These are not the destructive divisions so often worried over by instinctive moderates and multilateralists. These are constructive divisions, which are driving the world's people toward making a decision about what they believe in, why they believe it and what kind of world they want to live in.

Natan Sharansky has a big Russian soul, but he carries it on a small frame, and slumps in his seat. When I sat at his soon-to-be-vacated desk in Israel's Ministry of Housing and Construction, I had to scrunch down to be at eye-level with him. When I forgot, I would find myself looking instead into the eyes of his mentor, Andrei Sakharov, in a large photo above Sharansky's head. The man once known as Anatoly wants it that way. He believes the principles he and his fellow Soviet freedom fighters went to prison for are universal principles — as real and right in the Middle East as they were and are in what was once the Soviet Union. He also believes that in the terror war, as in the Cold War, appeasing tyrants can never bring lasting peace — only the spread of democracy can. And he believes, too, that democracy is for everyone, that neither Arabs nor Palestinians are exceptions to the rule.

I offer up the Israeli everyman's objection at the outset: Polls show that 80 percent of Palestinians approve of suicide bombings. Anyone they elect will be a murdering thug. "Of course," Sharansky explodes. "It's primitive to think democracy is about elections. It's not. It's about freedom. Freedom is the key." First, he explains, you have to free people from the all-pervasive fear that is the sine qua non of all tyrannies. Give people the freedom to express themselves, to say what they really think, over time — without the fear that government goons will come and get them. That's the start of the democratization process. Elections are at the other end. They come last, after people have experienced what it's like to live free, because that — not elections — is what democracy is about. Once people know freedom, Sharansky argues, they vote to keep it. And because rulers in a democracy can't ignore what majorities vote for if they want to stay in office, they have powerful incentives to respect freedom at home and to pursue peace abroad. For tyrants, the situation is quite different. Freedom is their nemesis, and to negate it they need to demonize enemies, both at home and abroad — justifications for their brutal, suffocating control.

It's a lovely theory — majestic in its universal reach, seductive in its sunny, egalitarian assumptions about human nature and culture. And, Sharansky insists, there is powerful, real-world evidence for it. Look at Russia and all the other countries that were once slave states of the Soviet Union, all more or less free and democratic now. The transformations in Germany and Japan are even more striking. "A thousand years of Russian serfdom wasn't ideal preparation for democracy," Sharansky notes dryly. Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, too, were both democratized, and have remained democracies for half a century now.

He's right, of course, but from the American point of view, there's a major difference between the Soviet Union on the one hand, and Germany and Japan on the other. We didn't have to occupy Russia or any part of the old Soviet Union to democratize it. In essence, we enfeebled Soviet dictators, and the people of those lands did the rest themselves. It wasn't like that in Germany and Japan. Those societies didn't crumble from within, under pressure. To democratize them we had to invade and conquer, settling for nothing less than unconditional surrender. Then, we tried their leaders as war criminals, and put their people under military occupation and kept them there for years — four in Germany, seven in Japan. We had to de-Nazify and de-imperialize them, to institute the rule of law ourselves, to reeducate the populace, and to remake their societies. It was certainly a success — a remarkable one — but it was a monumental undertaking, and the costs were enormous.

Surely, I asked Sharansky, you don't think Palestinian suicide bombers and the population that worships them are like the Russians, Czechs, and Poles, able and eager to free themselves with only a little help from us? Surely you see that for these Arabs, as for the Germans and Japanese, nothing less than a full-scale, long-term military occupation with a rigorous, all-embracing reeducation program has a chance? Sharansky is no pie-in-the-sky, peace-now wimp. He doesn't flinch or dodge. "Yes," he said calmly, "that's what must be done." Incredulous, I asked, "And you think the world will stand back and let Israel do that?" "No," he replied. "Of course not. Only America can do that."

Monsieur Chirac has stopped at nothing to try to prevent the defeat of Saddam Hussein, no matter how many American lives it cost. And, more often than not, the Germans tagged along for the ride. It is hard to imagine that such actions were solely the result of greed, whether personal or national. To take such action, Mr. Chirac must have conceived of a French future not only independent of the United States, but in open opposition to us.

