Media Bias... WHAT Media Bias...?

Who could possibly believe that the American mainstream media is biased?

Take a peek at the caption for this newsblurb from ABCNews.com today, and notice the not-so-subtle shift of blame from the Hezb'Allah practitioners of the religion of peace to the Jewish State for daring to defend her citizens from near-ceaseless aggression. "Nearly 200 civilians in Lebanon are dead after six days of bombardment. Israel is demanding Hizbollah [sic] release two kidnapped soldiers."

The conclusion that the ABC News staff apparently wants you to draw is that those nasty, evil, bad Jews are murdering hundreds of innocent civilians all because of two kidnapped soldiers. How unreasonable!

• Utterly absent is any mention of decades of cross-border raids and bombardment by Hezb'Allah


• Completely ignored is the fact that Hezb'Allah is firing Iranian rockets into Jewish neighborhoods - and has been responsible, along with Hamas, for rocketing and shelling Jewish synagogues, hospitals, schools, and homes for a very, very long time
  
• Implied by its seemingly purposeful omission is the fact that Israel has finally had enough and is shooting back and is demanding much more than a release of only "two soldiers"; shockingly, Israel is unconscionably demanding an end to Hezb'Allah's unrelenting efforts to advance the cause of the religion of peace through murder, mayhem, violence against Israeli citizens
  
• Utterly absent is any mention of Hezb'Allah's continuing murder of Jews, using their base in southern Lebanon as a safe haven and the cover of Syria and Iran to protect them from reprisal


• ...in fact, note the media's continued use of "Hezbollah" or "Hizbollah" or some variant, which one cannot help but wonder is a purposeful attempt to mask Hezb'Allah's identity as practitioners of the religion of peace (the word, in Arabic, means "Party of Allah")

...and yet, note the near-unanimous, though often (as in this ABC News blurb) subtly hidden disapproval or outright condemnation of Israel.

So long as it's Jews being killed by practitioners of the religion of peace, the world is sorry, wishes things were different, but hey - we don't live in a perfect world, now do we?

...but as soon as the Jewish State comes to the conclusion that the world is quite happy to sit by mumbling condolences for Jewish suffering and deaths, and muted, half-hearted condemnations for the (you just must admit, completely understandable) violence perpetrated by groups like Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya or "Islamic Resistance Movement") and Hezb'Allah, and decides to take matters into their own hands to stop the rain of death, suddenly the world sits up, takes notice, feeling deeply the hurt of the innocents, demanding an end to the violence, condemning Israel for being the obvious roadblock in the peace process.

Imagine if - oh, say, Canada started shelling American citizens in Michigan, or some other border State. You can bet that after a brief round of trying to come to a peaceful, diplomatic resolution, we'd be bombing our (for the purposes of this analogy, hypothetical) friendly malefactor neighbors to the north back into the equally hypothetical primordial ooze.

(Ed. note: I don't use the analogy of Mexico, since that very scenario does, in fact, seem to be playing out down South yonder-ways... but I digress...)

Imagine if Germany, or Spain started shelling the French; I doubt there'd be much diplomacy at all; Ivory Coast, anybody?

Imagine if Chechnya started shelling Russ- oh, sorry; bad analogy. Of course, surely our Russian allies would exercise at least as admirable and as much restraint as the Jewish State has in the face of unrelenting terrorist atrocities against their people.

Surely.

This has been a brief test of the Emergency Reality System. We now return you to your regularly scheduled chosen worldview, closed-captioned for the reality impaired. Thank you.