Israel is restarting the terrorist violence. Since Arafat died a month ago, there have been no serious Palestinian attacks - and all the world has been watching the Palestinian leaders try to organize to work for peace. So Israel has restarted the killing. When the Palestinians do strike back, it will be reported as a sad resumption of terrorist tactics by them, while ignoring Israel's actual aggressions.

I know many friends refuse to check Middle East news websites, assuming they are skewed in their reporting. However, all news is skewed - to serve corporate causes, for patriotic reasons, and to bolster personal political beliefs. To even get close to the truth we need competing news sources - and we need to bring critical thinking to the process. If we don't, then we are living in our fantasy world of choice - and it might be comforting but it is not real.

You can quickly check bookmarked sites for news reports of interest to you. There is a good selection to the right for starters. Try checking a couple sites that are readable to you and see if your perception of events becomes more complete. What are the civilian death tolls in Iraq? How much did we destroy the city of Fallujah? What are the Jewish Israeli human-rights activists trying to tell us?

If you are not already, I can tell you that once you get in the swing of checking various websites and start tracking issues and processes, it can be quite fun and more interesting than reading books of fiction. It is real, it is complicated, there are real dramas being acted out and - and it all does affect us in the short or long time span. For the first time in human history, we common folks can read what is happening in other countries and around the world without the official filters of our domestic media.