Trunk and Rocket Man have

Trunk and Rocket Man have relentlessly exposed the biased reporting of the New York Times. If I recall correctly, Rocket Man has gone so far as to call it the worst newspaper in the U.S. I submit, however, that when it comes to anti-Israel bias, the Washington Post is significantly worse than the Times. At least this latest example of the Post’s anti-Israel bias appears in the editorial section. But that doesn’t excuse the paper’s slipshod reasoning. For example, the Post acknowledges that there have been no suicide attacks against Israel in the past six weeks, but frets that Israeli troops occupy six major west bank towns and parts of Gaza, and have imposed curfews and other restrictions on movement. Apparently, it hasn’t occurred to the Post that the occupation and restrictions may well be the reason why there have been no successful suicide attacks. The Post’s failure to grasp this reminds me of the New York Times’ puzzlement that, at the same time the crime rate is going down, the prison population is increasing.
The Post takes President Bush to task for not focusing enough energy on implementing his vision of side-by-side Israeli and Palestinian states. It laments that, instead, Bush is focused on the “suddenly all-consuming campaign against Iraq.” Some might find it understandable that the President is more concerned with combating terrorism and destroying a hostile and dangerous regime than with attempting to create a new hostile terrorist state. The Post claims to be concerned that our failure to take up the Palestinian cause will “prove a serious impediment to building a coalition against Iraq.” But it offers no evidence that the support of any coalition partner the U.S. might need is contingent on greater “engagement” in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. In fact, no such argument can be sustained and the Post knows it. The “coalition building” argument is a red-herring. In reality, the Post is gung-ho for a Palestinian state and ambivalent about going to war with Saddam, despite the obvious danger he poses to our security.