Thursday, March 06, 2003

Baseless attributions

Someone ought to keep track of the amount of bad things initially and baselessly attributed to Israel in the Press. (The NY Times is particularly egregious.) In the past few weeks we have seen the bombing in Ein Hilweh which turned out to be a feud between Qaida and Fatah first get blamed on Israel. Prior to that we saw an attempted suicide bomber have his bomb go off too early and Hamas initially blamed Israel. There, the New York Times in the same article that they said that it was a guy blowing himself up, had a headline that read something like "Hamas Says Israel Responsible". The amount of irresponsible reporting is enormous.

I am reminded of a Dry Bones cartoon from the 70's which had Arafat reading about a boiler exploding in a Tel Aviv apartment. Then Arafat calls an aide and tells him to quickly claim responsibility for that. This is similar. If a boiler explodes in Gaza there is someone on the phone blaming Israel for the attack. Whatever the facts may reveal later is completely independent. (Remember Jenin?)