Bias of US media is shameful.

It is unfair, if not incorrect, to lump together the good, the bad and the ugly within the US media over the disappointing and the overwhelmingly one-sided coverage of the Israeli massacre of helpless Palestinians in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

So far, close to 5,000 Palestinians have been injured and nearly 1,000 killed, including hundreds of women and children during the senseless Israeli military invasion which began on December 27.

For a start, there are certainly some American voices which vehemently disagree with the biased views and the inferior reporting in the US media.

Prominent among these, for example, is NPR's Democracy Now programme, hosted by the straight talker Amy Goodman (and Juan Gonzales) which is aired by 750 radio and television stations country wide. Several American Jewish groups such as Israel Policy Forum and Americans For Peace Now are also often critical of Israeli policies.

Justifying the Israeli invasion, the pro-Israel New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, told Jon Stewart, the popular American-Jewish comedian, on the Comedy Central show that "if you're in your apartment and some emotionally disturbed person is banging on your door, screaming, 'I'm going to come through this door and kill you', do you want us to respond with one police officer, which is proportional, or with all the resources at our command?"

Stewart replied, mockingly, "I guess it depends if I forced that guy to live in my hallway and make him go through checkpoints every time he has to take a sh*t!"

The comedian's fans have now created a website to thank him for his unexpected stance criticising the continued Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. (http://www.thankyoujonstewart.com).

Likewise, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Jimmy Carter administration, told another television host, Joe Scarborough - the former Republican congressman and host of a television talk show: "You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on [in Gaza] that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you."

These uplifting gestures are minuscule when compared to the ongoing support in the US media of the Israeli invasion. The media appears to be largely following the footsteps of the outgoing Bush administration which justified Israel's disproportionate reaction to the ineffective Hamas shelling as "self-defence".

It even hardly offered any medical assistance to the Palestinian relief services or protested the Israeli ban on journalists from visiting the scene of what some UN officials saw as "war crimes".

"It takes real stupidity to blame [the war] on Israel," argued Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist, on January 6. He went on, straight-facedly: "As the leaders of Hamas understand, the war in Gaza is about Israel's incessant fight to be a normal country," overlooking the continued occupation of Palestinian land and the Israeli bombing of Arab villages as happened two years ago in Qana, the Lebanese village where the UN had a camp for its troops guarding the border with Israel.

Human Rights Watch reported then that 28 villagers were killed and 13 were missing. (This is the town in southern Lebanon where Jesus is believed to have performed his first miracle at the wedding of Cana.)

Cohen also laments the departure from Israel of some 750,000 Israelis to settle in the US. "For a variety of reasons and often with considerable pain they have given up the country of their birth," he writes. But he says nothing about the millions of Palestinians who were expelled from their homeland upon the founding of Israel in 1948.

There are several more inflammatory commentaries or reports that I can cite, but I will yield to Editor and Publisher, the journal that all American journalists respect.

Under the headline "Media Commentary Muted as Israel Invades 'NYT' Fails to Editorialise," Greg Mitchell, the editor, wrote that for over week after the war was launched the "US media had provided one-sided coverage of the conflict, with little editorialising or commentary arguing against broader Israeli actions."

He continued, "Most notably, after more than eight days of Israeli bombing and Hamas rocket launching in Gaza, The New York Times had produced exactly one editorial, not a single commentary by any of its columnists, and two op-eds."

But The Washington Post, he went on, "did manage to work up an editorial for Sunday which, in the usual contortionist manner, found the invasion 'justified' but also highly 'risky'."

It goes without saying that there was hardly any report on the Palestinian perspective, which can only be found in the European media, especially the British press.

This explains why Americans and their policy makers are only familiar with part of the conflict. As was the case last week, the US Senate supported Israel in its futile battle against Hamas, and the House of Representatives followed suit the following day.

Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich summed it all up. He said Washington "sniffs at the slaughter of innocents in Gaza. [and] US tax dollars, US jets and US helicopters provided to Israel are enabling the slaughter in Gaza". And the American media hardly opens its mouth, preferring shamefully not to rock the boat.

Aa

George Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at [e-mail]

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