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MSNBC Reveals Facts on Israel’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
by Ira Chernus

Most astounding web page of the week: http://www.msnbc.com/news/wld/graphics/strategic_israel_dw.htm

Here is MSNBC, giving us more information on Israel’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD)than I’ve seen in any left-wing or peace-activist news source. Here is the mainstream U.S. media, that beast we love to hate, giving us a story that gives away the store.

It’s a story we expect the elite media to hide, because it is so embarrassing to U.S. policymakers. How could anyone cheer for the carnage in Iraq, where no WMD have yet been found, if they knew that Israel is the only Middle Eastern nation with a proven WMD arsenal? How could anyone approve of a U.S. policy that kills where WMD don’t seem to exist and turns a blind eye where they obviously do?

Far from hiding the story, though, MSNBC uses its graphic skills to put all the details just a mouse-click away. What’s going on?

Supporters of Israeli policy will give you an answer in a single word: anti-semitism. These folks are always amazing us with their charges of anti-Israel bias in the U.S. media, which they insist proves anti-semitism. It’s silly, of course. If the media were biased against Israel, the facts about Israeli WMD would have been headline news every day during the debate about the Iraq war. Those facts were headline news in the Arab world. They were absolutely crucial, because they undermined the Bush administration’s principal justification for war. But mainstream news sources here paid very little attention.

Even now, MSNBC is not making the information easy to get. It is tucked away in an obscure corner of the website. Try finding it from the home page, and if you figure out how, let me know. (I found it only through a direct link in an email I received.) When I searched the site for “Dimona” (Israel ‘s best-known nuclear weapons site), it came up blank. When I tried to access the root directory, I was told that I was “not authorized to view this page.............”

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0421-08.htm