"Comments From Left Field" helps me keep familiar with the left side of issues. The bloggers are zeroed in on opinion at Kos, Media Matters, et al. They are frequently informed yet often deluded. They are intelligent yet unreasonable; assertive yet in denial. (I know these opinions seem arrogant. You just have to trust me. Reason and reality are not the strong suits of these bloggers.) They DO NOT like to be disagreed with. They believe only a fool or an evil person would disagree with them. Why should they waste time considering the reasoning of fools and evil persons?
Despite effort to be polite and circumspect, I've been banned by 3 of the 5 bloggers whose posts I have commented on. Blogger Kathy has had the guts to not ban me, and to try and address my comments. However, at the bottom of this thread,
Set up: With one exception, these bloggers trust the word of Hamas before they trust the word of the Israeli state.
Kathy did allow my comment (#12) to appear in the comment thread. Thanks, Kathy! I have added subsequent comments(#13, #14, #15).
Posts
Kathy,
You should clearly say you recognize the [Palestinian chest compressions] video was faked. Unless you make that unmistakably clear, everything else you say is tainted by suspicion you are writing from emotion instead of reason.
You can maintain your outrage at Israel while still recognizing the plain fact that Palestinians are 1) making fake claims of war atrocities, and 2) committing atrocities against fellow Palestinians as well as Jews, i.e.
- Hamas is torturing and murdering Fatah
- a father received a call from Israelis informing that his house was hiding weapons, his house was about to be attacked, and he and his family should vacate. Instead, he gathered his 4 wives and children (11 persons in all) around him to be martyred by the coming Israeli missile. His daughter in law left the house shortly before the attack, and told the story.
tharnbag: Fuck you.
You should clearly say you recognize the video was faked. Unless you make that unmistakably clear, everything else you say is tainted by suspicion you are writing from emotion instead of reason.
You should clearly say you recognize that a more than usually vile far right blogger invented a controversy over the authenticity of the CNN video based on the most uncharitable interpretation possible of medical personnel trying to revive a 12-year-old boy who apparently was dead before they got him on the table. There is no way for anyone but those directly involved to know what went on before and after the few seconds of CPR shown, or what the context was. There is simply no way to make any sensible judgments about what those few seconds meant. Just because it appears to you in those brief moments you saw that a doctor was “faking” CPR efforts does not make it true.What seems much more plausible to me is that this fevered campaign to discredit this video is motivated far more by contempt and hatred for Palestinians and the unreasoning conviction that anything Palestinians say is a lie and everything Israelis say is the truth.
The point to discrediting this video is to discredit the very idea that innocent Palestinians are being killed and injured by the hundreds and thousands by a military force that doesn’t even regard Palestinians as human beings and that bombs and shells and blows up schools, mosques, homes, and hospitals with no concern for the lives of noncombatants.
I have no problem agreeing that I write from emotion. Of course, you and every other right-wing proponent of Israel’s right to do whatever it wants to whoever it wants whenever it wants and for any reason or no reason argue from emotion, too. And there is very little if any reason in the arguments and claims I am hearing and reading from those quarters.
You can maintain your outrage at Israel while still recognizing the plain fact that Palestinians are 1) making fake claims of war atrocities, and 2) committing atrocities against fellow Palestinians as well as Jews, i.e.
The plain fact? According to whom? The Israeli military, which never ever lies?
I am caught by surprise that you defend the chest compressions video, that you dispute that Palestinians are making fake claims, that you dispute that Hamas is torturing and murdering fellow Palestinians. I did not expect that you hold these opinions.
Innocent Palestinians have been killed by Israeli ordnance. Yet, given the volatility in the region, it is important to expose lies and exaggerations about same.
Would you grant that Palestinians have made fake claims in the past - such as the supposed shooting of 12 year old Muhammad al-Durah? Would you grant it is important to counter such blood libel? The faked Al Durah shooting became a second intifada rallying point, sold stamps and T shirts, inspired violence and riots, and even inspired Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorists.
Would you grant that these Pallywood scenes - which were reported as real on CBS 60 Minutes - were in fact faked? Would you grant that it is important to counter such lies?
that Hamas is torturing and murdering fellow Palestinians…
With U.S. support and instigation. Read up, fuckwad. And make sure to fucking educate yourself on the issues for once before commenting about them like you think you fucking know something, because you fucking don’t.
As for the video, I’m surprised you say it’s fake. LGF has an incredibly weak case. Do you simply parrot everything your wingnut masters tell you without giving pause to pursue a single critical thought to the matter, asshole? Regardless of what you think of the video, tragedies like what it displayed are happening everyday in Gaza right now. If you can’t get that through your thick fucking skull, then you are in no way qualified to comment on these matters.
And make sure to fucking educate yourself on the issues for once before commenting about them like you think you fucking know something, because you fucking don’t.
Dead straight on, tas.
And now Israel has announced it’s going to escalate the war. Over 800 Palestinians have already been killed in the two weeks since the war began. In that same time about 13 Israelis have been killed.
