‘A terrible job!’

“Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years against the Palestinians…

But the horrors generally fall on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the US political arena [and] in the mainstream US media,” writes Katheleen Christison on the website www.counterpunch.org.
GW asked Katheleen, a former CIA analyst who has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years and the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession on her view of how the media was covering the war in Lebanon.
“From what I’ve seen, the print media has done a terrible job of reporting what is really going on.  No surprise.  The automatic assumption in the US Press, following Bush and the entire US political elite, has been that the Hezbollah attack was unprovoked, that Israel was victimised, and that it has a perfect right to “defend itself,” she told GW.
 “There are occasional pro forma remarks about the need for Israeli restraint, but that’s about all.  There seems to be no concern about the extremely disproportionate nature of Israel’s attack or about the fact that air strikes are targeted largely on civilian areas. There also seems to be no understanding that the months-long Israeli siege and bombardment of Gaza, which has been particularly intense since early June, was a strong motivator of the Hezbollah attack... just as there is never any understanding that Israeli oppression of the Palestinians always angers and stirs up the Arab people who, unlike their leaders, still care about what happens to their Palestinian brothers.”