Dave Crouch

There has been an avalanche on Bullshit Mountain. Set off by a timid stamp of Lord Justice Leveson's foot, the landslide of press outrage has buried the real scandal at the heart of Britain's newspapers.

Politicians and senior journalists have queued up to attack Leveson's report as a coup by the liberal establishment (the Daily Mail), opening the door to Stalinist state regulation (the Sun), threatening North Korean-style control (the Mirror), and giving succour to dictatorships such as Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan, China and Russia (more or less everybody).

On a September morning in 2005 police stormed the home of the sleeping Maloud Sihali and restrained him with such force that he was permanently lamed. At the same instant they broke down the door to the flat of Mustapha Taleb - he was so terrified that he vomited.

The two Algerians had been acquitted several months earlier at a massive terror trial in which they and three other defendants were accused of an Al Qaida mass murder plot using the poison ricin.

This is the closest that political writing gets to a John le Carré thriller. Kill Khalid is a highly readable introduction to the politics of the Palestinian resistance, focusing on Hamas.

The book takes its title from the botched Israeli assassination attempt in 1997 on Hamas activist Khalid Mishal, which effectively propelled him into the leadership of the resistance.

The shell that killed seven year old Shabia was fired by British troops. As the mortar landed, fragments of molten shrapnel sliced into her fragile body while phosphorus burned through her thick hair. The patrol called an ambulance. But Shabia was transferred to a squalid Afghan hospital. Within hours she succumbed to her wounds and died.

Away from the newspaper headlines about the damage done to parliament by the scandal of MPs' expenses, democracy is under threat in the press itself. The recession is tearing great chunks out of the industry, which has already been squeezed by a long-term decline in readership.

Last month the BBC Trust censured the corporation's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, for breaches of the BBC's guidelines on impartiality in his coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The complaints concerned an article by Bowen on the BBC website two years ago, and a radio broadcast in January 2008.

The BBC Board's position had nothing to do with "impartiality". When a dog savages a child, it is not impartial to stand back and watch the child bleed - that is siding with the dog. Hiding behind the shibboleth of impartiality in reality meant that the BBC sided with Israel.

Suitably uplifted, I bought ten copies to sell at work. So far I am only £3 down on my investment, well worth the feeling of working with nine other people who read the magazine.

Keep up the excellent work!

Dave Crouch
London

The British media coverage of the war that erupted in the Caucasus last month almost universally portrayed a fragile little democracy terrorised by its big Russian neighbour. But a closer look at what happened reveals something different - a frightening escalation of the "war on terror" that masks the US drive for markets, oil and influence around the globe.

How it sticks in the throat to hear Gordon Brown drone on about planting the union jack while he deports asylum seekers and sends more troops to occupy foreign lands.

So if we're so down on nationalism, why do we make it a point of principle to stand side by side with national liberation movements?

On one level the answer seems obvious. We wouldn't dream of saying "England for the English", but "Iraq for the Iraqis" is an excellent slogan in the anti-war movement.