The Washington Post published a story Sunday featuring a pathetic a tour of sorts backed by the US-designated terrorist group Hezbollah. With no counterbalance to the propaganda-laced piece, titled "Hezbollah takes journalists in Lebanon on a tour to prove Trump wrong," the article was anything but news.
"On tour with Hezbollah in Lebanon, where they're out to show that they, not Trump, are the ones fighting terrorism," Beirut chief Liz Sly tweeted with a link to the story, which she wrote with fellow correspondents Suzan Haidamous and Heba Habib.
Saturday's tour consisted of the terrorist group showing "a party of journalists on a tour that helped explain, trumpeting the results of the militia’s recent fight against Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate in barren mountains near the northeastern Lebanese town of Arsal," the piece stated.
They added: "Hezbollah officials said they took journalists on the tour to demonstrate that Hezbollah, not the United States, is the one doing most of the fighting against terrorism."
Though the article acknowleged Hezbollah is backed by Iran, it failed to mention its dirty work outside of Lebanon, such as backing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's genocidal civil war and threatening its neighbor Israel. Instead, the piece quoted Mohammed Afif, who said: "We are the force that fights terrorism while the United States continues to support terrorism in many forms."
The authors tied Afif's remark to imply that "a two-week offensive by Hezbollah in the Arsal area that drove out scores of al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters belonging to the group known as Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as well as several hundred former Free Syrian Army rebels — whose allies until recently had received support from the United States" is an accomplishment, when it is actually just one terrorist group combating others in what is a regional power vacuum.
The piece noted the tour consisted of exploring Bekaa Valley, even going "within 200 yards of Syria before being hurriedly turned around by Hezbollah guides." Maybe the terrorist group, to prevent a PR nightmare, did not want to show its support for Assad. "Nowhere was there any evidence of the Lebanese state, which has struggled to assert its role in the years since the 1975-1990 civil war saw the country overrun by scores of private militias," omitting the country's militia battles in the mid-2000s.
Moreover, the article consisted of this sentence: "There is no sign of its Lebanese equivalent." Of course, because Hezbollah controls the government, led by allies such as Lebanese presdient Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Saad Hariri, with a farcical opposition.
"As the sun set over the mountains where the final battle will be fought, Afif, the Hezbollah spokesman, announced the conclusion of the tour, apologizing to the journalists who had gotten lost and reminding them of the purpose of the visit," the piece concluded. "'We are the ones defeating terrorism,' he said. 'The Americans and their allies are the ones who are supporting terrorism, and they are the last ones who should be criticizing Hezbollah.'"
Hezbollah should be the last ones criticizing terrorism, which is their craft. Mixing propaganda and news is a recipe for publishing just the former—which the Washington Post concocted for a terrorist group whose leader said the US is the "mother of terrorism" and that its ally Israel is "the state of the grandsons of apes and pigs – the Zionist Jews."