Glenn Greenwald wrote about this in the same post with the Bill Moyers video. I’d like to repeat a question he asks at the end of the post:
You guys carom around like nothing I’ve ever seen. Just … be wary of losing credibility by positioning yourself in favor of lies and against truth. No sober person can deny Muhammad Al Dura faked his own death. No sober person can deny Palestinians have staged fake atrocities in the past. If Israel’s backers want to use this: so what? The facts are the facts, and you are not afraid of the facts. Acknowledging truth will only add to your credibility, and will not detract from any reasoned argument you are making.
Tharnbag, fuckoff. “No sober person can deny Palestinians have staged fake atrocities in the past.” Seriously, fuck you. You haven’t the faintest fucking idea what’s going on there, and you refuse to educate yourself about the matters — opting to demean Palestinians instead. You’re fucking pathetic.
be wary of losing credibility by positioning yourself in favor of lies and against truth. No sober person can deny Muhammad Al Dura faked his own death. No sober person can deny Palestinians have staged fake atrocities in the past.
Losing credibility is one problem you will never have to worry about, gcotharn, because you don’t have any.
Whenever one comes across an insistence that “No sober person can deny [ fill in the blank] is true,” without providing evidence that it is, it’s obvious you are dealing with a deeply seated prejudice. “Everyone knows that blacks are lazy criminals.” “Everyone knows that Jews are rich and vulgar.” Or the converse: “Everyone knows that the only thing blacks excel at is athletics.” “Everyone knows that Jews are smarter.” “Everyone knows that Jews will cheat you if you give them half a chance.” “Everyone knows that Palestinians lie and fake atrocities.”
No proof or evidence necessary. Everyone knows it.
What is all the fuss about the dead people in Gaza. In South Africa more than 50 people are murdered every day by criminals and the world does not worry about it. WHY ?
Dropped Jenin corpse resurrects and climbs back onto bier - twice!
Muhammad Al Dura: Columbia Journalism Review, State of Israel, Natan Sharansky, Philippe Karsenty defeats France 2 in French court, WSJ Europe
Pallywood fakery
I wrongly assumed you were already familiar with this; that this was agreed upon fact which required no further proof. I did not expect you to argue that Palestinians have never faked victimhood for video cameras.
You have got to be kidding, gcotharn. No, don’t respond; that’s a rhetorical comment. I know you’re not kidding.
These videos were declared “fakes” using exactly the same absurd tactics as the CNN video. In videos of fast-moving events seen in fleeting moments and from a distance (a GREAT distance in the case of the Jenin video), and without any context outside the video itself, far right lunatics seize on tiny arbitrary details they claim are “suspicious” and insist these details “prove” what the video shows is a lie. This is an idiot’s game. I could pick out equally arbitrary details from these videos and tell you that the people on the stretcher or being shot or being given CPR are certainly actors hired by Israel to create anti-Palestinian propaganda.
Re Muhammad Al Dura, I looked at the CJR link (because CJR is a reputable non-ideological highly regarded publication). That article in no way supported an argument that Al Dura’s death was not the fault of Israelis. Doubts were raised, that’s all — nothing definitive was ever established. State of Israel and Natan Sharansky are not reliable sources for a story like this. And the Middle East Quarterly is a publication of the Middle East Forum, which is extremely right-wing and pro-Israel. The MEF also hosts Daniel Pipes’ site, and he is a racist, Islamophobic nutcase.
So what have we got? One Jenin video taken from an unmanned Israeli drone that is much too high up to interpret the meaning of details on the ground accurately; one video that starts with a 60 Minutes news segment and seamlessly morphs into a propaganda piece by an unseen narrator, who is clearly Israeli, and who uses selected details in a scene of violent conflict in which it is impossible to either positively identify any individuals, or independently confirm what the video appears to be showing; and one 12-year-old Palestinian boy whose shooting death by Israel was supposedly faked, for which the “support” given comes almost exclusively from virulently pro-Israeli sources, and for which there actually was no conclusive evidence of who actually killed the boy.
So that’s three incidents the right is claiming are examples of “Palestinian fakery” in a conflict that has killed and injured literally tens of thousands of Palestinians since 1967, and that in the past two weeks alone has killed over 800 Palestinians and injured thousands. In the same two-week time period, 14 Israelis have died in war-related violence. And 10 of those were Israeli soldiers, not civilians.
You did indeed assume incorrectly that the “evidence” you have provided above constitutes “agreed upon fact that required no further proof” of Palestinians faking their own victimization.
I see this a lot: right and left disagree about seemingly overt circumstances, i.e. Did the corpse twice fall off the bier and then arise and climb back on?, et al times a bunch. I didn’t expect to see such disagreement amongst you and I regarding these Palestinian examples.
I appreciate your investigation of some of the links. There is no purpose in my furthering a discussion of specifics. Based on your and my life experiences, we perceive different likelihoods, and we will not find areas of agreement.
Based on your and my life experiences…
No, it’s based on the fact that you’re a douchebag who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.