Dear Lisa, I agree with your other readers on the merits of this article. You certainly told an important story, and as usual, the writing was wonderful. Like many others, I followed the various conversations on the blogs you mention with great interest. It was fascinating to sneak a peek at the "real" interactions behind some of those discussions in the blogosphere. There was one paragraph, however, that I found a little...condescending. You write that,

Over the following month a few bloggers managed to remain detached. Most, however, did not. Some of the Israeli bloggers devoted enormous amounts of energy to exposing media bias towards Israel, or to blanket condemnations of all Muslims, or to excruciatingly detailed descriptions of Israeli suffering.

There is no doubt that you are right in your characterization of some of the Israeli blogs. I'm sure there were hateful things said about Arabs and Muslims - they deserve our unqualified condemnation. However, I couldn't help but detect a certain snideness in your aside about those bloggers who "devoted enormous amounts of energy ... to excruciatingly detailed descriptions of Israeli suffering." I am not sure who in particular was the object of that description. But it seems a little uncharitable to those bloggers in Haifa and the north who really did have their lives put on hold and who were forced to grow accustomed to rockets landing in their neighborhood. As for those who spent so much time exposing media bias to Israel - I think their efforts could also be evaluated a little more generously; certainly, they should not be automatically classified as right-wing fanatics. It doesn't seem very fair to lump them together with racists either. A more generous reading of these bloggers' work might focus on the profound disappointment they felt over the blindness of some media outlets (by no means all or even the majority) to the experience of the people in northern Israel. Maybe these people were too self-centered, but does the representation of one's own suffering necessarily imply the exclusion of the other's pain? I hope this is making a bit of sense. Being personally connected to someone whose posts might have ostensibly fit your characterization, I felt that I had to speak up. At least in the case that I know, the description was inaccurate and a bit unfair. Best, Amos