Where was the bleeding-heart media last week?

The Israeli Palestinian conflict has been on the world's radar for over 70 years, which basically translates to some people as Israel's bombardment of Palestinian territory and adjacent Arab states for about that period of time.

Last week, parts of Lebanon were bombed almost to a cinder, and this is the second time in recent history that Israeli bombardment has reduced the Lebanese airport runaway to a dirt track. Three hundred and twenty four civilians were killed in Lebanon in the air strikes, and 34 were killed in Israel from recent attacks. As a Times of London columnist opined, 'where is the equitable retaliation. Go figure.' But, a compare and contrast is in order. There are no signs of hysterical media reports calling these bomb attacks 'acts of aggression' that have left thousands of Lebanese scampering for cover. Israel retaliated for the kidnapping of two soldiers. Compare this with the Sri Lankan government's retaliation for the attempted suicide bomb assassination of its Army commander, or for the Claymore mine attack on a bus carrying civilians including schoolchildren in Kebbethigollewa..

The Sri Lankan government launched retaliatory strikes on known terrorist targets after these attacks, and any ensuing loss of civilian life was purely collateral, even though ''collateral'' is a dirty word in a lexicon of ugly words that have to be compulsorily used in a conflict context.

But, the BBC didn't visibly indulge in a public exercise of high decibel lamentation over lost Lebanese lives or the lives of Lebanese refugees. This is something that calls for a doctoral treatise of the relative aspects of media treatment of conflicts in different parts of the globe. It's a modern theory that has very valid currency in any analysis of conflict, that terrorists wish for retaliation after they carry out egregious acts of terror.

Terrorists have a sly yen for counting numbers of civilians made refugees in counter attacks by governments, which are in direct retaliation for indiscriminate acts of terrorism. That's because they can rely on the world's news services to fairy haemorrhage with news of this kind of counter strikes which are - as a media habit - reported now, regularly, without any reference to the antecedent circumstances, the gross acts of terrorism that led to the counter attacks in the first place. But what wonderment has to be expressed at one state's peculiar ability to stay above the fray of all of this mangling broadcast journalese of our times, and that is the state of Israel.

Israel has so much immunity from the rigours that face the rest of the world through the attack-journalism of the international radio and television media, that the state is almost able to turn on the head its excesses and use precisely these as symbols of Israel's machismo, the state's persistence, and its ability to give terrorists hell.

So what's one nations' magic that makes it turn their self defence into a show of bravado while self defence and retaliation for Sri Lanka goes in the international media's spotlight often as 'state excess'?