mandatory bomb shelters in Israel?

In a report on CNN earlier today, the reporter (I think it was John Roberts) mentioned the circumstances of one rocket attack in northern Israel (I think it was in Haifa). In the course of his report, he noted in passing (one rocket passed through several layers of concrete) that Israelis are required to have bomb shelters.

I’ve searched Google News for more information about this and found only a handful of relevant mentions. Here’s one:

Nahariyans who have stayed in the town are feeling anxious and claustrophobic. Houses built since the mid-1990s have mandatory, reinforced “safe rooms,” so residents go there when air-raid sirens wail.

Others have to make use of the town’s more than 160 municipal shelters.

Here’s another:

Intel has moved employees in Haifa, which is located about 20 miles south of the Lebanese border, into a bomb shelter equipped with Wi-Fi, an Intel Israel representative told Reuters.

This would seem to be a salient piece of context for reporting on the ground in Israel, no? I mean, this is a liberal democracy where it is “normal” to have a bomb shelter in your home, or for your branch office, because your safety can come down to that.

How do we measure “proportionality” in such a context and in such a neighborhood as the Middle East? And why has everyone in the MSM jumped on the “Israel used disproportionate force” angle without reporting this element of the story?

The real bias of the talking-head media culture is ignorance and lack of intellectual curiosity.

Even for someone who knows that television news organizations are woefully lacking in overseas facilities (not to mention basic knowledge about the areas they “cover,” which makes them susceptible to manipulation by our enemies for propaganda purposes), the emptiness of the reporting, the lack of context, the absence of explanation of basic facts about the region, the conflict, the history, the potential impact on American concerns—i.e., the stakes—is shocking.

The MSM was caught with its pants down and has no idea how to handle this story. They’re so wrapped up in being “fair and balanced,” careful to allow Hezbollah press officers to have their say, that they are failing utterly to tell basics of the story: who? what? why? where? when?

The scrambling to get up to speed by pundits and bloggers is painful to behold, too.