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From WNYC in New York,

this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. Israel unleashes the biggest bombing campaign in Lebanon in decades. It's a major escalation in a mid-east already on

Ed. Israel's ambassador to the U.S. calls it a major-major escalation. The news from the

Middle East this week was at once familiar and unusually terrifying,

a hostage-taking-turned-conflagration that quickly engulfed Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine.

By Friday, the situation was still escalating, with Syria and Iran suggested as instigators,

and the violence was widely portrayed as the brink of full-scale war.

Press in the United States struggled to find context and reflexively reviewed the past, but in the Middle East, the press was dealing with the immediate emergency.

Susan Kasky is the international editor for the Week magazine,

...