Neither blazoned in the headlines or featured on TV newscast was the Israeli murder of five Palestinian children earlier that same week on the 23rd of November, 2001 along with three others killed by Israeli shelling in Khan Younis.

Nor was the Israeli murder of nine Palestinians on the 24th of November mentioned or the murder of an 85 year old man by a Jewish settler who crushed the old man with his car and drove off on the 29th.

Nor anywhere in the media does it detail the facts that a 13 year old boy was shot dead on Sunday, the 23rd of November and on that same day a taxi driver was shot in the face by IDF. We are not informed that Israeli forces opened fire on a woman 8 months pregnant, bombarded a police station wounding a policeman and a teenager, and demolished three buildings housing five families using tanks bulldozers and Apache helicopters on the same day.

Neither is it mentioned that five childred were wounded in Israeli bombardment of Palestinians village and cities in the West Bank and Gaza on the 27th of November, 2001.

The fact that Israeli forces invaded two Palestinians towns with tanks and another with tanks and helicopters on the 30th of November is not mentioned. Nor is it stated that the week started off with the Israeli bombing of a refugee camp and the destruction of 18 homes and the wounding of several Palestinians and the kidnapping of the chairman of the Palestinian medical commitees in the Jerusalem area by IDF forces on the 21st of November, 2001.

These events all happened in the days immediately preceding the suicide bombings. And yet the launching of missiles on towns full of terrorized civilians and on refugee camps is termed "retaliation" by the Israelis for 'Palestinian violence'. This is not simply biased reporting. It is lying by omission. It is a gross distortion of the reality of the situation in Palestine.

Israeli violations of the humanity of the Palestinian people include assassinations of thousands of their leaders since the 1940's, the murder of hundreds of thousands more in Palestine and Lebanon, the destruction of 400 villages and the resultant creation of several million refugees. It includes the creation of a theocracy in the Middle East that is based on religious exclusivism rather than the separation of church and state, the complete opposite of what Jews in the U.S. have compaigned for, might I say, religiously. It includes the creation of a state where the native Arabs are treated as second class citizens without the same rights and privileges as the Chosen People, the majority of whose roots lie in Russia, Poland and the U.S.A. It includes the military occupation of the 22% of Palestine to which the Palestinians are relegated and in which they live under a brutal military occupation. It includes the torture of 80% of those incarcerated, the murder of children, the demolition of homes, the plowing under of farmland, the uprooting of olive groves that are hundreds of years old. It includes military assault on civilian towns with tanks and Apache helicopters and attacking refugee camps with F-16s and missiles. It includes the ongoing establishement of Jewish settlments in the West Bank and the Gaza in violation of the "the Oslo peace accord" itself.

With every escalation of the violence the predictable hand-wringing over the 'cycle of violence' ensues on chatrooms and major American media. But this reflex reaction is just another way of hiding the truth. It implies that Palestinians and Israelis are equal contenders in a fight neither wants to give up. It avoids the truth that the Palestinians are an impoverished, dispossessed people living under a brutal military occupation by a world class military power. One has to ask why? Not only why do such things take place but why Americans are largely unaware of them. Has it come time to re-examine the special relationship that the US has with Israel? And has it come time to look at it closely?

Any mention of Jewish political power or ownership of the media will trigger the predictable accusations of anti-Semitism. But that begs the issue. What of the occupation of Palestine; the death of a 100,000 Palestinians over the years and the creation of several million refugees; the carpet bombing of Beirut and of Baghdad and now, of Kabul; the ten year sanctions regime that has killed at least 1 million Iraqis; Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon which killed at least 20,000 Lebanese; the killing of at least 7,000 Somalis by American troops; the presence of 40,000 American troops in the Gulf Region; sanctions placed on Iran, Iraq, Libya, and the list goes on.* Why is it the term anti-Arabism not applied to these actions? Why is the term anti-Arabism, hardly a word in the American lexicon? Why, when in addition to the aforementioned, have at least 20,000 Chechens been killed by the Russians, and another 20,000 Kashmiris have been killed in the last decade? Why do the powers that be, and at this juncture, they include Russia and India, insist that this is not a war against Islam? It certainly appears so to the Muslims.

*Correction: The 100,000 figure for deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflicts includes Lebanese, Jordanians, Iraqis and Syrians.