Their seething hatred of Israel transcends facts and journalistic standards.

The hatred just goes to harm their own credibility.

I get the feeling in your world everything is caused by Jews and neo-cons and probably Rupert Murdoch.

And what do you want to do to the nation run by irrational medieval zealots?

I was talking about the coverage in the West - because we’re part of the West - sorry if that pisses you off. If I was somewhere else, I’d be talking about somewhere else.

I didn’t say they let journalists into Gaza during the war. I said they let journalists into their country.

You have an extraordinarily anglo-centric viewpoint, and I don’t know whether it’s purely cultural or simply because you haven’t been around that long and therefore simply have not had the time to assimilate the same amount of information as someone older than you.

I am hampered somewhat by the limits on URLs, but let’s start with your claim that Israel let foreign journalists into Gaza during the war; Israel banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza in early November, and notwithstanding the ruling in their courts, continued to do so throughout the war. Try reading this article in that well-known outpost of Islamic fundamentalism, the Christian Science Monitor:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1126/p06s01-wogn.html

There are many, many more articles all saying exactly the same thing; all you have to do is google it.

It was obvious from that time that, notwithstanding the supposed respect for the rule of law and the freedom of the press in a free country, Israel’s government proposed to ignore it.

So why do you keep saying that Israel let foreign journalists in?

It’s particularly unfortunate when you couple such an easily refuted claim with the accusation that I ‘probably believe the 8 Protocols of the Elders of Zion wasn’t a forgery’;

I am scrupulous about ensuring that I can support anything I say with evidence, which is a great deal more than can be said for you; you seem to believe that emotion is a substitute for rational analysis based on the facts.

It is a fact that watching your children burn to death in front of you usually incites hatred of the people responsible for their deaths; do you really believe that if we all pretended that it didn’t happen the woman in question is going to forget all about it once she gets out of hospital herself? Should the UN pretend that its buildings were not attacked because that will just make the Israelis attack more UN buildings? Admittedly the Israelis do seem to make a habit of it, so maybe the UN should just keep quiet and hope that all the non-western members of the UN won’t notice. In reality, attempting the Basil Fawlty approach of not mentioning the war is likely to be as successful as he was.

As for your exceedingly anglo-centric belief that calls for intervention are directed at the west, I think you will find that the majority of calls for intervention are made to the UN as well as to Arab heads of state who do nothing, and that the Arab heads of state are greatly disturbed since they see the non-Arab state, Iran, as gaining influence with ordinary Arabs across the region.

Abbas is a spent force, having lost all credibility by appearing to condone war crimes against his own people, and his chances of winning re-election in free elections are rather low. His term of office expired on 9th January. Meanwhile, Israel’s Central Elections Committee has demonstrated its deep sympathy for the death of an Israeli Arab, one of the 3 Israeli citizens killed by Hamas during the war, by voting overwhelmingly to disqualify the two main Arab parties from running in the national elections on Feb. 10. The High Court has overturned it, but the Israeli government is good at ignoring Court rulings, so who knows what will happen.

As I have noted before, Israel and the neo-cons got their war on Gaza as a consolation prize for not being allowed to nuke Iran; Israel pulled out of Gaza before Obama took office because Olmert was stupid enough to provoke George Bush’s spokesman into calling him a liar, and there was not a snowball in hell’s chance of Obama tolerating a similar attempt to manipulate him.

But Israel is unfortunately ruled by stupid people; its military has caught the dreaded US disease of not being able to tolerate the idea of taking casualties, much of its population has an obsessively medieval interest in relics to the point where they will pardon a convicted child killer and hand Hezbollah a massive propaganda coup in exchange for a few boxes of bones, and it sees the prospect of its finances ceasing to be a mere matter of getting whatever it needs from the boundless coffers of the US Treasury.

And if that doesn’t scare you then it should; irrational medieval zealots armed with nukes should scare any sane individual, and trying to appease them by pretending that they are not irrational medieval zealots is not, in my view, a viable option.

Incidentally, I can truthfully say that I have been on the receiving end of Arab nationalist violence; admittedly I was literally a babe in arms at the time, and thus have no recollection of the incidents in question, but who knows what dreadful damage may have been done to my psyche. On the other hand, my father spent 35 year years in the RAF, much of it in the Middle and Far East, and was what is politely described as a weapons specialist. He wasn’t too keen on nukes in the hands of irrational medieval zealots either…

Do you mean Tony Blair?

