Last time I checked, YOU were part of the American media, as a highly visible blogger for Salon.com who is regularly quoted and interviewed on all sorts of cable stations.

Thus, your misbegotten notion no critical words can be spoken of Israel in the American press is as ludicrous as when Bill O'Reilly talks about the "mainstream media" as if he isn't part of it.

The reason there is so little criticism of Israel's actions is because Gaza had been SHELLING ISRAEL FOR MONTHS.

I love you in every area but this one, Glenn. You always get this one wrong.

There is plenty of criticism of Israel all over America, it's not like you have to dig for it. Heck, just read the conspiracy theories flying about Madoff, and how the "Jews are funneling money to Israel."

That being said, your criticisms of Peretz are 100% on the money. The man is a psychopath. No one should be celebrating Palestinian deaths, especially not some chickenhawk keyboard warrior.

Media hacks like Gregory failed disgracefully on the Iraq Invasion precisely because there was absolutely no evidence of threat, WMDs or connection to 9/11.

The Israel/Palestine issue is thus not really comparable, as Palestine was clearly and directly launching missiles into Israel for months, a direct provocation for Israel's response.

I realize you don't explicitly equate the two events, but there is an implicit danger when you link the failure of the media to pose adversarial questions in each case. Thus your post implies both acts of "war," as such, were comparably propagandistic acts of provocation, deserving of media scrutiny, in which the media acted as protector of government lie and spin.

But these two events are not comparable on the underlying issues. Thus, Gregory's obsequiousness, which you rightly critique, is not equally pathetic in each case.

Israel, as our ally responding to a direct attack and as a foreign nation in which Gregory does not live nor is a citizen of, can not be expected to be met with the same media scrutiny and adversarian positioning that we should expect when it is our own country, and our case for war is as shockingly pathetic as it was in 2003.

I did not defend the obsequious hack that is David Gregory, as you allege. I simply noted that questioning Israel's "justification" for responding to an armed military enemy lobbing missiles into its civilian neighborhoods for months is not the same as questioning the American government's invasion and occupation of a country thousands of miles away that never attacked us.

When discussing Israel, Glenn starts from a correct premise (the press can and should have the freedom to be adversarial) to all sorts of false equivalencies that equate the press's failure to challenge conventional wisdom on issues like Iraq with the press's failure to challenge conventional wisdom on Israel.

That's like saying the press should equally challenge whether the NSA program was illegal and whether NASA really landed on the moon in 1969. I'm not saying the I-P issue is as cut and dry as the moon landing (no military issue ever is). I'm only noting that there are varying degrees of antipathy we should expect from our media, and those responses directly relate to the underlying facts of the issue being discussed.

Israel isn't challenged for disproportionately responding to Palestine's aggressions, because it was only 10 years ago that Arafat responded to the peace process and Israel's concessions by sending 500+ terrorists to explode bombs near schools, churces and in pizza parlors.

I'm not sure there's much for the media to probe in terms of Israel's fundamental right to respond. What they can and should probe (and where Glenn is correct) is in the proportionality of their response.

But challenging proportionality is not the same as challenging the fundamental illegitimacy of a pro-active war, as our actions in Iraq amounted to.

Uberbah asks:

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Why is Israel the only country allowed to conquer territory and then whine "terrorism" when the conquered fight back? Especially when the "terrorist" rocket attacks kill no one as you slaughter them by the thousands.

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Your loaded comment begs another question: Why is Israel the only country not allowed to respond to terrorism with military force?

Israel's "conquer(ed) territory" that you so sneeringly reference came about due to two wars that Israel did not start, in which Israel was attacked by neighboring countries bent on destroying it.

Do you advocate we give Texas back to Mexico?

Nearly every national border on this planet came about through military conflict. Why is Israel different than all other countries?

And your "kill no one" nonsense is totally ridiculous. You do not measure action and reaction by simply adding up dead bodies. Israel has a right to protect its ability to function as a country, to have its citizens not live in fear from Palestinian mortar shells.

Palestine has been offered chance after chance to build their own country, and have turned to chaos, violence and rage.

Other occupied peoples have found peace is the most powerful tool. Gandhi did. Nelson Mandela did. Did not the Indian and South African blacks suffer too? They did not set off waves of nail bombers.

The Palestinians have had so many opportunities for peace. Israel bent over backwards, handed Arafat guns in the 1990s so he could form a police force. Those guns were turned on Israelis.

Yet to sneering people like you, Israel will never be legitimate. And the reasons for that belief go back thousands of years.

Why do you assume Rahm Emmanuel is Obama's closest "Israel First" advisor?

Oh right.

Awesome post, broheim. Way to bring the reflexive anti-Semitism.

You should note that Bush had zero Jews in his cabinet for the past eight years.