* Daniel Gordis reflects on the soldiers’ return and Thursday’s bus attack in a moving column: Coming Home

Adi Avitan, Benny Avraham and Omar Souad came home today. But they came home to a very different country than the one from which they were stolen. A country that’s been at war for three years. A country that when they were killed was just weeks post-Camp David, when we thought that virtually anything and everything was possible. To a country that no longer yearns for a peace that we suspect will not be, but still hopes for the sort of quiet that we had for a while. Until this morning.

* Jerusalem Post reporter Eric Schechter was wounded ‘moderately’ in Thursday’s attack. So we understand better what news reports mean by this designation, here’s Schechter’s diagnosis:

In Schechter’s case, “moderate” wounds are a broken left knee and a severed vein in the calf below it; puncture wounds in his right leg and back, from slices of metal packed into the explosives; a broken shoulder suffered on impact when the blast threw him from one part of the bus to another; lungs and spleen contused by the force of the explosion; and singed eyebrows from the blistering heat.

* JPost’s editor-in-chief Bret Stephens was at the scene of the attack: Jerusalem, 8:45 am

I doubt many reporters have actually witnessed a suicide bombing up close – indeed, not many Israelis have. After today, I know there is a basic difference between what one sees in the first five or ten minutes and what one sees in the next 20 or 30 minutes. Most of the reporters who “covered” the bombing did not actually see the corpses on the ground. They do not know about the body convulsing in the bus. What they saw was a bus blown to smithereens, which is awful enough, while the rest was left to their imaginations. But if you haven’t seen it before, you cannot imagine it. You don’t have a clue. If I learned one thing today, it is this.

* Haaretz’s Danny Rubenstein on Law and Order in the PA:

The fact that Thursday’s suicide bomber in Jerusalem was a traffic policeman from Bethlehem and a member of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade says something about the state of that movement, which has long been considered the ruling party of the Palestinians. In some parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Brigades operate as gangs of local hoodlums who have almost completely severed ties with the senior members of the movement crowded into Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah.

* Washington Post reports on Israeli survivors of terror in rehab. According to this, 3,000 Israelis have been injured in suicide bombings alone. Includes interviews with a good number of people, including a teen who has undergone 26 operations since the Dec. 2001 bombing of Cafe Rimon.

UPDATE: We’ve issued a communique on this topic – view it here, and sign up above to receive HR communiques by email.

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Yesterday it was reported by Reuters that Israel would allow the PA police to redeploy in the West Bank cities, after refusing this for some time:

The new security arrangement could be a rare step toward building trust as called for under a tattered peace plan being pushed by visiting U.S. envoys.

The army has destroyed dozens of Palestinian police stations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, accusing security forces of either turning a blind eye to militant groups attacking Israelis or taking part themselves in the three-year-old uprising.

Taking part themselves? Well, today a PA policeman committed the horrific suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus, killing ten and injuring more than 50:

The suicide bomber, identified as Ali Jaara, 24, a Palestinian Authority policeman from the Aida refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, left a note saying that he wanted to avenge eight Palestinians killed in fighting with Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip Wednesday.

This wasn’t the first time. Now back to the Reuters article – does Israel merely ‘accuse’ PA police of taking part in terrorist activity? Wouldn’t a more accurate term be, Israel ‘points at’ PA police terror, and demands they clean up their act?

Comments to Reuters: editor@reuters.com

Paul Crespo in the Miami Herald comments on how differently Israelis and Palestinians react to violence:

Rather than clear the rubble and rebuild the area [after IDF actions], the PA apparently chooses to keep the buildings in disarray as a monument to the Israeli military actions, which the PA calls invasions. This is part of a deliberate and generally successful Palestinian victimization strategy that contrasts sharply with the way Israelis handle Palestinian terror attacks

While the Israelis could keep dozens of destroyed restaurants and other past terror targets as permanent symbols of terrorism, they choose not to. They prefer not to dwell on the attacks.

We see this even today, when in the wake of the horrific suicide bombing in Jerusalem, the Israeli police quickly cleared away the carnage and allowed traffic to flow again on the busy downtown street.

Crespo addresses how this affects media coverage:

Their differing responses to attacks, along with the contrasting means that each side uses in its fight, also affect how the media portray the conflict.

• Palestinian terror attacks are usually nearly invisible. Terror groups such as Hamas and the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade use lone suicide bombers who suddenly appear in a crowded city street, bus or store, and disappear in a flash of explosives.

• Israeli military raids against Palestinian militants regularly involve massive shows of force, often lasting several days. Israeli retaliatory strikes are often more physically devastating and visually dramatic than suicide bombers. Israel uses armored vehicles, its troops move shooting through Palestinian areas, and helicopter gunships hover and fire overhead.

Add the emotional outbursts of Palestinians carrying mangled bodies through the streets after an Israeli raid, and you have a gut-wrenching story. Never mind that the Palestinians have created a culture of death that glorifies as ”martyrs” the suicide bombers who indiscriminately kill Israelis.

Journalist and analyst Tom Gross has this to add to our recent communique on partisan editing at the International Herald Tribune:

The New York Times-owned IHT, aimed mainly at audiences in Europe and Asia, also regularly runs photos that don’t correspond with its accompanying stories — photos designed to paint Israel in a more menacing light.

