Author: Mike Ewens

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Nearly everyone at Antiwar.com receives email that accuses us of not covering the good deeds down in Iraq. We “look only at the negative” or “ignore all the positive.” Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz found a similar email in his inbox recently. He writes of it:

I received an email this weekend.

It’s a photo of a US Servicement holding a little Iraqi girl.

The caption accompanying the photo was oh so very telling

“Why isn’t this all over the news? If he had done something wrong, it surely would be!”

I plan to use Ritholtz’s response from now on:

To answer the emailer’s question, it is not all over the newspapers because its not news. The good guys are supposed to do things like this. Its only news when the bad guys do this. […] No, my dear emailer, you have forgotten who we are and what we are all about. A good deed by a US serviceman is what WE DO ANYWAY. In case you didn’t know, we are the GOOD GUYS. If this not being in a newspaper is what upsets you, than you NO LONGER GET IT. This is what the United States is all about. This is what is expected of us. This is the standard we aspire to. This is who we are.

Buried deep in the story about the capture of the No. 2 of al-Qaeda in Iraq, we find out that with the death of 4 US troops in Iraq, “the total number of Americans killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts [is] above the number of Americans and foreign nationals killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” How many more have to die?

The Economist reports that the American public is usually on Israel’s side:

Americans are far more likely than Europeans to side with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Pew Global Attitudes survey taken between March and May found that 48% of Americans said that their sympathies lay with the Israelis; only 13% were sympathetic towards the Palestinians. By contrast, in Spain for example, 9% sympathised with the Israelis and 32% with the Palestinians.

Politicians are much more likely than their constiuents to support Israeli policy:

Support for Israel stretches from San Francisco liberals like Nancy Pelosi to southern-fried conservatives like Bill Frist. The House and Senate have both passed bipartisan resolutions condemning Hizbullah and affirming Congress’s support for Israel. The House version passed by 410 to 8 (of which three were from districts in Michigan with concentrations of Arab-Americans). The Senate resolution, sponsored by 62 senators—including the leaders of both parties—passed unopposed.

Why the unquestioned support?  Two reasons: the Israeli lobby and Christian evangelicals:

“Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world,” says Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister. The lobby, which is the centrepiece of a co-ordinated body that includes pressure groups, think-tanks and fund-raising operations, produces voting statistics on congressmen that are carefully scrutinised by political donors. It also organises regular trips to Israel for congressmen and their staffs. (The Washington Post reports that Roy Blunt, the House majority whip, has been on four.)

…

White evangelicals are significantly more pro-Israeli than Americans in general; more than half of them say they strongly sympathise with Israel. (A third of the Americans who claim sympathy with Israel say that this stems from their religious beliefs.) Two in five Americans believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and one in three say that the creation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming.

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For up-to-the-minute news on the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, see our Lebanon news page.