“This is simply NOT TRUE. Nor is it true to say — as the same intro stated — that coalition forces are fighting ‘guerrillas’.

“It may be guerrilla warfare, but they are not guerrillas.”

Adams’ memo was fired off to TV news head Roger Mosey, Radio news boss Stephen Mitchell and other Beeb chiefs.

It adds stunning weight to allegations that BBC coverage on all its networks is biased against the war.

In one blast, he storms: “Who dreamed up the line that the coalition are achieving ‘small victories at a very high price?’

“The truth is exactly the opposite.

“The gains are huge and the costs still relatively low. This is real warfare, however one-sided, and losses are to be expected.”

The BBC has come under attack for describing the loss of two soldiers as the “worst possible news for the armed forces”.

One listener asked: “How would the BBC have reported the Battle of the Somme in World War I when 25,000 men died on the first day?”

A common thread among anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism is the fear of being outdone by people willing to work harder. It's not surprising that such a fear exists among a disproportionate number of those who take state-supported jobs. It's thus not surprising, then, that New Class sensibilities are so often anti-American and anti-capitalist, and increasingly (or perhaps I should say, once again) anti-Semitic, too. The New Class, in this regard, as in many others, is like the old haut-bourgeoisie.

On the eve of his recent trip to Tehran to attend an Iraqi Shiite conference, Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi contacted the Iranian Embassy in London. Chalabi spoke with the embassy’s adviser for relations with Iraqi opposition groups, Hossein Niknan, who used to be Iran’s charge d’affaires in Beirut. The INC leader asked the Iranian diplomat to issue a multiple entry visa for his public relations consultant whom he said would be traveling with him to Iraqi Kurdistan through Iran and back again. Under strict orders from Tehran to comply with all Chalabi’s requests,

Niknan did not hesitate to accede to this one even though the PR man in question was not Iraqi but American, Francis Brooke by name. Brooke, who was traveling with Chalabi, is a well-known American Middle East specialist and is rumored to be close to US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Chalabi was surprised to see Niknan take such an interest in Brooke’s case; the American was granted a special multiple entry visa similar to the one issued to Chalabi himself. When the pair arrived at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport, the Iranian authorities not only waived the newly introduced fingerprinting rule introduced in response to a US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) decision to fingerprint all Iranians entering the US as far as Brooke was concerned, Chalabi felt that his companion was being made even more welcome by immigration officers and Iranian Foreign Ministry officials than he was. Brooke was so warmly received wherever he went in Tehran that journalists who met with Chalabi were intrigued. They noted that Iranian officials from the departments of security and foreign affairs, the Revolutionary Guards and the presidency were even more interested in Brooke than in the INC leader himself. A young Iranian journalist who asked a Foreign Ministry official just back from a meeting between Brooke and a senior Iranian National Security official whether Chalabi’s PR consultant had indeed delivered a letter from the US administration to the Iranian leadership said that the Foreign Ministry man replied: “All I can say is that he (Brooke) is an important person who knows many secrets. We believe he is in contact with Washington decision-making circles. We therefore have to use the opportunity of his being in Tehran to convey our point of view to the Bush administration vis-a-vis the war on Iraq especially since the US government has closed off all other avenues open to us.”

A few hours later, two reporters Omid Memarian and Hossein Barmaki from Yas-e-no (a reformist newspaper published by prominent reformist MP and Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF) politburo member Mohammad Reza Naimipour) met with Brooke in clear violation of instructions by the Iranian authorities not to publicize his visit to Tehran and his meetings with senior officials. The contents of this interview revealed that Brooke’s visit to Iran was not simply that of a PR consultant Chalabi had hired to embellish his reputation in the West. Brooke was on a mission; and the effects of his mission quickly became apparent in Iranian policy vis-a-vis the United States in general and the way Tehran began viewing the war on Iraq. In his interview with Yas-e-no, Brooke said:

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US no longer felt threatened with nuclear annihilation. It became no longer necessary for America to maintain
relations with corrupt dictatorships just because of their hostility to communism. “The Soviet foe has been replaced by a friendly Russia; China is not perceived by Washington as a threat but as a potential strategic partner. In fact, the gravest threat facing the West is that posed by Islamic fundamentalism. Sept. 11 brought home to us the magnitude of this threat to Western civilization. “We understand that there are two factors that have encouraged the spread of fundamentalism in the Middle East and the Muslim world: the Palestine question and lack of democracy,” Brooke continued. “America’s most important strategic goals at the moment are to help Arab and Muslim peoples achieve democracy, and to find a just settlement for the Palestine question through the establishment of an independent and democratic Palestinian state.

