Hi Irwin - just letting you know I've seen youre later posts and I'm sorry if I counted you among Sharon's supporters. I didn't mean to make that assumption. People who take your line while actually living there in Israel get a lot of respect from me.

For my own information, is Zionism a fair term to use where the aim is to criticise aggressive Israeli state policy rather than the whole Jewish diaspora?

Wes, you said the nit-picking here would end in misery, whereas in fact it started with misery. I'm with Mousethief (for a change!) and others here who see this sort of debate as one of the huge values of Mudcat.

Lonesome, there was in fact tv footage of the injured dad and his dead baby, and it truly was a distressing sight. If it was not shown widely at peak viewing times, that might have been a result of the self-censoring that these sort of images always do undergo, whether after road accidents, bombings or whatever. I'm not aware of an anti-Israeli bias in the press, or not here in the UK anyway.