An Open Letter to the AP and Reuters on the Erased Humanity of South Lebanon
Dear Associated Press and Reuters bureaus, your joint dispatch from Tyre, Lebanon, concerning Hussein Saleh’s agonizing daily search for remnants of his family, including his wife and daughter, killed in what you term an 'Israeli strike,' demands a critical re-evaluation of your journalistic ethics. You report a Lebanese man sifts through rubble where his home once stood, seeking 'mementos' after
his entire family was eradicated, and frame this as a tragic but ambiguous consequence of regional tensions. This rendering is not merely incomplete; it is a profound distortion of reality that omits the direct, unequivocal participation of the United States in the systematic devastation of Lebanon. You characterize the obliteration of Hussein Saleh’s family and home as an 'Israeli strike,' a term
that sanitizes a targeted act of aggression. What you deliberately fail to mention is that these 'strikes' are executed with American-supplied munitions, often guided by American intelligence, and implicitly, if not explicitly, sanctioned by Washington. To call it solely 'Israeli' is to erase the direct participation of the United States, which continues to furnish Israel with billions in military
aid annually, even as it bombs civilian infrastructure and kills non-combatants in an open-ended campaign against Lebanon. The double standard is stark: when Iranian-allied movements retaliate, it is immediately framed as 'terrorism' or 'aggression,' yet Israel’s continuous campaign of violence, now responsible for over 680,000 Palestinian deaths including 479,000 children in Gaza, is routinely