“The overthrow of Saddam Hussein will be just the beginning of this process. A glance at America’s traditional allies in the region shows that they do not enjoy the trust of their peoples. That is why we have decided to rethink our alliances. “There is a vast gulf between us and the Europeans. America is a country built on revolutionary principles; one of these is helping oppressed peoples and fighting colonialism. No country is more justified in talking about democracy than the United States,” Brooke said. “It is essential that the peoples of the Middle East enjoy the fruits of democracy. “Europe’s experience is different to ours. European history is full of political and religious conflicts. Look at Europe now; in America, we proved that it is possible for people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds to live together. There are no racial and religious barriers preventing people in America from reaching the top in any field of human endeavor. In Europe, by contrast, laws are still in effect that distinguish between indigenous and immigrant populations. In America, once you are naturalized, you will be exactly the same as anyone whose ancestors came there centuries ago.“We have an open society and a free press; we are not afraid to discuss our weaknesses openly.“We are currently in the process of trying to overthrow the Iraqi regime and helping the Iraqi people establish democracy. This is part of our new strategy in this region.” But what about Iran? he was asked. Brooke said: “Iraq is the common denominator between Iran which was attacked by the Saddam Hussein regime and the United States, which wants to unseat the Iraqi leader. Iran has extended valuable help to the Iraqi opposition, and enjoys excellent relations with many opposition leaders such as (Kurdistan Democratic Party leader) Masoud Barzani and Ahmed Chalabi. We cannot deny that Iran enjoys a semblance of democracy, but we hope that this will be further developed into true democracy.”

The truth is that at its root the conflict is about the Arab world's obsession with rejecting Israel. Kuwait hates the Palestinians. The Kuwaitis kicked the Palestinians out of their country.

The way I was treated had nothing to do with Beit El or Netzarim. It has to do with Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and the Bible.

The most dangerous of these states are those that also possess weapons of mass destruction, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that can kill not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands. Iraq is one such state, but there are others. Whatever hope there is that they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with which they are confronted. The chronic failure of the Security Council to enforce its own resolutions — 17 of them with respect to Iraq, the most recent, 1441, a resolution of last resort — is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task.

We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the United Nations.

This entire operation generated havoc among military experts on American TV. When Saddam's meeting place was hit, some of them declared it marked the start of the full-blown war effort. It wasn't. When a reporter asked Rumsfeld if Operation Scare and Divide was a deviation from "what we have been led to believe about the war plan," the defense secretary responded: "I don't believe you have the war plan . . . a fact which does not make me unhappy."

This war will be smaller in scale and shorter in duration than many of the conflicts in which we have been engaged over the past half century. It is not without grave risks. But its practical benefits and the message it sends make it the most important "hot" war we have waged since World War II.

President Bush is not the most articulate of the world's heads of state. Elitists who speak artfully, while failing to listen honestly, dismiss him. Yet while the intelligentsia clings to the past, our president has the vision to see that the old patterns of diplomacy have failed us, that the world's health is too grave for yesterday's quack medicines.

He will never write a scholarly tome on strategy that will win the applause of academics and diplomats. But our president is rewriting the strategy itself, in a manner so bold and vital that we have not yet begun to grasp its full import.

The new American policy toward which the times have driven us is as radically different as our critics fear. It breaks with a failed and blood-soaked past. We have finally accepted that it is no longer enough to wait for enemies to attack first. We have accepted our unique responsibility to intervene abroad in the cause of global security and human rights.

And we have dispensed with a corrupt sham sustained by our critics: the notion that a dictator, no matter how cruel and illegitimate, is untouchable behind his "sovereign" borders.

