Time Magazine's Fond Farewell to a Terrorist

Why does the founder of Hezbollah deserve a fawning obituary in Time's review of the year?

Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
16 December '10

What is it about the late Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlalah that makes some media lose all sense of reality? It was the Hezbollah founder's death that prompted CNN's Octavia Nasr to Tweet her regrets and respect for the extremist - an action that with a bit of a push from HonestReporting cost Nasr her job.

Aside from his role as a founder of a vicious terrorist organization, Fadalah also supported suicide bombings and terror attacks inside Israel, engaged in Holocaust denial and, according to Reuters, at the hospital when a nurse asked the ailing cleric what he needed, he replied: "For the Zionist entity to cease to exist."

Yet, Time Magazine saw fit to honor Fadlalah with a fawning obituary in its "Fond Farewell" section of its People of the Year 2010.

(Read full "Time Magazine's Fond Farewell to a Terrorist")

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BBC downplays Hezbollah's history of violence

Just Journalism
10 July '10

This week saw the occurrence of two separate controversies in relation to the death of leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Mohammed Fadlallah. The Lebanese figure, closely associated with Hezbollah, was eulogised online by both the CNN Middle East editor, Octavia Nasr, and the UK’s envoy to Lebanon, Frances Guy.

While neither praised Fadlallah in an official capacity - Nasr made the comment on her Twitter account, while Guy wrote about her personal encounters with him on her blog - both soon came under heavy criticism for their statements. In the case of Nasr, CNN announced that she would no longer be working for the company, and that her tweet ‘did not meet CNN's editorial standards.’

Both of these stories received coverage in the UK media, with all the outlets explaining that Fadlallah was seen as a controversial figure because of his ties to Hezbollah. However, there were noticeable differences in the way that publications presented the militant group.

The Daily Telegraph was the most critical, with its article providing a substantive background on Hezbollah’s history of violence. In ‘Britain's Lebanese ambassador praises Hizbollah founder’, Damien McElroy and Adrian Blomfield noted how the group ‘has been proscribed by the UK as a terrorist organisation since 2008’, and that, after being formed, it had taken ‘dozens of foreigners as hostages, including Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Brian Keenan’. The journalists also cited the outrage of ‘Israeli relatives of those who died during Hizbollah rocket strikes’ and mentioned that Fadlallah had issued fatwas (religious edicts) which ‘authorised suicide bombers who attacked American troops or Israel.’ Hezbollah gained notoriety in 1983 for a suicide attack on a US military base in Lebanon that killed over 300 marines.

(Read full article)

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