Possibly you missed the news that Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, last weekend authorised the execution of four men in Gaza - three by hanging, the fourth by firing squad. Indeed, this newspaper was virtually alone in reporting it.
But imagine the publicity such judicial murder would have garnered had the executioners been Jewish and the legal authority responsible for them the state of Israel.
Of course, this is hypothesis: the only man lawfully executed in Israel was Adolf Eichmann; otherwise the state of Israel does not indulge in judicial executions.
But if it did, and in a single morning sent three men to the gallows and the fourth to the firing squad, would the killings have gone largely without notice around the world?
Now the issue here is not the rights and the wrongs of capital punishment. Virtually without exception, we all approve of capital punishment: who would argue today that Himmler, the architect of the death camps, should have been allowed to end his days in stately old age in a prison cell?
If you accept that he should have been hanged - as he would have been if he hadn't managed to poison himself - then you agree in principle with capital punishment; the rest is quibbles.
Nor is the issue the conduct of Israel's deeds in the West Bank, Gaza or anywhere else for that matter, many of which have been reprehensible. Few of us can look with equanimity at what are called "targeted killings" which could also go by the terms "assassination" or even "murder". But before we get too precious about Israel, let us remember a few details of our own counter-insurgency operations.
Let us recall the 77 men summarily murdered by the Free State, or the way de Valera's government used the Emergency Powers Act to change the rules of evidence so as to ensure a conviction and execution of the IRA man George Plant. In more recent times, the Rangers were deployed with orders to kill the kidnappers of Don Tidey,if at all possible, and when the security forces of this Republic ambushed the INLA leader Dessie O'Hare, their apparent intention was, understandably, to kill him.
No, the real issue here is how our media view the middle-eastern conflict: is a subconscious, pan-European anti-Semitism now at work, when this newspaper was almost alone in reporting last Sunday's executions? Yet we know that, if performed by the other side in the conflict, these killings would probably have caused an international outcry. And is this the reason why almost every visual representation of the conflict nowadays consists of Palestinian victims, or palpable signs of Israeli "aggression", such as the wall along the west Bank?
We are all familiar with pictures of dead Palestinians, killed by the Israelis. But how many pictures of any of the hundreds of dead Jews, children or otherwise, who have been killed by Palestinian suicide bombers, have you ever seen? An anti-Israeli bias has now become a norm in western European culture at even the most simple level.
The reason that Israel still stands a chance of qualifying for the World Cup is because of the performances of its Arab players, yet this uncomfortable truth is explained away with a few embarrassed coughs. That Israeli society generally strives to be fair and just, in simply impossible circumstances, is seldom applauded; instead, there is the usual diet of supercilious sneers and disdain at its failures, as if Israel could be just like Denmark, if only it tried a little harder.
The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed European coverage of the Middle East crisis. It reported that in Spain, for example, on June 4th, 2001 (three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis at a disco), Cambio 16 published a cartoon of the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, with a big hooked nose, wearing a skull-cap and sporting a swastika inside a star of David on his chest, proclaiming: "At least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every living insect."
The week before, El Pais - roughly the Spanish equivalent of this newspaper - published a cartoon of a figure carrying a small rectangular-shaped black moustache, flying toward Sharon's upper lip. The caption read: "Clio, the muse of history, puts Hitler's moustache on Ariel Sharon". A cartoon in the Catalan daily La Vanguardia showed an imposing building bearing the sign "Museum of the Jewish Holocaust" and beside it, another building under construction, with a large sign, "Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust".
A cartoon in Greece's largest newspaper, the daily Eleftherotypia, under the title "Holocaust II", showed an Israeli soldier as a Nazi officer and a Palestinian civilian as a Jewish death camp inmate. In Italy, La Stampa ran a cartoon showing an Israeli tank pointing a large gun at the infant Jesus in the manger, while the baby pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again, do they?" A Corriere Della Sera cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, rifle in hand, was sitting on the sepulchre.
These sacrilegious falsehoods - just a sample of many across the continent which was the home of the Final Solution - are so grotesque as to constitute anti-Semitism, pure and simple; but what makes them most insidious of all is the fact that their perpetrators are - apparently - quite unaware of this. Worst of all, such foul libels conceal the real truth that the only people who desire another holocaust in the Middle East are Israel's fundamentalist enemies.