It is no accident that the core countries of "Old Europe," France and Germany, oppose us. Between them, they have been responsible for every major European conflict since the Napoleonic era. Those who now accuse us of aggression bear the weight of hundreds of millions of corpses.

President Bush has turned away from the murderous logic of European diplomacy, from mechanisms of statecraft that have led only to unchecked aggression and unchallenged genocide. The essential purpose of European diplomacy has been, and remains, the preservation of the powerful, by the powerful, for the powerful. Wherever in the world we see a dictatorship protected by diplomatic custom and webs of trade, we see an outpost of "Old Europe." Saddam is more European than Tony Blair.

Just as we fought our Civil War to cast off the European legacies of human bondage and political power vested in a landed aristocracy, we are now fighting to cast off an Arab dictator who embodies the European tradition of a tyrant sustained by a bureaucracy of terror. Europeans pioneered the methods. Saddam is merely an imitator.

Our Spanish-American War shattered the inviolable image of European empires. Underestimated in its importance because it was a "small" war, the Spanish-American War was the first time a non-European power reached out to destroy an oppressive European empire. It sparked the century-spanning collapse of European empires that ended with the disintegration of the Soviet incarnation of the empire of the czars, in 1991.

The Europeans will never forgive us for spoiling their party.

Now we have begun a new endeavor. It, too, may last a century. With the old empires gone, we are sending notice to dictators everywhere that the rules formulated by Old Europe no longer apply, that Saddam may be only the first dictator to fall, that the United States will no longer overlook massive violations of human rights, that we shall no longer allow ourselves to be threatened without responding and that we will no longer heed the voices of those foreign capitals that have failed the world with such devastating consequences.

"So-called occupied territories": There's one for Chris Patten, the EU's leading proponent of the theory of Yasserite inevitability. The Arabs would benefit from a little more straight talk: They're very bad at confronting the consequences of their recklessness.

A "vile people, superstitious, ignorant, and both scientifically and commercially stunted," wrote no less an Enlightenment icon than Voltaire. Such pronouncements were not out of step with the views of many other Enlightenment thinkers.

But in his highly anticipated first book, Adam Sutcliffe, a 33-year-old assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, makes the bold claim that what has for centuries been referred to as "the Jewish question," rather than being merely a less-than-admirable aspect of Enlightenment thought, was actually of central importance in shaping it.

"Like a stubborn shard of intellectual grit," Judaism was a "ubiquitous, troubling, and often frustrating presence" for the philosophical architects of the movement, writes Mr. Sutcliffe in Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press).

Regarded as "not only the most venerably orthodox but also the most inscrutable and most potentially subversive strand of theology," he says, Judaism was "uniquely difficult for Enlightenment thinkers to negotiate." The "Jewish question" brought out what Mr. Sutcliffe regards as important paradoxes in their thought -- unresolved tensions that he maintains constantly threatened to undermine the very Enlightenment idea.

"Have They Gone Overboard?" this week's cover-story in Le Point, a center-right newsmagazine, wondered over a picture of Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. Its lead editorial's response was mostly yes, noting viperishly that France was rather good at accommodating itself to any detestable status quo. But that hardly signaled some kind of special unease, no more than the middle-ground financial daily La Tribune did in saying Tuesday that France would pay dearly for its gratuitous threat of a veto.

Instead, the notion that a botch may well be at hand for France came in a well-researched article in the current issue of the left-populist magazine Marianne, normally a font of anti-American tweaks and bellows, which analyzed recent French diplomacy under the title, "Visionary Policy or Operetta-Style Gaullism?"

It said France always sought if possible to propel its own policies with a European motor but found that its disagreement these days with many of the EU's members and candidates about the French desire for a Europe defined by its opposition to America eliminated any hope of a common policy.

Quoting Aymeric Chauprade, who teaches geopolitics at the French War College, the article told of his criticism of France's resistance to American "domination" as piecemeal, without any overall plan, and judging its flirt with Russia and China at the United Nations as old stuff and without basic effect on Moscow and Beijing, whose ties with America are priorities for them.

"As for Germany," Chauprade said, "if it changed its line (from its present stance), it could return to its role within American strategy. Not France."

