Lebanon, Israel And America's Blind Eye ...

Andrew Gumbel is an excellent English journalist and successful author living in and working out of Los Angeles. He also happens to be one of the best none-whore media men still around, especially in modern day Bushamerica.

He's eminently experienced in what he does best -- getting the truth out -- even if and when it hurts. He's well traveled, well educated, well versed and well informed with regard to the things that matter most (or should do), to the regular man & woman in the street. In a nutshell Andrew Gumbel is one of the good guys, and you can take our word on that since we have it on the (very), best authority.

Moreover, Gumbel's a guy whose press reports and other writings should be required reading in the United States. Yet he's a man whose name won't ring many bells with most regular Americans. And that's a shame, since they simply don't know what they're missing -- in many more ways than one.

Here's a snip of a piece of his, published just today in one of Britain's best selling mainstream newspapers 'The Independent', for which he writes regularly.

America's one-eyed view of war: Stars, stripes, and the Star of David

There are two sides to every conflict - unless you rely on the US media for information about the battle in Lebanon. Viewers have been fed a diet of partisan coverage which treats Israel as the good guys and their Hizbollah enemy as the incarnation of evil.

Andrew Gumbel reports from Los Angeles - 15 August 2006

If these were normal times, the American view of the conflict in Lebanon might look something like the street scenes that have electrified the suburbs of Detroit for the past four weeks.

In Dearborn, home to the Ford Motor Company and also the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, up to 1000 people have turned out day after day to express their outrage at the Israeli military campaign and mourn the loss of civilian life in Lebanon. At one protest in late July, 15,000 people - almost half of the local Arab American population - showed up in a sea of Lebanese flags, along with anti-Israeli and anti-Bush slogans.

A few miles to the north, in the heavily Jewish suburb of Southfield, meanwhile, the Congregation Shaarey Zedek synagogue has played host to passionate counter-protests in which the US and Israeli national anthems are played back to back and demonstrators have asserted that it is Israel's survival, not Lebanon's, that is at stake here.

Such is the normal exercise of free speech in an open society, one might think. But these are not normal times.

Here's another tasty teaser taken from the same story.

It is not just the US media which tilts in a pro-Israeli direction. Congress, too, is remarkably unified in its support for the Israeli government, and politicians more generally understand that to criticize Israel is to risk jeopardising their future careers.

When Antonio Villaraigosa, the up-and-coming Democratic Mayor of Los Angeles, was first invited to comment on the Middle East crisis, he sounded a note so pro-Israeli that he was forced to apologise to local Muslim and Arab community leaders.

There is far less public debate of Israeli policy in the US, in fact, than there is in Israel itself.

Then there's this quick clip & paste.

"There is no major figure in American political life who has been willing to raise the issue of the legitimate needs of the Palestinian people, or even talk about them as human beings," Lerner said.

"The organised Jewish community has transformed the image of Judaism into a cheering squad for the Israeli government, whatever its policies are.

That is just idolatry, and goes against all the warnings in the Bible about giving too much power to the king or the state."

Read the rest of his latest report.