Unholy, Indeed I rarely watch The Agency, a CBS drama set inside a fictionalized Central Intelligence Agency, but this week's episode, a rerun called "Unholy Alliances" caught my attention.

In it, the head of the CIA is paid a visit by head of the Palestinian Authority's intelligence service, asking for help in cracking down on Hamas, the Palestinian terror group. Interesting, I thought, and kept watching.

Shortly, the head of the CIA is also visited by the head of the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, demanding to know why the American intelligence chief has been meeting with the PA's intelligence chief. The CIA director then concocts a plan to set up a meeting between the head of the Israeli and Palestinian intelligence services. To make a long story short, some Americans are wounded and some Israelis killed in a terrorist attack shortly after arriving in Israel, and operatives from the CIA are sent to Israel to track down the perpetrators.

At this point, the viewers are lead to believe that Palestinian terrorists are behind the attack, clearly an effort to sabotage efforts to bring the PA and Israeli intelligence services together in a joint effort to wipe out Hamas.

There are, no doubt, some Palestinians who would like to put an end to Hamas and its terror tactics and negotiate a real peace with Israel. And this episode of The Agency seemed to be headed toward a somewhat balanced message: Israel and right-thinking Palestinians ought to work together to wipe out terror groups like Hamas.

But that's not where the episode ultimately took viewers. No, viewers were instead treated to an anti-Israel polemic, a piece of propaganda that Yasser Arafat and his terror goons must have loved.

As the story evolved, the terrorist attack on the Americans and Israelis was perpetrated by Jews, while almost every single Palestinian portrayed in the show was a model of moderation. The only Palestinian "terrorist" in the episode is a young boy, who seems hardly threatening at all, while the head of the Mossad is seen as a revenge-minded crazy who doesn't want to even talk with his Palestinian counterpart, let alone help him. The head of Palestinian intelligence is shown as a dapper, well-dressed, urbane moderate who just wants peace, and when he is killed in a car-bomb explosion, the perpetrators are not members of Hamas, trying to sabotage attempts to wipe out Hamas, but Jews who don't want peace with Palestinians. And not just any Jews, but members of the top echelon of Israeli intelligence. And not only do they not want peace, they want to push every single living Palestinian out of the West Bank in the pursuit of creating a "Greater Israel."

Talk about turning reality on its head. In the real Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is the Palestinian Authority that continues to coddle those who want to see Israel completely eliminated, while it is Israel that has repeatedly offered generous land-for-peace deals that aim for side-by-side existence of Israel and a Palestinian state. In the real Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is Palestinian terrorists who use car bombs and suicide bombers to blow up Jews.

But not on CBS.

UPDATE: Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs (LGF) [http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com], has a post on anti-Israel propaganda at the New York Times (NYT), in the form of a cartoon series. In the post-September 11 world where, as GW Bush so accurately defined it, "if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists", where, exactly, is the NYT?

UPDATE: A LGF reader comments: I taped that CBS show Saturday night expecting to see an intelligent episode, yet I was treated to an anti Israel polemic. All Israelis were portrayed as hard lined ideologues and the Palis were shown to be really reasonable nice guys. The whole premise was ludicrous - that Israeli right wing Jews and Hamas would cooperate to destroy the phony "peace process" and that fantical Jews (Yigal Amir types) could infiltrate into the highest echelons of the Israeli security services. The show was absolutely terrible!

UPDATE: The Agency is produced by Wolfgang Petersen, a German-born director who now works in Hollywood and has produced or directed such movies as Das Boot, In the Line of Fire, Air Force One and The Perfect Storm. He once said this of In the Line of Fire: "I like to tell big stories, but I don't like those that are too simple, too predictable. I like characters that aren't stereotypes and one-dimensional, and correspond to the reality of our increasingly complex world." Oh. Really?

Bill Hobbs is a journalist and commentator in Nashville, Tennessee. He publishes articles and observations on his website: http://hobbsonline.blogspot.com. This article first appeared on Hobbs On Line.

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