‘Britain is an island!’ she exclaimed. ‘Hey, John,’ she shouted to her husband, ‘did you know the Brits all live on an island?’

Such encounters feed all our prejudices about America. They stand accused of being insular, unsophisticated and ignorant of the rest of the world. In many European eyes, these grave deficiencies make it all the more annoying that they have nevertheless become by far the richest and most powerful nation on our planet. To be seen as stupid invites contempt, and to be powerful produces respect, but to be known as both at the same time creates a particularly intense form of jealousy and resentment.

Such are the feelings of many on this side of the Atlantic towards America’s assertion of its power. Bush is more dangerous than Saddam, they chant. Americans have killed more people than the Iraqis. The US seeks world domination and an oil monopoly. If none of these things is true, then the Americans just don’t understand us in the rest of the world. And allied to the heated chants of demonstrators is the cold power-play of the Elysée Palace, freely confessed to by French ministers in private, determined to take the opportunity to scotch Anglo-American leadership in world affairs.

But what is the true nature of America? Is the US really more dangerous to world peace than a mass-murdering, genocidal dictator who has invaded his neighbours, used chemical weapons, stowed away hundreds of tons of anthrax and tortured tens of thousands to death? Is it now an imperialist nation?

I have been lucky enough to travel across most of the states of America. I have sat with old men on their porches in Tennessee, and ridden with young wranglers in Montana in the mountains of the Great Divide. As a politician, I have visited schools in New York, retirement homes in Florida and technology firms in San Diego. And I have to say that it would be hard to come across a nation of people less imperialist by culture, temperament and inclination. America was forged in the first place by the families of Protestant settlers who had a work ethic, a strong sense of right and wrong, and a hostility to governmental power and royal authority. They went to a new land in order to be away from wars, taxes and kings. Their attitudes, reinforced by the waves of dispossessed people who have joined them in succeeding centuries, remain the central characteristics of America today. Americans are still by nature disrespectful of authority, deeply democratic by instinct, very conscious of their freedom, and particularly happy to live in a vast and beautiful land which is free from external threats.

Such people are difficult to rouse to war. If Americans are insular — and many of them are — they cannot be imperialist at the same time. In British and French eyes, their sin over much of the last century has been isolationism: ‘too proud to fight’, as Woodrow Wilson said. Americans have always hated joining in other people’s conflicts. Only unrestricted submarine attacks off their west coast brought them into the first world war, and only a direct attack on American soil in Pearl Harbor brought them into the second, even Churchill’s brilliant eloquence having made little progress with them until then. Once roused, however, they have responded with a mixture of determination, loyalty and generosity that no other nation has ever matched. Without America, France would have lived in a dark age of dictatorship for decades. Without America, Germans could not have rescued themselves from a racist ideology. And without America, Europe’s only alternative to Nazi tyranny would have been communist tyranny. American troops left behind them an independent and democratic Japan, and brought Europe the Marshall Plan — both supreme acts of enlightenment in foreign policy. They share with Britain, but not with other European powers, the distinction of leaving democracy and freedom in their wake wherever they can.

That very freedom now gives millions the right to protest. South Koreans now resent the US troops without whom their society could not have survived. The French, it seems, have never got over the indignity of having to be rescued. And as the responsibilities of being a superpower in a Cold War required Americans to intervene in a wider range of conflicts, such resentment can be found anywhere on earth.

But now Americans are roused once again. They suffered on 11 September an attack on their own soil more devastating to human life than Pearl Harbor itself. Europeans sympathised, but they did so in the manner of sympathising with a friend who has suffered a bereavement. Americans actually experienced the bereavement. Pre-emptive warfare is their response, and if it had been Canary Wharf or the Eiffel Tower that had been reduced to dust, such a policy would be cheered to the echo. Those Europeans, including British people, who attack American policy have not seen thousands of their own citizens killed before their eyes in a single act. And they are not prepared to do anything about it themselves.

This surely is the crucial point. Americans are not warlike people, but they will now go after rogue states and terrorists because, if they don’t, no one else will. All over the world, America takes on responsibilities because others shirk them. They got involved in Kosovo because Europeans had neither the means nor the ability to sort it out. They pursue a ‘one-sided’ policy on Israel because without it the Jews would be driven into the sea. They need a huge increase in military spending partly because France, Germany and others are not prepared to spend a penny more themselves.

