Israel's romantic terrorism

Just an everyday tale in The Raw Story of the sheer hypocrisy of coverage of Palestine in the US media:

A little-noticed comment in a New York Times interview with Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni has critics arguing that it shows the media has a "double standard" when it comes to terrorism.

In an interview published Tuesday, Livni, the leader of Israel's centrist Kadima party, boasted that her parents, both members of the Zionist militant group Irgun in the 1940s, were the first couple to be married in the newly-formed state of Israel.

"Both of them were in the Irgun," Livni said. "They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons."

To which New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon responded: "It was a more romantic era."

"I've met interviewer Deborah Solomon -- smart lady," writes Philip Weiss, who brought attention to the comment on his blog. "I wonder whether she was inoculated, as I was, by Zionism, and to what degree. This is typically one-sided."

But it's not just one-sided:

Matt Duss at ThinkProgress goes even further than Weiss in his criticism of the Times' portrayal of Irgun.

"What’s amazing here is not only does Solomon neglect to challenge Livni’s characterization of her parents’ membership in a terrorist group as 'freedom fight[ing],' Solomon herself volunteers further assistance in the whitewash," he opines.

Meanwhile, Ben White has a piece on the al Jazeera website on a looming confrontation between the State of Israel and its Arab "minority". I mention this now because Ben reports, among other things, on how hard it is for Arab MPs (MKs) to be heard in the parliament of the only democracy in the middle east.