This veteran journalist, who has specialized in covering events in the Middle East, describes the difficulties that Western ruling class media directors are having with their journalists' coverage of the latest Israeli massacre of Palestinians.
There was a time when our politicians and media had one principal fear when covering Middle East wars: that no one should ever call them anti-Semitic.
So corrosive, so vicious was this charge against any honest critic of Israel that merely to bleat the word “disproportionate” – as in any normal wartime exchange rate of Arab-to-Israeli deaths – was to provoke charges of Nazism by Israel’s would-be supporters. Sympathy for Palestinians would earn the sobriquet “pro-Palestinian”, which, of course, means “pro-terrorist”.
Or so it was until the latest bloodbath in Gaza....