Horus,

"I've seen Israeli troops openly question...the war." While firing their cannons or dropping their bombs? And of course, you'd be the first to accuse Israeli refuser groups such as Courage to Refuse and antiwar demonstrators of treachery, now wouldn't you? As for "the other side", I guess they were clearly too busy dodging, not always successfully, falling masonry, and being shredded by Israeli ordnance to engage in protest.

It's OK, Horus, you don't have to make veiled allusions to Mel Gibson. You can go ahead and smear me as an anti-Semite if you wish. The sting went out of that one long ago. God help Jews facing real anti-Semitism. Who's going to take the word seriously after the likes of you have relentlessly cheapened the coin?

As for movies, for your sanity and ours, give up on those endless reruns of 'Exodus', will you?

rache, shooting the messenger is one thing. Questioning the credibility of the messenger is entirely another.

My point is that it is extremely easy to sit in an ivory tower, remote from the action, in a comfortable office and with a coddled first-world existence, and produce admonitory finger-wagging against a variety of trendy targets.

I'm sure that they are all well-meaning, caring folk who tut-tut their way through the evening news at the horrors of the world, and that they put every ounce of their compassion into the articles they write.

But that doesn't make them credible. Just smug.

As someone who spends considerable time watching how various NGO's report on abuses, 2 facts stand out. The first is that on any measure Israel is singled out unfairly and receives harsher treatment and greater scrutiny versus countries such as Iran, Syria, North Korea, China etc. The second fact is that many NGO's do put out critical pieces on some of these other countries but the media simply has little interest in running them. It is simply a bigger and easier to sell media story to beat up on the Israeli's than explain the history of the LRA in Uganda or the systematic detention and torture of both right and left-wing intellectuals in Cuba. Israel is no angel but to try and compare it to China or Iran is pure madness!