Slashdot Mirror

The headline makes it sound like there was this firefight just sort of hanging out, like firefights do, and a couple of troops just blundered into it.

Let's rewrite the headline in active voice: "Palistinians Attempt to Kill Two Noncombatant Israeli Soldiers Who Accidentally Entered Refugee Camp"

From the article:

In the camp, they were "stormed by a mob of people with rocks and molotov cocktails," Lerner said. The troops' vehicle was blocked from turning around and caught fire. The soldiers fled in separate directions.

I don't think Israel is perfect, nor Israeli soldiers, but I am rather tired of how passive voice is so often used when describing things done to Israelis.

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=3132

I wouldn't say that the two Israeli soldiers "blundered into a firefight". They blundered into a refugee camp, and there a group of Palestinians tried to kill them. Since their vehicle was blocked and then destroyed, they fled on foot. The firefight came later, when more Israeli soldiers came to rescue the two who blundered.

Note that the Slashdot story headline is worse than the one from the Washington Post, which is: "Israeli troops relying on Waze app blunder into Palestinian area; clashes follow"

I note also that the summary has a detailed accounting of the harm done to Palestinians: "at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously." Yet curiously it leaves out the small details that the Palestinians attacked first, destroyed a military vehicle, and injured 10 Israeli soldiers.

Again for comparison, the Washington Post article says:

The clashes in the Qalandiya refugee camp outside Jerusalem left at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously. At least 10 Israeli soldiers also were wounded during the hour-long operation.

Perhaps the omissions are simple mistakes, but it's kind of strange how the omissions were all about harm done to Israeli soldiers.

I'll finish with one more quote from the Washington Post story:

Tension between Israelis and Palestinians has been running high over the past five months, with almost daily stabbing, shooting and vehicular attacks by Palestinians against Israelis. The violence has left at least 29 Israeli citizens and three foreign nationals dead.

So the two soldiers who "blundered" are guilty of getting a bit lost. I've gotten a bit lost; I'm just lucky that I don't live in a place where a mob of people will attack me if I go to the wrong neighborhood.

Hamas instructions to lie about casualties and claim all militants are civilians
http://www.memri.org/report/en...

Hamas faking casualty reports and claims
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...
http://www.ynetnews.com/articl...
http://www.haaretz.com/news/di...
http://honestreporting.com/sha...

Debunking claims about civilian deaths
http://www.camera.org/index.as...

Hamas using human shields
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://honestreporting.com/for...
http://www.algemeiner.com/2014...

Here's a Qassam rocket. When they're new they often paint them up all fancy, but you can see how simple they are without the paint. They're just a steel pipe with fins crudely welded to the side. The engine is a steel plate with nozzles drilled out. They use multiple nozzles because the rockets are so crudely made, they keep on going even if a couple fail. They're literally sugar rockets - the fuel is sugar and potassium nitrate fertilizer. The warhead is a steel shell which they stuff with whatever smuggled explosives they can get ahold of. The trigger is a bullet cartridge with a nail and a spring.

Teenagers competing in model rocket competitions build more advanced rockets than that.

The courageous yet curiously named Anonymous Coward asked a simple question unrelated to cockaroaches turned into cyborgs by a children's hobby kit:

If you understand, please explain what Menachim Begin meant when he said, "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.".

Well Mr. A.C., we have moved quite offtopic here but I think that the explanation below of what Begin did not actually say regarding drugged roaches may satisfy your request for an explanation of what did not actually occur:

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=21&x_article=1446

Besides the false quotes portraying Israeli leaders as brutal ethnic cleansers, Walt and Mearsheimer also dredge up other supposed quotes (page 89) to argue that Israeli leaders are racists. Thus they charge that former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin called the Palestinians "beasts walking on two legs" and former IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan termed them "drugged roaches in a bottle."

Did Begin say that Palestinians are beasts? The answer is absolutely not. In a June 8, 1982 statement to the Israeli parliament, Begin did use the term "two-footed animals," but he was referring not to Palestinians but to terrorists who would murder Israeli schoolchildren. Begin's statement is available online; here is the relevant passage:

        The children of Israel will happily go to school and joyfully return home, just like the children in Washington, in Moscow, and in Peking, in Paris and in Rome, in Oslo, in Stockholm and in Copenhagen. The fate of... Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents.

Obviously there is nothing racist in the least in Begin's statement, and once again the genuine quote actually undermines the point Walt and Mearsheimer were deceptively trying to make.

Any politician who dared sign the release papers wouldn't only be out of a job, he'll be lucky to make it through the next year without an angry mob destroying his house.

Israel releases 429 Palestinian prisoners in gesture to Abbas
Israel releases another 550 prisoners
Israel approves release of 250 prisoners
The Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange followed an agreement between Israel and Hamas to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,027 prisoners
Hezbollah released the remains of two captured Israeli soldiers in exchange for Samir Kuntar (described here)

Of the politicians responsible, Olmert resigned on corruption charges and Netanyahu is still Prime Minister.

