The commentator Tom Gross argues in the Jerusalem Post that there appears to have been a slight improvement in the media's attitude towards Israel recently. As he is the first to acknowledge, this is to start from an extremely low base; but even so, any movement in the direction of sanity and decency is to be noted and welcomed. Gross observes, for example, that:

'overall, the reporting on Operation Days of Penitence was not nearly as fierce, nor as bad, as it has been on several past occasions. When, for example, Israel launched a similarly-sized counterterrorist operation in Jenin in 2002 (and actually killed very few civilians in doing so), Israel-baiting in the European media reached hysterical levels. Israel was invariably compared to the Nazis, al-Qaida, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the Taliban.The Guardian said Israel's actions were "every bit as repellent" as the 9/11 attacks. The (London) Evening Standard called them acts of "genocide" and, for good measure, accused Israel of the "willful burning of several church buildings." And even supposedly pro-Israel newspapers like Britain's Daily Telegraph said "hundreds of Palestinian victims" had been "buried by bulldozers in mass graves." Palestinians in Jenin, Telegraph readers were told, were "stripped to their underwear, bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with single shots to the head."

'During recent weeks, by contrast, not only has there been a slight easing of pressure against Israel in media coverage, some European reporters have actually taken the unusual step of speaking out against their Israel-hating colleagues. In Paris on Saturday several journalists at Radio France International slammed the station's news director, Alain Menargues, for his "unacceptable" remarks during an interview concerning his book Sharon's Wall on Radio Courtoisie last week. Menargues told listeners that we knew from the Book of Leviticus and from 2,000 years of history that Jews wished to separate themselves from "impure" non-Jews. He added that Jews had deliberately created the world's first ghetto in Venice "to separate themselves off from the rest." And in London on Sunday fellow journalists publicly condemned the notorious Robert Fisk, The Independent's Mideast correspondent. The associate editor of the (London) Times said Fisk's coverage "masquerades as reporting but is, in fact, polemic."Bill Newman, ombudsman for The Sun, Britain's most popular newspaper, said Fisk's coverage of Israel was so bad that he found it "distasteful."

Nevertheless, as Gross concludes, any such improvement is likely to be temporary. The media's attention is currently elsewhere -- principally fixated upon Iraq and the US presidential election. But the distorted analysis of Israel and its alleged role as a perpetrator rather than principal victim of global terror still pulsates through the media. It is only a matter of time before it erupts in another blood libel yet again.