Friday, August 25, 2006 · Last updated 11:35 a.m. PT
Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV survived attacks
By ZEINA KARAM ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Its headquarters was leveled, its antennas pounded, its transmissions jammed and Web site hacked. Yet, throughout 34 days of ferocious fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the group's Al-Manar TV stayed on the air - mocking Israeli military power from studios in secret bunkers.
How is a mystery. For security reasons, Al-Manar officials won't say where they located makeshift studios. The station stayed on the air even after its main offices south of Beirut were flattened by Israeli warplanes, beaming out live talk shows with political guests. Newscasts were broadcast on schedule.
Now that the war has ended, Al-Manar's public relations chief Ibrahim Farhat said the broadcaster would rebuild its bombed-out headquarters. But its plans have not yet come together about where and how quickly. He said the station was still taking stock of its losses.
During the conflict, which began July 12 after Hezbollah killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two in a cross-border raid, the station routinely aired reports on guerrilla rockets strikes on northern Israel and ground battles with Israeli troops.
Perhaps the most important broadcasts carried exclusive videotaped speeches by Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who went into hiding when the war began.
And within hours of a U.N.-brokered cease-fire that ended the fighting on Aug. 14, Al-Manar came out of hiding and into the sunshine, its reporters anchoring a live program in the midst of the rubble of destroyed buildings in Beirut's southern suburbs.
advertising "A flame that will not be extinguished," read the new slogan beneath the station's logo that was hoisted on surrounding, bombed-out buildings.
"It (Al-Manar) fought alongside the guerrillas ... fielding a unique experience of tenacity with great commitment," wrote George Hayek, a TV columnist for Lebanon's leading daily newspaper, An-Nahar. "Its employees were like the soldiers on the battlefield."
Farhat said the station was able to continue broadcasting through the efforts of its employees. "Certainly, there were many difficulties, but the will to confront was bigger and stronger," he told The Associated Press.
He said contingency plans to face such a situation were made several years ago, after the U.S. decision in December 2004 to place the station on its list of terror organizations. Earlier that year, the station was blocked from satellite programming in Australia and had to struggle with France to keep it from taking similar measures after its transmission of an anti-Semitic miniseries was denounced by Jewish lobby groups.
The series - "Al-Shatat," Arabic for "The Diaspora" - was based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" - the 20th century anti-Semitic text purporting to describe a plan to achieve Jewish global domination - and depicted among other scenes the killing of a Christian child on the orders of a rabbi so the child's blood could be added to matzos for Passover.
On Wednesday, a Pakistani businessman in New York was arrested and charged with providing satellite broadcasts of Al-Manar to New York-area customers.
"They (Israelis) were trying to silence Al-Manar during peace, we knew it was only a matter of time before they tried to do that by force," Farhat said.
Al-Manar's headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut was leveled in an airstrike in the early days of the monthlong war. The TV station went off the air for just a few minutes when hackers broke into its transmissions but has since been broadcast without stop, despite repeated airstrikes that knocked down transmission towers across the country. Israeli warplanes attacked an Al-Manar antenna just 15 minutes before the cease-fire took hold on Aug. 14.
Since then, the station, which obtained its license from the Lebanese government in 1997 and is watched by many across the Arab world and elsewhere, has been broadcasting live programming from secret bunkers and bombed out areas in south and eastern Lebanon and the southern suburbs, often interviewing women who claim to be the mothers, as well as other relatives, of those killed in the Israeli attacks.
Al-Manar also airs blatant propaganda videos of its fighters - often firing Katyushas from rocket launchers - anthems to rally fighters and marches that glorify Hezbollah guerrillas.
One of the clips shows smiling Israeli generals and prime ministers juxtaposed against an Israeli flag, ending with the words "Terrorism has found a state." Another shows dead and wounded Israeli casualties being evacuated from southern Lebanon, with the words: "Your wretched fate."
The clips are signed by Hezbollah's "war media" department, in charge of recording battles and operations on the battlefield and editing them for propaganda purposes.
Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres recently ridiculed Al-Manar's coverage.
"They can sing all the songs they want. We know the realities on the ground," he said in an interview with the pan-Arab Al-Arabiya station.
President Bush said it could take time for the people of Lebanon and the world to come to the "sober realization" that Hezbollah lost the war.
"The first reaction of course of Hezbollah and its supporters is to declare victory. I guess I would have done the same thing if I were them," Bush said last week.
Regardless of who won on the battlefield, employees at Al-Manar are confident they have won having survived the war.
"I feel so proud that we kept Al-Manar on the air," says Farhat. "And they should know they will never succeed in silencing us."