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When a recent blog post by citizen journalist Yaacov ben Moshe won the hearty endorsement of an editor at the country's arguably most influential political journal, it was clear he struck a chord.

Ben Moshe, a resident of the Boston area, found his site flooded with traffic when he posted a series of tongue-in-cheek graphs demonstrating the media's obsession with Palestinian victimization. Soon, such voices as National Review's Michael Ledeen were telling readers "Do not fail to read" the posts.

Ben Moshe's posts were aimed at the vast majority of journalists, he said, who have a pathological fixation with blaming Israel and America first, and desperately seek to tell the Palestinian side of the story at the expense of honesty and integrity.

"They all subscribe to all of the lethal progressive ideologies," ben Moshe told The Jewish State in a phone interview. "And this stuff is what's killing Western civilization. In the process of deconstructing ideas, they're deconstructing the underpinnings of what makes us the greatest civilization that ever existed."

The site is called Breath of the Beast (breathofthebeast.blogspot.com), and was set up to allow fellow citizens to tell their stories of eye-opening encounters with Islamic anti-Semitism. Ben Moshe's first post was his own story. (Ben Moshe is his "nom de blog," as he calls it, because of the danger in revealing one's identity on Internet sites that fight Islamic terrorism. Yaacov ben Moshe is his Hebrew name.)

Ben Moshe retold his story to The Jewish State. In the 1980s, an Iranian family moved next door to ben Moshe. His daughter, then 5, would play with the Iranians' 5-year-old son, and the parents were close friends as well. One summer, the Iranian family took a two-month trip to Iran. When they returned, ben Moshe's daughter ran excitedly to play with her friend, but came home five minutes later.

"She had this funny look on her face, an odd look for a 5-year-old," ben Moshe said. It turns out the boy had told his daughter "that we're Jews, and so he has to kill us."

Ben Moshe confronted the boy's father, who "was just horrified that his son had said these things."

Ben Moshe said it awoke him to reality, that when Jewish enemies say they want to kill all the Jews and Americans, they mean it.

"So it kind of sensitized me in a way that I think a lot of other Americans -- and particularly American Jews -- have never gotten sensitized," he said.

That is where the name Breath of the Beast comes from.

"You don't necessarily believe that the beast is there until you actually feel the hot breath on the back of your neck," he said. "And by that time it's too late, so take the warning."

Others have responded and submitted their own such stories to ben Moshe.

"These are people who were not sensitized, and became sensitized in a moment of distress and revelation," he said.

One example was a Jewish woman in New York who had a friendly and even flirtatious relationship with a Muslim. She ignored the voice of apprehension in her head in an attempt to prove her open-mindedness.

"And one day, she saw his face on the front of the newspaper; he'd been arrested as a terror suspect," he said. "It was an alarming thing for her, and she got to thinking that maybe this blind liberal tendency to feel everybody is just a good person at heart, and if they're mad at us it must be something we did -- maybe that's not the best way to approach things."

Ben Moshe believes the progressive instinct to ignore warning signs stems from people's desire to avoid taking life-changing steps to protect themselves.

"If they really were to believe that one of the prime movers of the Arab world is the hatred and urge to destroy us, then we really ought to do something about it," he said. "And we have a tremendous aversion to doing anything along those lines."

Ben Moshe offers our dependence on foreign oil as one example. If we weren't so dependent on Arab oil, he said, they still might hate us, but would be less able to take action against us.

"The only thing that makes them able to is the fact that every time you drive your SUV up to a gas pump, you're renewing your membership in the terror-attack-of-the-month club," he said. "And people just don't want to deal with that."

One of ben Moshe's charts -- which, he stresses, are based on perception, not statistics, a bit of a spoof on such charts -- shows how free reporters are in Israel versus the neighboring Arab countries. Reporters take advantage of the setting by digging their heels in against Israeli leaders, and letting their Arab hosts drive their coverage.

"They have to give up the idea of even-handedness, because even-handedness doesn't exist in that world," he said. "So they're bringing in this foreign concept of even-handedness, and in that context it's actually just suicide."

In terms of what Israel can do to combat this, ben Moshe believes the Israeli government must be more aggressive. When evidence mounted that French reporter Charles Enderlin's report on the death Muhammad al-Durra -- who Enderlin claimed was killed in the Intifada by Israeli soldiers -- was a hoax, the story had to be driven by others, since the Israeli government didn't want to fight it.

Things on that front may be looking up, he said.

"I think the [Prime Minister-designate Binyamin] Netanyahu regime is going to improve the performance along those lines," he said. "He's very much better at thinking about these things than [Ehud] Olmert and [Tzipi] Livni."

On the prospects for media improvement in general, he said: "It can't get any worse."