What the present crisis underlines is that Western Europe is losing its influence. In the coming decades, the greatest growth of manufacturing will be in China, the fastest growth of population in the Middle East and India, and the strongest enterprise culture and greatest military power will remain in America. The sound we can hear from Paris and Berlin is not the march of ever closer union, but the rage of ever closer impotence. Once again, when the world gets dangerous, it is the Americans, British and Australians who respond. The vacuum left by others leaves us no choice. And if America leads us yet again in destroying another murdering despot, I will join the woman in Tucson who has no knowledge of where I live, in saying, ‘God Bless America.’

A TALE OF TWO BAPTISTS

On March 4, a 59-year-old American Baptist, William P. Hyde, was among 21 people killed by a suicide bomber in Davao in the southern Philippines. That an American died was made clear in the following day's New York Times. The Times titled its news report "Bombing Kills An American And 20 Others In Philippines." The first seven paragraphs concerned Hyde, who had lived and worked in the Philippines since 1978, and another American, Barbara Stevens, who had been "slightly wounded" in the attack. The caption alongside two photos on the front page of that day's Times also made reference to his death, as did a news summary on page 2. In addition, the paper ran an editorial titled "Fighting Terror in the Philippines." And a front-page photo of a wounded boy, and the caption that accompanied it, made clear that at least one child had been among the injured.

On the next day (March 5), another American Baptist, 14-year-old Abigail Litle, was among 16 people killed by a suicide bomber on a bus in Haifa, Israel. The story and photo caption in the March 6 Times, tucked at the bottom corner of page 1, made no mention of Abigail's name. Neither the headline nor the photo caption indicated that an American had died, or that the suicide bomber had deliberately chosen a bus packed with schoolchildren, or that a majority of those killed had been teenagers.

The suicide bombers in both Davao and Haifa were acting on behalf of Muslim fundamentalist groups fighting for separate states. But the Haifa bomber was arguably worse. He deliberately chose children as his target, and his bomb was packed with specially sharpened nails and shrapnel to maximize pain and to make it harder for doctors to save the wounded.

Readers of some newspapers � but not of the Times � were told that Litle's Missouri-born parents had rushed to Haifa's Rambam hospital to look for their "wounded" daughter and instead had found only what remained of her: her legs. They had identified Abigail from an ankle bracelet still attached to one of them. That day's New York Post carried a picture of the pretty, New Hampshire-born schoolgirl who had been active in Jewish-Arab school dialogue groups on its front page.

Even the Sun � a British tabloid not known for its foreign news coverage, and which goes to press several hours before the New York Times � gave Abigail's death greater prominence than the Times did. The Sun's report began: "Fury swept Israel last night after a suicide bomber killed 15 people on a crowded school bus. Ten children died and 12 victims were left fighting for life after the bus was blown apart. The youngsters killed were aged 14 and 15 and from local high schools. One was 14-year-old Abigail Leitner, a U.S. citizen." (Initially, Litle's name was transliterated from Hebrew as Leitner by news agencies, hence the discrepancy; the death toll in Haifa has now risen to 17, not including the bomber.)

The coverage of Litle's death is just part of what has become a familiar pattern at the Times. The paper downplays Israeli suffering, and de-emphasizes Yasser Arafat's responsibility for the suffering of Israelis and ordinary Palestinians alike.

UPPING THE DEATH TOLLS

While the Times couldn't find room to include a photo of Abigail (or any injured child) last Thursday, it did choose to again run its "Mideast Death Toll" chart alongside the news report about the Haifa bomb. Strangely, the Times (to my recollection) usually runs this chart � in which it lines up total numbers of Israeli deaths next to the greater number of Palestinian deaths � only on days after Israelis have died. The implication would seem to be that Israel is responsible for more fatalities than the Palestinians.

It also seems odd that the Times doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) run these kind of football-score-type charts for any other conflict (Protestant vs. Catholic deaths in Northern Ireland, for example, or Afghan vs. American deaths since September 11).

