The Story Beneath the Story

Top Headline on BBC News online: Israel troops 'ignored' UN pleaTop headline in the NY Times online: Israel Battles Militants for Control of Lebanese TownI was in London for most of the unfolding of the crisis du jour in the Middle East. It was my first opportunity to witness such events through a media lens quite different from the American one I am used to. I can pretend to neither certainty nor even most of the time clarity on the subject of Israel and its strained relations with its neighbors. But when you get such a strikingly different version of events depending on what side of the Atlantic you're on, it makes you wonder.I'm not one-hundred percent sure that recent events are the tipping point that will plunge the world into an all out global war of civilizations. Maybe the Middle East will revert to its normal state of simmering hatred. Maybe Iran's leaders won't try to goad the West into war with their brain-dead anti-semitic proclamations. And maybe the US won't exploit the opportunity to expand its expansively defined "War on Terror" to incorporate Iran, Syria, and whoever else it feels like invading.But.If this most recent ugliness escalates, we should be darn sure we have, at the very least, a multiplicity of perspectives from which to view and judge it.There is no such thing as press neutrality. There is no such thing as neutrality period. Bias is fact of life.Are England and Europe falling under the sway of anti-Israeli, if not anti-semitic, bias? Is the US guilty of pro-Israeli bias?Yes, no, or maybe, the important lesson here is: don't trust anything you read. Not even this.