprovoked on October 8.  For nearly every day of the last nine months, Iran-backed Hezb’allah has launched rockets, drones, and other projectiles at Israel, killing 43 Israelis, including 25 civilians.

Hardly any media reported on how Hezb’allah’s “Radwan Force” rehearsed an assault on northern Israel in February of 2023.  Indeed, global news organizations have virtually ignored obvious warnings since at least 2017 that the Iran-backed terrorist organization was advancing its war goals against Israel by amassing an arsenal that was bigger than what most Mideast states held.  But when Israel is inevitably compelled to act against the ever-growing threat from its northern neighbor, the media will suddenly wake up to report on all of the Lebanese civilians and infrastructure harmed by Israel.

Tragically, the country that used to be “the Paris of the Middle East” has already been sapped by Iran’s proxy.  Beyond the decades of mismanagement, political paralysis, and corruption attributable to Hezb’allah, the group was likely responsible for the 2019 port blast of ammonium nitrate, a chemical used to make explosives that the terror group has reportedly stored in several European countries.  Unsurprisingly, in 2021 Hezb’allah threatened one of the Lebanese judges investigating the blast.

Yet, just as the global media and world powers were deafeningly silent about the ever-growing threat of Hamas up until October 7, they have similarly ignored Hezb’allah’s countless violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions.  The same media and global powers that will obsess about how much Israel is destroying Lebanon have for years acquiesced to the root cause of this inevitable destruction: Hezb’allah’s repeated and flagrant violations of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and prohibits any Hezb’allah military presence south of the Litani River, effectively creating a 30-mile buffer zone down to the Israel-Lebanon border.

The international community has remained deafeningly silent while the Iran-backed terror group has stockpiled about 150,000 rockets and missiles, not only undermining the sovereignty of the Lebanese state, but practically condemning Lebanon to the war against Israel so wanted by Iran.  Such a potent arsenal could overwhelm Israel’s air defense systems, effectively compelling Israel to conduct massive pre-emptive air strikes to eliminate as much as of the threat as possible in the first days of an all-out war, which would of course leave Lebanon in ruins.

The U.N. has been embarrassingly impotent and untrue to its foundational principles of preventing war.  But extreme anti-Israel bias has also discredited the U.N.’s moral authority, as evidenced by the U.N.’s total disregard for about 100,000 Israelis who have been made refugees by the Iranian proxies on Israel’s borders.  A July 2nd report by U.N. Watch concludes that “both the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the UN Special Rapporteur on Internally displaced people (IDPs) ... the two UN representatives one would expect to champion the rights of the displaced Israelis — have been largely silent on the issue.”

Enabled by media bias and failed international institutions, Iran-backed Hezb’allah effectively controls the Lebanese state, but without any political accountability.  Indeed, the Lebanese public is essentially hostage to Hezb’allah’s reckless impulses and Iran’s adventurous dictates.

Iran must feel particularly satisfied: even where its terrorist proxy officially governs and therefore should be unequivocally held accountable, in Gaza, Hamas still gets a pass because global pressure is entirely focused on Israel.  And just as the world has unfairly faulted Israel for the destruction of Gaza caused by a jihadi death cult supported by Iran for decades, so too will Israel be wrongly condemned for the destruction of Lebanon occasioned by Iran’s terror proxy there. But the international community will have only itself to blame for the next war in Lebanon. 

Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic submarine thriller about Iranian nukes, Hamas, and Hezb’allah.

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