The chart itself is fundamentally misleading. It makes no distinction between civilians and armed combatants, lumping together suicide bombers and other gunmen killed on shooting sprees with their innocent victims. It also reports suspected Palestinian "collaborators" killed by their own compatriots as if they had been killed by Israelis.

If the Times wanted its readers to gain a better understanding of what is actually going on in the Middle East, one could think of other statistics it could have given. It could have informed them that 80 percent of Israeli fatalities have been noncombatants, half of whom have been female; or that less than 5 percent of Palestinian fatalities have been female; or that a much higher proportion of Israeli casualties than Palestinian casualties have been older people. All these would be a good indication of which party is targeting the innocent.

When New York Times readers complained on another occasion about the misleading nature of its "Mideast Death Toll" chart, the response from the paper was surprisingly brusque and dismissive. Bill Borders (senior editor on the Times's news desk) wrote: "The graphs are correct because everyone that they count as dead is in fact dead. All of them."

But there is a further problem. The Times appears to have inflated the number of Palestinian dead. "At least 2,100 Palestinians have been killed during the months of violence that began Sept. 29, 2000," stated a caption on March 6. Yet the Reuters news agency � which even Palestinian Authority officials have admitted is sympathetic to their "struggle" � provides a considerably lower figure. In a story on March 7, Reuters Gaza correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi writes: "At least 1,906 Palestinians and 720 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising for statehood began in September 2000." Not only is Reuters's estimate of Israeli dead higher than the Times's, and the Palestinian figure considerably lower, but the Reuters statistics also included 11 more Palestinian militants and civilians who had been killed in disputed circumstances that morning.

The New York Times has taken its statistics for its "Death Toll" chart from the Palestinian Red Crescent, which it should know is a highly politicized and sometimes militant organization � Red Crescent ambulances have on more than one occasion been caught smuggling suicide bombers into Israel. At least one Red Crescent medic became a suicide bomber herself, killing or injuring over 150 Israeli civilians at a west Jerusalem shopping arcade last year.

If the Times wants to rely on Palestinian sources, it might do better to follow the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG), whose mission is "to end human rights violations committed against Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, regardless of those responsible." The PHRMG, while certainly no friend of Israel � it is often brutal in its criticism � is nonetheless relatively free from the influence of Arafat's security forces. A PHRMG press release dated March 7, 2003, states that "since the start of this bloody Intifada on September 29, 2000, 1973 Palestinian people have lost their lives" � a figure that again includes Palestinian terrorists, but is still significantly lower than that used by the Times.

(For the record, according to a report in the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on March 13, 2003: 441 of the Palestinian casualties have been suicide bombers, bomb makers, gunmen, or activists in Hamas and Islamic Jihad; 324 in Fatah and Tanzim; 329 in the Palestinian Authority security forces; 69 in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In addition, 417 have belonged to other small, armed groups, or were individuals killed in the course of perpetrating acts of terrorism against Israel. And 365 innocent Palestinians � unconnected to terrorist or armed activity � have died, though some may have been killed as a result of being caught in Palestinian, not Israeli, crossfire.)

The New York Times is hardly the most anti-Israel newspaper. And it is much too measured and careful to indulge in the kind of ugly calumnies found, for example, in the London Guardian � which in a lead editorial last year compared Israel to al Qaeda, concluding that Israel's behavior was "every bit as repellant." Still, in all kinds of small, insidious ways � most of which are not apparent unless you have expert knowledge on the Middle East � the Times's coverage is more slanted than many readers might realize. And owing to the Times's reputation as the newspaper of record, its distortions are especially damaging.

PREGNANT MOTHERS

Less than 5 percent of Palestinian casualties have been female, and even fewer have been pregnant mothers. Yet when one is killed � as happened on March 2 � the Times takes care to let its readers know: in news reports on March 3 (page 6), March 4 (page 1), March 5 (page 3), and March 9. Readers would be forgiven for assuming that Israel killed pregnant mothers every day, but these stories all refer to the same unnamed woman.

