With regard to Israel, we need a little balance in reportage.  The lead story, top of the fold will tell how Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza strip killed a civilian and wounded 25 others, setting fires and causing chaos.  It leaves the reader with the impression that Israelis just bomb the Gaza strip willy-nilly, just for giggles. 

What the media will fail to mention is that the air strikes were retaliation for 4 Kassam rockets and 11 mortar shells that had been fired at southern Israel from Gaza (jpost.com). They will also fail to tell you is that the reason civilians are killed is that Hamas plants its artillery near hospitals and schools and residential areas so that if Israeli strikes take out Hamas rocket launchers they are bound to harm civilians. Hamas uses the innocent as human shields. 

The media would also have us believe that the Jews usurped the area from the “Palestinians.”  Actually Palestine was never a state or a country.  There were simply "Arabs" who moved into a geo-political area of the Ottoman Empire called "Palestine.”  About half of today’s Israelis are Mizrachim, descended from Jews who have been in the land since ancient times, about 3200 B.C.   

When Caliph Omar conquered Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt in 636 C.E. Jews, massacred in huge numbers, were forced to flee the inland villages towards the coast.  So it was not the Jews who usurped “Palestinian” lands; it’s Arabs that even today vow to carry out Calip Omars mission and drive the Jews into the sea. 

Let’s consider a modern day scenario.  Say the Europeans who settled in this country dispersed the native populations into Europe and other parts of the world.  Say they were persecuted everywhere, slaughtered, on the brink annihilation. Suppose the international community decided to take action and force America to provide the native populations a permanent settlement, a little piece of land half the size Washington’s Bainbridge Island, only 15 percent of which is arable.   What if the other residents of Bainbridge Island launched the 2,653 missiles and rockets at the natives supported and financed by the rest of the United states of America, all intent on pushing the natives into the sea? (That’s the number of rockets that were launched against Israel last year.)

Whom would you side with: the brutal Americans attempting to drive the natives into the sea or the persecuted peoples trying desperately to hold on to a little scrap of their homeland?