For example, on January 14, 2004, a Palestinian mother, blackmailed into becoming a suicide bomber rather than face death through honor killing after she was caught cheating on her husband, murdered four Israelis at the checkpoint through which Palestinian workers cross into Israel from Gaza.

The next day, January 15, 2004, instead of showing a photo of the bomb scene, or its victims, or the perpetrator, the IHT ran a huge photo across most of the top of its front page of an Israeli soldier pointing a gun at Palestinian laborers, and another large photo at the top of page 4 showing another Israeli soldier, gun in hand, near unarmed Palestinian civilians. The IHT’s story on the bombing made no references to the identity of the victims. The photos, which took up considerably more space than the text of the articles, bore virtually no relevance to the articles, or the previous day’s news.

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It was a tough day for the BBC as the Hutton Commission released to the public its long awaited report.

The commission’s report severely castigates the BBC’s handling of the affair, calling the Beeb’s editorial and management system “defective.” An excellent summary of the report can be found at The Guardian.

HonestReporting commends the Hutton Commission for successfully piercing the BBC veil and making the UK media giant answerable for its coverage. To a great degree, the report also vindicates the tireless efforts of BBC monitor Trevor Asserson, and HonestReporting hopes this will add steam to efforts to remove the BBC’s royal charter and repeal the annual license fee supporting BBC programming.

Support the cancellation or non-renewal of the charter by writing to UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell: tessa.jowell@culture.gsi.gov.uk

UPDATE: The BBC Chairman has resigned in the wake of the report.

In yesterday’s communique to subscribers (didn’t get it? sign up above!) we made reference to the latest poll of European opinion on Jews and Israel. According to the Independent, the Italian newspaper poll also included some basic questions on the Middle East:

The people polled were asked four questions about the Middle East conflict. Nearly one-third proved clueless. Only 6.2 per cent gave correct answers.

So plain ignorance contributes to the problem – no surprise there. We’d be interested to know what exactly those Middle East questions were, though. Anybody out there know? If so, please respond in comments below.

A British paper – Somerset News – has the full story of the German national, Stefan Smyrek, who will be released as a part of the prisoner exchange, and will apparently return to the UK, where he previously dwelled:

Authorities would be powerless to stop him from returning to the UK, despite the fact that judges in Tel Aviv warned he could attempt a terror strike at any time.

“He has an enormous hatred of Jews simmering inside him,” they said at Tel Aviv district court in 1999.

“He does not regret what he wanted to do. He would do it again. He has an obsessive urge to carry out a suicide attack on Jews.”…

His mother Karin told how he had been “brainwashed” by Muslim extremists. He had become obsessed with Islam, even adopting the Muslim name Abdul Kerim.

“Before he changed his religion he was always smartly dressed, always wearing expensive clothes,” she said. “Afterwards, he spoke in riddles, quoted the Koran and studied the Arabic language.

A disturbing story, and another aspect of the exchange not covered by the major media outlets.

As Israel’s prisoner exchange with Hizbullah nears completion, news outlets have provided the raw data of the deal – 435 Arab prisoners (400 of them Palestinian) and one German convicted of spying for Hezbullah, in exchange for Israeli Elhanan Tanenbaum and three IDF soldiers abducted near the Lebanon border in 2000 and assumed dead. (This is the latest in a history of highly lopsided prisoner exchanges between Israel and Arab groups.) A proposed second stage of the deal would involve the release of terrorist Samir Qantar for “significant, proven and clear information” about the fate of Israeli airman Ron Arad.

Absent from news reports, however, is the essential background of two terrorist leaders due to be released to Lebanon: Mustafa Dirani and Abdel Karim Obeid. Here are their stories, and their connection to Arad:

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Recently we’ve run separate critiques of BBC and Google. Now this Guardian report comes to our attention:

Just 48 hours before Lord Hutton delivers his verdict on the controversy surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the BBC has begun an advertising experiment that involves buying up all internet search terms relating to the inquiry.

Despite being one of the main players in the drama, anyone searching for “Hutton inquiry” or “Hutton report” on the UK’s most popular search engine Google is automatically directed to a paid-for link to BBC Online’s own news coverage of the inquiry.

No other news broadcaster or any newspaper has paid Google for this facility, leaving the corporation’s move even more conspicuous.

As one of the chief “interested parties” in the Hutton inquiry into the apparent suicide of Dr Kelly, the move will strike many as worthy of comment, not least because the BBC’s online news pages will not be the most obvious place to go for the most comprehensive coverage, which is bound to include painful criticism of the corporation.

It could be that BBC simply included ‘Hutton inquiry’ in its Google Ad Words, as a part of a larger ad campaign to attract new viewers, but it would seem appropriate under the circumstances to omit that particular topic.

Great staff-ed in the Montreal Gazette today on the CBC’s absurd refusal to use the word ‘terrorist’ on their TV broadcasts:

CBC news writers, and presumably the executives to whom they report, do not like the T-word. They believe that by calling a terrorist a terrorist, they would be choosing sides in the divisive conflict in the Middle East…

To substitute “extremist,” with its overtones of ideological fervour, for the much more specific “terrorist” is itself an expression of favouritism. It is also an abuse of speech. A terrorist can be an extremist. A terrorist can also be a vegetarian. But someone who blows up a bus is not in the news for eating tofu. The CBC should call a terrorist a terrorist, and let viewers reach their own conclusions.

For our breakdown of recent editorial opinions on using the term ‘terrorist’, click here.