He’s for the 2-state option. So is Barak Obama - from what his people have said.

Israel is still for expansion and Hamas and enough of the Arab world are still in favour of the ‘push them into the sea’ option - so who knows where it’s going.

They really need to sort the borders out though - they’re unworkable.

What do you think hating Israel will actually achieve?

Rather than listing their crimes.

What actually should happen?

Saddam gassed the Kurds, oppressed the Shi’ia and tyrannised his own people - but everyone disapproves of the Iraq war - and sanctions didn’t work - so what do you think will work in Israel?

I do watch non-English news channels - but I was taking about the West, since when people call for intervention it’s the West it’s directed at.

Judiasm is tiny compared to Christianity and Islam - and is certainly more hated.

If you genuinely believe that a neo-con/Israeli conspiracy is solely responsible for the P.R. mess that Islam is currently in - then you probably believe the 8 Protocols of the Elders of Zion wasn’t a forgery.

I’ve never said Palestinians should cast aside hatred - only pointed out that there is absolutely no point in outsiders hating Israel - since it actually increases the intractability of Zionism rather than decreases it.

There were already tv cameras in Gaza; it is, after all, supposed to be a sovereign entity, even if the Israelis have bombed the Parliament building to rubble, and since we live in the age of mobile phones which can do video very easily, much of the stuff is from mobile phones. The attack apparently using 120-millimeter phosphorus shells on the UN school which killed two children, for example, was caught on video.

And I think your belief that no-one televises Turkey, Russia, Iraq, China is more than a tad eccentric; do you mean that British tv doesn’t televise it? Because the world is rather bigger than Britain, and our tv is no more universal than Fox News is; try some of the non-english speaking rolling news programmes sometime, and you will see a rather different picture. As for the bit about the smallest religious group, Judaism is estimated to have 14 million adherents, putting them well ahead of the Jains, the Bahai, Shintoists and an awful lot of smaller groups.

And then there’s the most hated; the neocons have done their best to make Muslims adopt that role, but with limited success; they will, I have no doubt, keep trying.

Israel, of course, claims to be acting on our behalf, pursuing a War on Terror enthusiastically espoused by our government, killing a few hundred children in Gaza. This is chickenfeed alongside the hundreds of thousand of civilians who have died in Iraq, in our war, They all deserved a chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but they are all still dead, and watching your children die of phosphorus burns is not conducive to casting aside hatred:

‘She wept with fury, saying that as farmers she and her family had good relations with Israelis, selling them produce in past years. But now, she said, she wants to see Israel’s leaders — she named the foreign minister and president — “burn like my children burned.”

“They should feel the pain we felt.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/middleeast/22phosphorus.html?ref=middleeast

Israel’s worst crime is letting the T.V. cameras in.

No one intensely hates Turkey, Russia, Iraq, China - or any other country currently involved in ethnic conflicts because they aren’t televised and these countries aren’t made up of the world’s smallest and most hated religious group.

And if you have any hope of breaking this vicious spiral then you are going to have to let go of the desire to believe that everything would be just fine if people would stop being nasty about Israel, and get to grips with the fact that a country which proclaims “baal habayit hishtageya” in the apparent belief that the legitimate laws of war do not apply to it, has a long way to go before it can win hearts and minds around the world.

In actual fact to anyone who knows anything at all about war it should be clear that the IDF have in fact been quite restrained compared to the way that certain other modern armies would, and have, behaved in similar circumstances. For example, consider the way the Russian army behaved in Chechnya (twice) and Georgia just last summer.

I certainly do not recall any anti Russian hysteria in the media and particularly not from the BBC even though the level of destruction, civillian casualties and atrocities were far worse than anything Isreal has done during the Gaza conflict.

One must wonder why the BBC is reporting in this way and whether some high level executives are being paid, and by whom, in order to ensure that reporting is done in a particular way.

I urge those of you who are concerned about the biased nature of the reporting of this conflict to contact the news organisations with your viewpoint. It is only by letting them know that there ARE people out there who want to see a fair and balanced picture of what is going on in the Middle East that they will be influenced to change their style of reporting.