War in Gaza Evening 2: Media and Blog Watch

The events in Gaza are proving to be an interesting litmus test for one's ability or inability to think in rational terms about Israel.

The Guardian, we've already demonstrated, is deep in the irrational camp that condemns Israel no matter what. This is getting worse as the hours pass; by now, the evening of the second day of Israel's attack on Hamas, they're into their obsessive mode. As anyone who has ever designed a website will tell you, the most important place on it is the upper left corner, and from there on down and right the significance dwindles; what's below the scrolling line is almost non-existent. So the Guardian this evening has filled the upper left column with a picture from Gaza, and then 14 separate links. Only beneath them all is the forlorn 15th link: Afghan suicide bomb kills 14 children. (I'm linking to their web page here, but it will change by tomorrow. I suppose I could post a print-screen of their travesty, but they're not worth the effort).

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has a long and wordy article by Jorg Bremer. Would I sign him up for an AIPAC seminar? Perhaps not, but it's a reasonable post. So we've got the top German newspaper being far more rational about the Jewish State than an important British one. Funny the way history changes, isn't it.

The BBC tells that the whole Arab world is in an uproar; the proof being that thousands participated in demonstrations today. Thousands? Out of hundreds of millions? Including this enigmatic sentence:

A suicide bomber blew himself up at a rally in Mosul, northern Iraq, killing a protester and wounding 16.

Sort of sounds as if the suicide bomber was for the Israelis, doesn't it.

Among the blogs, Juan Cole sides with the frenzied reports of al-Jezeera, always more reliable in his opinion than, say, the New York Times. His thesis: Israel is committing war crimes. Israel is committing war crimes. Israel is committing war crimes. Do I make myself clear?

Less important than Cole, but even more loony, Dianne Mason has come out of semi-retirement. The last anyone heard of her she was bemoaning Obama's choice of Secretary of State, back in November; then she went silent and one hoped perhaps she'd been knocked off by Madoff's ponzi scheme or some such. Alas, she's back, with a long article about how the Jews don't deserve a state of their own, and since they insist on having one, they do deserve anything the Palestinians try to do to them for the crime of their existence. Not much room for nuanced discussion with that one, is there?

Faux Ibrahim of Rosario, by the way, is so off the map that the best he can think about to write today is some tall tale about Israeli telephone books. Feverish, if you ask me.