The problem with Wikipedia in respect to 1990 is actually fairly clear; to most Wikipedians, "if it's not on the web it doesn't exist." Their faulty, backwards "reliable sources" sections have left them ignoring, or sometimes destroying, records painstakingly crafted on the history of various industries in which much of the documentation is not found in newspapers, but in archives like USENet and inter-BBS communication.

Here's a great example of where wikipedia screwed up in covering and handling the topic of content management systems.

Or where obvious POV-pushing is not just tolerated by Wikipedia, but actively supported by Wikipedia insiders: Tellingly, it was later revealed that one of the Wikipedia editors who led the attack is actually an employee of Electronic Intifada.

And then there's what they do to actual researchers who try to contribute.

Understand the problem yet?

A fair number of the GPs quotes seem to come from mepja.org, or at least are among those also quoted there.

I find both the original references, and the refutation links interesting.

The first refutation link is to a wiki (wikiquote), which one can imagine being subject to propaganda struggles on popular pages. The second refutation link describes the quote being refuted as from some entirely different sources than the GP's. One can't help but wonder, when a quote is attributed to different sources. Of course, the GP's quotes are from sources obscure enough that researching them becomes more than an idle moment's diversion from work as well.

The parent's CAMERA.org link is to a page debunking a few particular "sources of misinformation". It is hard to tell, from the sidelines, whether they've cherry-picked particular statements that are provably false, or whether they have chosen a small set of examples fitting a larger pattern. The sources quoted, as well as those used for verification, are obscure beyond the idle endeavor.

But in as much as I have no first hand evidence, and no experience with any of the sources or organizations involved, I have no basis to place trust in either side. CAMERA evidently has its stated goals, as described:

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or CAMERA, a media watchdog founded to combat what was perceived as anti-Israeli press coverage...

Columbia Journalism Review

...devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East. ... non-partisan organization, CAMERA takes no position with regard to American or Israeli political issues or with regard to ultimate solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. ...Frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.

CAMERA's stated policies.

I would have more trust if they were an academic organization, or if they were interested in busting myths about both Israelis AND Arabs/Palestinians, instead of being specifically a defense of one side.

And this, really, exhausts how far I'm willing to research a set of topics I have no personal stake or influence in, on whim alone. Someone wants to compensate me for my time, I'd develop more interest in chasing down these quotes.

But it does show that you can trust quotes only as far as your personal knowledge, and your sphere of trust goes.

All this quotes are pure lies:
search for "must expel Arabs and take" in
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Ben-Gurion

search for "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation"
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=22&x_article=775

etc...

some arab supported seem to just LOVE using lies as the best weapon.

Link to a few examples from the flotilla one.

Oh please. The BBC is hardly impartial. It's been accused (with evidence) of being pro-Palestinian and well as anti-Israel. It's not neutral. Is the BBC as a concept wonderful? Yeah. Is it objective? No.

Read "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" by Ilan Pappe (an Israeli jew... mentionning it so that you can't dismiss him as a muslim, anti-semite, etc)

Just so you know, Ilan Pappe freely admits that he just makes shit up to support his objective.

If you want to cite Israeli sources and not sound like you're on an agenda, you might cite someone more mainstream.

If anyone wants a rough idea of the reliability of that site, they only need to compare its page on the BBC to the one on Fox: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=15. Can't say I was surprised

the BBC hasn't been a reputable news source to any honest observer for years now. Here's another sample of journalistic malfeasance by BBC news: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=12

Of course, the general attitudes and biases of the News org tends to generally filter out to the rest of the organization as well.

Feel free to peruse some of the articles here; http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/ or here; http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=26019_Outrage-_BBC_Employs_Hamas_Terrorist&only or here; http://michellemalkin.com/category/bbc/

Meant to include this link in my original post: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=12&x_article=1464

If such an investigation finds no hidden counter-claims, then we will know for a fact that the claims of stifling are overblown.

Because the BBCsaid so? !

Government != impartial.

There are several pro-Israel monitoring services watching the press - CAMERA in the US, BICOM in the UK, and MEMRI to monitor the Arab press. CAMERA is noted for having a good database of stories about Israel. Apparently stories mentioning Israel are found automatically, but evaluated by people.

The CIA has something called the "Open Source Intelligence Service", which started as the "Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service". Visualize some poor guy spending eight hours a day listening to Radio Albania, all through the Cold War. Most of the content is terminally boring, but then, one day the announcer says "so we're invading Yugoslavia", and the CIA needs to notice this. There have been repeated attempts to automate the job.

When Arial Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, openly bragged on October 3rd that, "We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it", why should I not find this statement objectionable, and anti-American? I whole-heartedly support this inquiry because the Israelis cannot be trusted with our (American) interests.

That quote is a fake.

Google and I agree with you ;-)

As for your second comment, using a radio to remotely detonate an explosive is still relevant if you are using an innocent carrier to deliver the explosive. Even if he is too young to know yet what a virgin is.

The BBC seems far more interested in painting a picture (with their particular slant, of course) of the situation for Palestinians than reporting on the situation for Israelis.