ei: Why is there no information about suicide bombing on EI?

1. The fact is that a considerable amount of material in a variety of sections on EI addresses suicide bombings, suggesting the questioner has spent little time browsing EI's website. In terms of key content and original EI content, BY TOPIC: Human Rights: Suicide Bombing offers access to a variety of background information, anaylses, reporting, and personal accounts about the topic. In addition, EI offers links in our BY TOPIC: Statistics: Casualty Statistics page to both Israeli and Palestinian databases of victims of the conflict. In brief, it is there if you look for it.

2. EI is not alternative media, rather, EI is supplementary media. While "alternative news" websites have become increasingly popular since the mid-1990s, the fact is that to be true alternative media, one's content by definition needs to make other media redundant. Our 2004 total annual budget was in the region of $50,000, less than the salary of a single foreign correspondent. Clearly, organizations such as EI, with limited resources and a small, primarily volunteer team of writers and researchers, are not in the position to replace or act as substitutes for large media organisations such as the BBC or The New York Times. We are, however, in a position to supplement existing media by offering differing analyses and by highlighting key sources of information from on the ground that do not usually get full reprints in the commercial media. The time and resources we do have are not therefore best employed in reporting on events that are already widely covered in the commercial media. In brief, there is hardly a shortage of, or oversight in, reportage about suicide bombings or coverage of events from the Israeli perspective. If there was, EI would be reporting it.

3. EI offers breaking news headlines in our THE MEDIA section, and strives to offer a selection of commercial and other media reporting to cover the gaps via our Weekday Press Picks List. In brief, EI does not wish to reinvent the wheel and, as we have pointed out time and time again, a genuine gap in commercial media coverage is that of Israeli attacks against Palestinians, as well as the historical, political, and legal context of the conflict, all of which regularly goes unreported by the mainstream media. In brief, we do our best to offer the maximum amount of coverage we can, and it should be noted that our Palestinian coverage — obviously our first priority — is itself not as comprehensive as we would like it to be, given the above noted limitations on our work.

4. All EI founders and team members are opposed to all forms of violence against civilians by any actor in the conflict. We all embrace, as guiding principles of our efforts on the site, the major international conventions and charters that aim to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure in times of war, armed hostilities, and/or military occupation. Chief among these is the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Additional Protocols of 1977. According to this international document, as well as major statements by such organizations as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B'Tselem, suicide bombings by Palestinians that target civilians, and Israeli abuses and killings of civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are all violations of international humanitarian law. Despite the equality in individual suffering, however, the conflict is not one between equals, and EI's analyses encourage readers to critically consider the structural underpinnings of this conflict at the local and global levels. Suicide bombings represent a statistical minority of the violence carried out against civilians in the conflict. That these attacks appear to be one, if not the primary, forms of violence urges caution and judiciousness to those who rely solely on the commercial media for their information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All the international media are based in Israeli-controlled areas where most suicide bombing attacks take place. If correspondents for leading media outlets were based in Palestinian areas, our window into the conflict would be a very different one indeed.