Informant38

Walt? Mearsheimer?

"Check the cable news shows or the Internets and you will find them saturated with coverage of the missile strike on Haifa today and its gristly effects:

The train platform, slick with blood and littered with chunks of fallen roof... Twisted metal dangled from above and debris covered the site where train company employees had just arrived for the beginning of the Israeli workweek. Two trains were charred with their windows blown out.

The Israeli government, naturally enough, is vowing massive retribution - although against who and what and how isn't very clear.

But I've been having trouble finding much Western media coverage at all of this atrocity:

Israel steeply escalated its military campaign against Hizbollah in Lebanon yesterday with a series of air strikes that left more than 35 civilians dead, including a single strike on a convoy of families fleeing the fighting in a village near Tyre in the south of the country that killed more than 20 people, most of them children.

[...]
At times, this fairly overt bias has led to some rather odd results, as when one media account from a couple of days ago (sorry, can't find the link now) quoted an Israeli official sternly warning that further strikes on Israeli urban centers wouldn't be tolerated, and then went on to note, without any apparent sense of irony, that Israeli missiles had just flattened the Palestinian Economics Ministry in downtown Gaza City.
It may be that this is, at least in part, a result of the relative difficulties involved in covering the war from the two sides -- random missile strikes notwithstanding, northern Israel is still safer and easier to move around in than southern Lebanon, which has been virtually paralyzed. But still it's hard not to think of the line from Steven Spielberg's Munich, in which the Israeli hit man contemptuously proclaims: "The only blood I care about is Jewish blood."
Under the circumstances, it's understandable the Israelis would feel that way -- although, to their credit, many, maybe even most of them, don't. But for the Western (which means America-centric) media to take roughly the same position only shows what a warped and biased view of the rest of the world we get here in the United States."

billmon/whiskeybar 16.Jul.06