know your enemy

In biblical language, your “enemy” is someone working against you. To be someone’s enemy is not an emotional response, as much as it is practical application of emotion. Hezbollah is an enemy of the United States. They are the group responsible for killing almost 250 marines back in the 80’s in Beirut, among other things, and they are still an enemy today. Whether you like it or not if you are an American, if you can’t stand American policy, you are a member of the “hate Bush” club and the all the rest, Hezbollah is the enemy. You don’t get the option of choosing who your enemy is, at least from a biblical viewpoint. Your enemy chooses you.

This is why it is so amazing to me the use of photoshopped altered photos (one was a guy dead and then in another later photo he was walking around again! Must be named, “Lazarus”…), staged photos (various brand new Disney toys put on top of a pile of rubble) and the rest, that were being used in the New York Times and other major newspapers until they were called out on it. Turned out that most were from one specific photographer, but they are still coming from other sources after all his stuff was pulled from their websites.

Blatant propaganda is not the place of newspapers in a free society. Obviously, one can’t “balance” everything, yet, overwhelming, news organizations are actually finding themselves going out of their way to aid the message of the enemy. An unbelievable attempt at this occurred yesterday from an AP report. Hezbollah is continuing to fire rockets at Israel. The latest rockets just happened to miss by not reaching far enough. They didn’t get across the border. Here is the AP headline:

Rockets hit Lebanon despite cease-fire
Those Israeli’s are at it again, right? Zionist pigs! Except it is Hezbollah firing the rockets! 99 out of 100 people would not know that or guess that from the headline. Not until the second paragraph do you get the true story:

Highlighting the fragility of the peace, Hezbollah guerrillas fired at least 10 Katyusha rockets that landed in southern Lebanon early Tuesday, the Israeli army said, adding that nobody was injured. The army said that none of the rockets, which were fired over a two-hour period, had crossed the border and so it had not responded.

Help me understand here. I am looking for one example (e-mail me link) of mainstream media doing as severe a slant on a news headline in making Israel look like the “good guy.” Not a pro-Israel headline, but a headline that casts Israel in a good light, though the facts of the article are opposite.

We have known for some time that mainstream news appears to be biased opinion more than news. The challenge is we are not talking about taxes, political parties or the environment. For those of us who are Americans, we are talking about people who want to kill us. We can’t say, “I have no enemies. This is not my conflict.” Alas, we don’t get to choose our enemies. They choose us.