ISRAEL ALWAYS outwits ABC NEWS

From: Harold Knight
To: support@abcnews.go.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2006 6:33 PM
Subject: ABCNEWS.com EDITORIAL

Dear ABC News with Charles Gibson,

Your surreal coverage of the conflagration Israel is causing in the Middle East would be laughable if it were not so immoral and tragic.

That Israel is permitted carte blanche by the United States and Europe to destroy the civilian infrastructure of a free country with a democratically elected government is only evidence of the decadence of American foreign policy in regard to the Middle East. That your broadcast never once mentioned the following realities is evidence that you are not providing news coverage at all, but are propagandizing for the United States administration and Israeli government policy.

The realities:

1) The instability along the Israeli-Lebanese border results from the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are still refugees there, sixty years after being driven from their homes by the nascent Israeli government in what the Palestinians (and all Arab peoples in the area) refer to as "The Catastrophe," but which is never referred to in American media.

2) The history of Hezbollah begins with the 1982 occupation of Beirut and southern Lebanon by Israel. Israel invaded the country in an effort to control members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) who had settled there. There would be no Hezbollah were it not for the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982, just as there would be no Hamas without the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

3) While it may be true that Hezbollah taunted Israel at the beginning of this "conflict" (as you so charmingly call it) by capturing two Israeli soldiers (has anyone in your organization ever stopped to think how ridiculous it is for an army that has totally subjugated one people for 39 years, and is now destroying the civilian infrastructure of a sovereign nation to call itself a "DEFENSE FORCE?"), the response of Israel is a pre-meditated and planned attack on a defenseless country that is so over-reaching that Lebanon may never again be able to function as a nation (which is, of course, what Israel plans).

4) Your chattiness with Israeli army officers, your making heroes out of the obscenely privileged and media-friendly Euro-American tourists and foreign workers while totally ignoring Lebanese citizens, and your constant glorifying of Israel as somehow the innocent "victim" in this conflagration MAKE YOU COMPLICIT IN THE HUMAN DISASTER BEFALLING THE WORLD.

I have one question for you. Perhaps you, in your great wisdom---reporting with such accuracy and sympathy---can answer one question: with the Israelis intent upon destroying Lebanon and Gaza, what will their "defense" policy be when all of the infrastructures of all of their neighbors are destroyed and they still have not put an end to the resistance to their dream of Eretz Israel? What will they do when there are no more bridges to bomb or supposed "terrorist" houses to destroy? And what will be the United States policy in supporting whatever it is the Israelis do next?

Dr. Harold Knight
Rhetoric Faculty, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
Music Director, St. Paul Lutheran Church (ELCA) Farmers Branch, TX http://www.elca.org/middleeast/