“For a kid like me, those bombs looked like fireworks. I counted more than 200 of them before I was told to go to sleep. We didn’t know it, but we were watching the massacre of almost 2000 Palestinians. Apparently the Lebanese Christian militia, under Ariel Sharon’s control, couldn’t wait until daytime to do their killing.
“So for the Herald to now start equating peace with Sharon is a disgrace. He was, and still is, a war criminal.”
A few days later, the paper published a letter by S.E.P. James with a unique reference: the Zionist lobby:
“My only reservation about the Herald letters page over the years has been that it has given too much space to the Israeli lobby, and not enough to the Palestinians. That has changed with some earlier correspondence from Ali Kazak, the Palestinian Authority’s representative in Australia, and now a moving letter from Maan Beydoun (January 7-8). Judging from the number of furious phone calls I have had from Jewish friends today, this will result in a flood of protest letters, and even more when you don’t publish every one of them. Who would be a Herald letters editor?”
The Zionist lobby is pernicious, aggressive and largely unaccountable. The biased and blindly pro-Israel coverage in the mainstream media is not solely because of its influence, but certainly contributes to an intimidatory atmosphere.