Conspiracy theories are widespread and exceedingly popular. They appeal to the all-too-human need to make order out of chaos, and to assign blame to a convenient and/or strategic scapegoat. They arise spontaneously, or they can be manipulated for political and … Continue reading →
Christopher Hitchens (previously no special friend of Israel’s) deconstructs Juan Cole’s Dowdification of Ahmadinejad’s threats to Israel in this Slate article (via Austin Bay) entitled “The Cole Report: when it comes to Iran, he distorts, you decide.” Hitchens’s contention is … Continue reading →
The Hamas government claims that today’s suicide attack that killed nine innocents and wounded sixty in Tel Aviv is a “legitimate response to Israeli aggression.” One thing you can say for Hamas: they’re clear about where they stand. The linked … Continue reading →
Right from the start–its very title–this NY Times article is a good example of what’s wrong with the paper. Are there any incorrect facts in the piece? I doubt it. My guess is that, strictly speaking, it contains not a … Continue reading →
A while back, I speculated on how many Palestinians who voted for Hamas in the recent elections were playing a voting game. An article from the Telegraph had quoted a young Palestinian voter as experiencing post-election regret: Like many others, … Continue reading →
This post is based on one of those comments of mine that grew and grew until I realized I’d written what almost amounted to an article. So, why not make it one? Well, one reason is that arguments about Israel … Continue reading →
Via Austin Bay, I came across this article from the Telegraph, on the Hamas victory: It was not supposed to be like this. For the past two years, America has pursued the idea that democracy is the answer to Islamist … Continue reading →
A while back, I wrote about the important job I thought Second Draft was doing in presenting facts and original material about controversial news coverage–and perhaps misrepresentations–of certain events in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Recently, Second Draft has taken on the … Continue reading →
In case you missed the story the first time round, Richard Landes of Second Draft has a post at Solomonia on the misidentification of Tuvia Grossman by the press. Grossman, an American Jew studying in Israel, was beaten by a … Continue reading →
It’ll be like having a look behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. –Richard Landes, originator of Second Draft, in an interview at Solomonia. By now you may have heard the buzz about Second Draft, a new media watchdog … Continue reading →
A reader recently alerted me to an astounding article by Martha Gellhorn which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October of 1961, forty-four years ago. Gellhorn was quite a story in herself. Beautiful, brilliant, brave, she was the third wife … Continue reading →
The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (which I supported, by the way, as the best alternative among all the lousy “choices among crazinesses” available to the Israelis at the time) has had some disheartening results. First we had the inevitable but … Continue reading →