The New York Times resident Fig Tree, public editor Byron Calame, has a piece in today's paper on photographs used during the recent Hezbollah/Israeli conflict. I'm not that interested in the main subject of his column, but this bit at the end got to me.

A final thought on morality. Some supporters of Israel, who contend that Hezbollah wants to destroy that country and invaded to trigger the latest fighting, have asserted that morality should be considered by The Times in deciding what pictures to publish. But I can’t accept their questioning — on the basis of the goals and motives they attribute to Hezbollah — of the validity of a photograph that could arouse sympathy for the Lebanese. The obligation of The Times is to provide a fair and accurate perspective on the fighting and its impact in both pictures and words — presenting both the good and evil that armed conflict can bring.

What gets me about this is Calame's willful ignorance of what Hezbollah is all about. Supporters of Israel "contend that Hezbollah wants to destroy that country." Calame makes it seem that that "final solution" is in doubt.

From Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah's own lips:

One of the central reasons for creating Hizbullah was to challenge the Zionist program in the region. Hizbullah still preserves this principle, and when an Egyptian journalist visited me after the liberation and asked me if the destruction of Israel and the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem were Hizbullah's goal, I replied: "That is the principal objective of Hizbullah, and it is no less sacred than our [ultimate] goal. The generation that lived through the creation of this entity is still alive. This generation watches documentaries and reads documents that show that the land conquered was called Palestine, not Israel." We face an entity that conquered the land of another people, drove them out of their land, and committed horrendous massacres. As we see, this is an illegal state; it is a cancerous entity and the root of all the crises and wars and cannot be a factor in bringing about a true and just peace in this region. Therefore, we cannot acknowledge the existence of a state called Israel, not even far in the future, as some people have tried to suggest. Time does not cancel the legitimacy of the Palestinian claim. (Hasan Nasrallah, interview, Egyptian television, June 2, 2000).

It took me three minutes to find. Calame and the Times can refuse to take sides all they want, but don't pretend not to know -- or care -- what the self-professed goals of each side are.