Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 11:48:08 -0500
From: mark rosenblit <markrosenblit@attbi.com>
To: Hartford Courant <letters@courant.com>
RAW SEWAGE
Israel recently destroyed the empty headquarters of the Palestinian Authority broadcasting system in retaliation for the January 17, 2002 bat mitzvah massacre in Hadera, asserting that official Palestinian television and radio habitually and relentlessly incite hatred of, and violence against, Jews. However, Knight Ridder Newspapers, in a story redistributed by the Hartford Courant ["Media Complex Blasted", January 20, 2002], asserted that "the Israelis acted to rein in a medium that gives voice to the public's anger at the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip".
With this facile explanation, the Knight Ridder story paints Israel's action as mere pique over unfavorable reportage and thus petty revenge; and it thereby marginalizes the crucial role that official P.A. media plays in promoting the murder of Jews by means of its monopoly of the airwaves. This is a little like claiming that the United States obliterated the forces and infrastructure of Afghanistan's Taliban government due, not to its facilitation of the murder of thousands of Americans, but rather to its bothersome anti-American posture in diplomatic forums.
Furthermore, if mere media insistence on making Judenrein (cleansed of Jews) the districts of Judea, Samaria and Gaza were to be a litmus test for destruction, then Israel would also have to dismantle the broadcast facilities of much of its own -- and the resident foreign -- media.
No, the offense of official P.A. media is not in venting their "public's anger", but rather in providing religious justification for the annihilation of Jews. A typical example is a June 8, 2001 televised sermon by Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim Maadi in which he explicitly praised the June 1, 2001 suicide slaughter of 20 Jewish teenagers at a Tel Aviv nightclub and called for more such suicide attacks, declaring: "Woe upon whomever will not raid, and not tell tales of raids. Woe upon whomever does not give his children Jihad [Holy War] education... Blessed is he who fights Jihad in the name of Allah, blessed is he who goes on a raid in the name of Allah, blessed is he who dons a vest of explosives on himself or on his children, and goes into the depth of the Jews in their sinful discotheque. I ask of Allah that we see the Knesset building collapsing on the heads of the Jews."
For this raw sewage the P.A. media and its masters deserve much more than the destruction of their empty headquarters.
© Mark Rosenblit