As the violence between Israel and Palestine headed into its fifth day last night, owner of various awful news properties Rupert Murdoch asked a very thought-provoking and interesting question about the media's coverage of the conflict.

Fighting between Israel and the Palestinian people entered its fourth day today, and eight Palestinians were killed by Israeli fighter jets targeting Hamas government compounds, tunnels and transformers. That brought the overall death toll to at least 45, with all but three of those being Palestinians.

Tel Aviv air raid sirens wailed yesterday for the first time since the first Gulf War as Israel's second most strategically important city was targeted by Palestinian militants armed with long-range rockets.

Operation Pillar of Defense (or Pillar of Cloud if you're Israeli), the worst conflict between Israel and Gaza since 2008, escalated overnight as the IDF continued to strike dozens of targets inside the Strip, resulting in dozens of rockets being fired by Palestinian militants at Israeli towns and villages.

If you speak Hebrew, the Israeli Defense Forces would like you to refer to the wave of assassination strikes it commenced in Gaza today as "Pillar of Cloud," a Biblical reference to the form God adopted in order to protect the Children of Israel and strike terror into the heart of Egyptians. If you speak English, it would prefer you to use the less fanatical "Pillar of Defense."

Following four days of intensive rocket strikes from the Gaza Strip on neighboring towns and villages, and just hours after an Egypt-mediated truce, Israel announced it was launching a "widespread campaign" to root out "terror sites and operatives in the Gaza Strip, chief among them Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets."

We told you last month that Pamela Geller's wildly offensive pro-Israel ads, which paraphrase Ayn Rand to call Muslims "savages," were set to make their debut in New York City's subways sometime in September.

While most have focused on the "47 percent" comments from Mitt Romney's leaked fundraiser video, the full footage released today includes some very blunt words about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If any human right is inalienable, it is the right to get obliterated with your friends before running ass naked into the same waters in which Jesus once swam. Today, some awful people are trying to take away that right, and we mustn't let them.

Yes, it probably is.

During the Olympic opening ceremonies Friday night, Bob Costas almost expressed his opinion about the refusal to hold a moment of silence for the 11 Israeli athletes and coaches killed at the 1972 Olympic Games.

An explosion on a bus carrying Israeli youth in the Bulgarian resort town of Burgas killed as many as seven people and injured at least 20 at around 5:20 p.m. local time. It's unclear what happened — apparently some are claiming it was a female suicide bomber, while the Israeli Foreign Ministry says it wasn't a suicide bombing but rather a bomb in the trunk — but Bulgaria has been increasing security on resort towns frequented by Israelis since the January discovery of a suspicious package on an Israeli tourist bus.

Fourteen elderly women between the ages of 74 to 97 were picked from a pool of 300 registrants to walk the red carpet at an unusual event that took place yesterday at a reception hall in the Israeli city of Haifa: The first (and last) Miss Holocaust Survivor beauty pageant.

At least three American citizens were ordered by security agents to submit to a search of their private email account shortly after landing at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport.

Two Sundays ago, the New York Times ran an article about Mitt Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two have known each other for about 35 years. They went through Boston Consulting Group's "boot camp" together. They "can almost speak in shorthand." They finish each other's sentences and once accidentally ate from opposite ends of the same long strand of spaghetti. Their lives are an endless geopolitical meet-cute: Romney wants to run the nuclear big-box store of the United States, but he has enough love in his heart that he'd never crush the beautiful Middle Eastern shop around the corner.

On tonight's Daily Show, reporter Samantha Bee traveled to Park Slope, Brooklyn to get some first hand accounts of the fight over a proposed ban on Israeli products being waged within the Park Slope Food Coop. As expected, her report highlights the ridiculousness on both sides of the issue and throws in a solid skewering of the coop itself to boot.

On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart took a look at the increasingly pointed war rhetoric coming from Israel, Iran and the United States. It seems the case that since all three are in the midst of election cylces, no one is going to be turned the noise down any time soon.

"After three years of heated debate," The Wall Street Journal reports, "the Park Slope Food Co-op is at last ready for a vote." The vote is about whether they should vote about whether they should boycott products made in Israel, to protest what boycotters consider "an apartheid system against Palestinians."

The reaction to our post last week on Atlanta Jewish Times owner Andrew Adler's suggestion that Israel consider "order[ing] a hit" on Barack Obama was fast and fierce: After being denounced far and wide and apologizing abjectly, Adler is reportedly stepping down as publisher.

Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper serving Atlanta's Jewish community, devoted his January 13, 2012 column to the thorny problem of the U.S. and Israel's diverging views on the threat posed by Iran. Basically Israel has three options, he wrote: Strike Hezbollah and Hamas, strike Iran, or "order a hit" on Barack Obama. Either way, problem solved!