It also shows the high degree of censorship. Merhi's the kind of reasonable person one would want to see in office.

I second that. When are the people of the US gonna throw AIPAC out of their country?

Frank Lautenberg, our other senator opposite Menendez (both Democrats) is about a hundred years old and has no business being in office anymore. Years ago, he was perhaps a decent politician, as far as politicians go, but he's long past any semblance of competence. Of course, he's fiercely pro-Israel.

Don't get me started on Menendez, who is a classic political yes-man, no substance, signs onto whatever will advance his career, gives the appearance of caring about "left" causes and then votes establishment-right every time.

The pro-Israel sentiment in our state is best exemplified by our state paper, The Star Ledger, which does a great job on local issues (although it, like most print, has been cutting back tremendously of late – the paper gets thinner and thinner by the day (yes, I still do buy the classic paper format!) Nationally, it's allegedly "on the left", but obviously adheres to the classic business-first, Capitalist model, with some dissent allowed, albeit within a limited frame.

On international stuff, the Star Ledger is more often than not classic imperialistic propaganda, although it does allow more peaceful voices to be heard, especially now, in the wake of the last eight years. That said, it's been completely behind the Afghanistan-Pakistan buildup and slaughter, so it's sort of takes the typical "Iraq was bad, we need to build up relations and dialogue with the rest of the world, oh, and we need to bomb Afghanistan and Pakistan and maybe Iran too" stance.

In regards to Israel, it's right there with the New York Times – even worse, perhaps, as I monitor pretty much every day and I've never seen a pro-Palestinian voice, op-ed or otherwise.

Interestingly, southern and central New Jersey are served more by the Philadelphia press, and my limited exposure to them indicates that they're not so Israeli-centric down in Philly. The Philadelphia Inquirer pretty much toes the Israel line (Trudy Rubin is their resident Israeli apologist, and she does it from a softer perspective, seeming to give at least some credence to the humanity of the other side, but still enveloping everything in the overall context of "Israel is defending itself").

But the Philadelphia dailies aren't as pro-Zionist as the NY dailies, perhaps because at least one of them is owned by McClatchy which, according to a recent article by Paul Craig Roberts, is essentially the last remaining newspaper publishing house in this country that isn't entirely pro-Israel.

Well if he felt that a suicide bomber entering a room where a seder was occuring, stepping between a grandmother and her newest grandchild, and then blowing himself up, ensuring at least those two where murdered in cold blood, was much worse than 9/11, then he should have said so.

Precisely. To quote myself from another thread:

'while one arm of the I/P problem, Israel's murderous behaviour, is at last being forensically dissected rather than ignored in the West, the other part – the crucial support of the Lobby- is not. We must move from the general to the particular on BOTH fronts, and that means naming names, publicising sometimes rather boring minutiae on who did what and when.

Michael Backman had his site cyber-attacked after he wrote his Nepal trekker column; will the names of people who arranged this ever come to light? The reputed hundreds of letters that bomb newspapers that dare publish a Palestinian POV – who are they? Is it astroturf? Are they arranged by the official organisations? Do they maintain their own email lists?

This stuff needs sunlight to disinfect us from it's corrosive effects.'

Its a small world nowadays.

If the seder family hadn't been supporting US F-16 & Apache attacks
on the suicide bomber's family while they were silently protesting the rape of their olive trees, American tractors demolishing their home, American cluster bombs killing their kids, and
irresponsible US taxpayers ( themselves trying to find or keep their jobs), then there'd be no suicide bomber.

Agreed. Let's make AIPAC register as a foreign lobby. Let's also find a way to out all those Zionist orgs that masquerade as anything but Israel First orgs.