Usually, I wouldn’t bother fisking a college newspaper’s opinion column. But since (a) we have the Pitt News on our blogroll so I feel kind of responsible, (b) it’s a slow news morning (Kerry wins another race and more flu cases in Asia – be still my beating heart), (c) I hate to see my alma mater’s paper fall to these depths, and (d) this article contains some very, very typical idiocy that you see elsewhere that can make it an instructive case study in how to take apart lies about Israel, I’m going to go ahead and blog it. And let’s be honest: it’s either blog this or do something productive, so it’s a pretty easy choice.
So, with these things in mind, let’s meet today’s guest. One Kevin Funk, who’s clearly not the honors-caliber student that Pitt is trying to attract nowadays. His main point is that the US media doesn’t present the context for Palestinian deaths. The problem with getting through his (and I use this word generously) opinion, is that it’s so filled with factual inaccuracies and snide insinuations that you sometimes lose track of the fact that he’s a flaming hypocrite. I’ll try to help keep you focused as we go through the article:
Thursday, Jan. 29, a Palestinian detonates a shrapnel-packed explosive on a crowded Jerusalem bus. He kills 10, plus himself. He wounds 50 more.
Even more tragic than this reprehensible act is the fact that, as wrong as it is, it is dwarfed by Israeli crimes.
Technically false. According to Amnesty International Palestinian terrorism constitutes a crime against humanity, which is a juridical category of the most severe magnitude. Israel has yet to be formally accused of crimes against humanity by anyone who, well, knows what that is (Al Jazeera editorialists don’t count – they don’t exactly have much game on international law). But that’s not the point.
The Palestinians, incidentally, also regularly violate international law by using children as soldiers, treating civilians as human shields, utilizing ambulances as combat vehicles, and storing weapons in mosques. But that’s not the point either.
The point of this post is context and hypocrisy. So lets see what context he provides. Civilian vs. Combatant deaths? No. Accidental vs. Intentional Deaths? Not so much. Remember, the distinction between targeting civilians versus targeting terrorists is the heart of the moral case for Israel’s self defense – and fortunately it’s an intuitive distinction that’s very, very hard to answer. Ergo the “maybe if I don’t talk about it people won’t notice it” strategy that this rhetorical genius uses. Hypocrite.
As the BBC reported — apparently, foreign media outlets try to give context — at least 2,600 Palestinians and 875 Israelis have been killed since the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada — Arabic for “uprising” — in September 2000. For the math-impaired, this means that Palestinian deaths — at least 439 of which were victims younger than 18, according to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem — outnumber Israeli deaths three to one.
If this sounds new, thank the press.
Sigh. Where to begin?
First of all, it’s factually misleading. It wasn’t the BBC that compiled these statistics it was a report from If Americans Knew, a Berkeley based group (I know, I know – he says “reported” – but his point is that everyone on this side of the Atlantic is hopelessly biased). Their website is here. Lets talk about it for a sec. They present some charts proving that Israelis are evil. They say that “Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by none” – without mentioning that the UN is structurally biased against Israel and makes it the only country on the planet, among dictators, thieves, tyrants, and murderers, that is banned from sitting on the Security Council. They say that “920 Israelis and 2,706 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000″ – without distinguishing between civilians and combatants. They say that “The Israeli unemployment rate is 10.4%, while the Palestinian unemployment is estimated at 37-67%” – without mentioning that every time Israel tries to let Palestinians into Israel, a suicide bomber attacks and they have to shut down the border crossings again. They say “106 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 513 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000″ – without mentioning that many of those children died while being used as human shields by Palestinians, and at least some of them died as suicide bombers themselves. So lets
be careful with the whole “foreign media outlets try to give context” thing, shall we?
So that’s hypocrisy in his source. Now lets talk about his own hypocrisy. For some real statistics, we go over to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism for a look behind the numbers. Now, while If Americans Knew (gosh, the name just reeks of professionalism and legitimacy, doesn’t it?) does indeed have bar graphs, the ICT does some actualnumber crunching. This is where I go off on guy’s sanctimonious little line about “the math-impaired.” It’s true that numbers help us understand things – but something that every first year stats student learns (you know, the non-math-impaired among us) is that numbers can be deceiving and you can’t just take two numbers and conclude that you have meaningful results – only ignorant ideologues do that. So the ICT actually did some analysis and came up with the following (and I urge you to click through to their site – their analysis is imposing):
