To the editor,

I agree indeed with your columnist Bill Barth regarding the ongoing loss of newspapers across our increasingly ill-informed nation. I must point out however that the major media he cites, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. have not always served us so well, and still do not, particularly with regard to reporting on U.S. foreign policy. A glaring example is and always has been unstinting support for the state of Israel and its unrelenting theft of Palestinian lands and abuse of its people. Abuse now amounting to almost 15,000 people, the majority of them by far being women and children, bombed to death in Gaza, a place long described as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Noam Chomsky, Nobel Prize-winning Jewish American scholar and long-time opponent of the Israeli state and its horrors, has said this of the American media: Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. The notable exceptions are of course the smaller and more local papers, such as this one, the Pierce County Journal, which I read avidly and with great pleasure each week. Not so incidentally, if you are truly interested and concerned with events in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, you should read, for example, the notable Israeli daily, Haaretz, the Quatar-based news source, Al Jazeera, and the monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, from France. And if you want to know the real reason Congressperson Van Orden went to Israel, read a book by two noted conservative Harvard scholars, Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Paul Schaefer

Hager City