Try this for a headline from the BBC: “Witnesses cast doubt on Israel’s convoy raid account”. That’s the lead story on the MidEast section of the BBC’s website. Here’s the first paragraph:

“Eyewitness accounts from ships raided by Israeli commandos have cast doubt on Israel’s version of events that led to the deaths of at least nine people.”

So, members of a virulently anti-Israeli convoy whose friends, colleagues and soul mates launched a violent attack on Israeli soldiers which ended in bloodshed have a different version of events from the Israelis, their sworn enemies? That’s a quotable lesson in BBC propaganda: people whom the average 11 year old could see have a conflict of interest are passed off as objective “eyewitnesses”.

But if you think that’s stupid, wait until you see what the Guardian’s serving up as Middle East editor Ian Black refers to the predictable condemnation of Israel in the Islamic world and then feigns surprise that it has been echoed in the West:

“Far more striking,” he writes, “was the wave of critical statements by normally friendly countries, with Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, calling for the lifting of restrictions on Gaza. France, Sweden, Denmark and Greece all summoned Israel’s ambassadors for explanations.”

“Normally friendly countries”? The British Foreign Office is so notoriously hostile that its MidEast team is habitually referred to as the “Camel Corps”. France has been the most viscerally anti-Israeli country in Europe since Charles de Gaulle called the Jews an “arrogant and domineering people” back in the 1960s.

Sweden last year became the wellspring for one of the worst anti-Semitic blood libels in living memory when the country’s best selling newspaper Aftonbladet released the Jew-organ-harvesting story while the country’s government actually condemned its own ambassador to Israel for distancing the Swedish authorities from it. I’ll give Denmark a pass for the moment since, with all due respect, it’s not a major player. As for Greece, it is probably the most anti-Semitic country in Europe, though I concede that the competition is stiff.

If this is what passes for being “friendly” to Israel you get a startling insight into the calculus that informs the Guardian’s broader worldview.

Still, the media has not been alone in the irrationality of its response. I noted in a postscript to my previous entry that CNN was carrying a strapline (on the afternoon of the day the story broke) as follows: “EU condemns use of excessive force, calls for investigation”.

But why call for an investigation if you’ve already drawn your conclusion that the use of force was excessive? That, in fact, provides a pretty fair summary of the way in which most Western leaders have responded to this affair. They say that they don’t know what happened (therefore there needs to be an investigation) but condemn Israel all the same, thus saying that they do in fact know what happened.

And that’s the price you pay for adopting the anti-Israeli agenda. It’s not just your basic political principles and values that get flushed down the toilet, it’s your capacity for reasoned discourse as well.