The New York Times also neglected to emphasize that the woman's unfortunate death happened in the course of a successful military action to capture Mohammed Taha, cofounder of Hamas, who was hiding in the house next door. The front-page report by James Bennet ("Israeli Raid Snares a Foe, but leaves Family Motherless," March 4) refers to Taha only as "a known militant." Not until the twelfth paragraph, on an inside page, does Bennet mention that Taha is a leader of Hamas. (He is in fact the most senior one ever caught.) Other papers ran headlines such as "Israel nabs Hamas founder in Gaza" (Daily News, March 4).

This was an accidental death in the course of a legitimate counterterrorist action. But a number of pregnant Israeli mothers were killed deliberately. If their deaths were reported at all, the Times and other media have referred to them merely as "Israelis" or as "settlers." For example, when a pregnant Israeli, her infant child, and other family members were attacked at their family Passover meal at Elon Moreh on March 28, 2002, the only coverage the Times provided was the following sentence buried in an article about Yasser Arafat: "Even as Mr. Arafat made his pledge, a Palestinian gunmen shot and killed four Israelis in a Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus." No mention of the seven children left orphaned in that attack.

SHE ADORED CHILDREN

When the Times has sympathetically profiled women who have died in this conflict, it has more often been the suicide bombers than their Israeli victims. Wada Idris � who killed or wounded 150 innocent civilians on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road on January 27, 2002 � had "chestnut hair curling past her shoulders"; she "raised doves and adored children," James Bennet reported in a front-page article for the Times.

Another young Palestinian woman, Ayat al-Akhras, who blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket last March, was profiled no fewer than three times by Times correspondents. The first two articles (by Serge Schmemann, March 30, 2002, and Joel Greenberg, March 31, 2002) presented details about her name, age, sex, occupation, and family members, and included a large, full-length photo of her and another of her mourning father. The only information given about the victims of the attack was that "a man and woman were killed," and that at least 30 were wounded. No names, no descriptions, no occupations, no ages, no mourning families, and certainly no photographs. (All these were given in other papers.)

While the schoolgirl victim of al-Akhras's bombing (Rachel Levy, 17) was finally named a week later in a third Times article (which again provided a photo and details of the terrorist � Joel Greenberg writing that al-Akhras wore jeans, had "flowing black hair," and so on), the male victim of the bombing was apparently deemed to not be newsworthy: His name was never mentioned. He was in fact Haim Smadar, who was temporarily working as a security guard at the supermarket during the Passover holidays, and who used himself as a human shield to keep al-Akhras from taking more lives.

New York Times reporters have employed sympathetic language in describing male terrorists too. When 26 Palestinian gunmen, who had seized control of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, were exiled to Gaza last May, Tim Golden's report ("Cast Adrift After Siege, Bethlehem Exiles Grieve," May 21, 2002) was surprisingly sympathetic. These men had just shot their way into one of Christianity's holiest shrines, trashed it, and held its priests hostage; before that they had been involved in shooting at Israeli motorists, preparing bombs, and dispatching suicide bombers. Yet Golden went so far as to describe the difficulties the men might now have finding work: "The echoes, critics of the deal said, could scarcely be crueler: after half a century in which Palestinians have fought for the return of compatriots who fled at Israel's creation, they have been forced from their homes once more."

DOES THE TIMES HAVE AN AGENDA?

The Times's distorted presentation of events is especially troubling given the very high respect in which the paper is generally held by its readership, policymakers, and other members of the media. The Times's framing of the conflict has for years contributed to bad diplomacy at the State Department and elsewhere, and has fueled negative images of Israel among the public at large. As I know from personal experience working as a correspondent in the Middle East for both American and European papers, foreign news editors throughout the world often look to the Times for story ideas. Every evening, editors across America check the next day's front-page stories on the New York Times before altering their lineups.

Especially abroad, some mistakenly presume that the New York Times must be pro-Israel since it is Jewish-owned and has several prominent Jewish writers and editors. In fact, it may be precisely for this reason that it bends over backward to avoid being seen as the "Jew York Times," as one European journalist I used to work with in Israel called it. There would be nothing new in this. The Times deliberately downplayed reports on the Holocaust in the 1940s. It hid news of the ongoing genocide of European Jewry "in small print on the back pages� Jewish-owned but anxious not to be seen as Jewish-oriented," as historian David S. Wyman put it.