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Saturday, September 18, 2010

Where's this Time magazine cover?

After Time magazine wrote its ridiculous cover story saying that Israel doesn't care about peace, Soccer Dad wrote a series of articles (the originalpart iipart iiipart iv and part v, part vi) showing how Palestinian Arabs are the ones who are not interested in peace.

(I contributed the cover art.)

Well, I just read something that could be part 7.

A new poll of Palestinian Arabs show that more than half of them are not even following the current negotiations in the news.

Now, Time's main evidence for saying that Israelis don't care about peace was a poll from last March:
Asked in a March poll to name the "most urgent problem" facing Israel, just 8% of Israeli Jews cited the conflict with Palestinians, putting it fifth behind education, crime, national security and poverty. 
This is playing with numbers, of course. Local issues always outpoll international issues for every country - to use it as evidence of not wanting peace is the worst kind of twisting of data.

One could also argue that the Palestinian Arab poll I am quoting does not indicate that PalArabs don't care about peace, just that they are skeptical about the chances for a breakthrough. However, Israelis didn't get any benefit of the doubt by Time, and they will never put out a similar story about Palestinian Arabs as they did about Israeli Jews given evidence that is at least as compelling as that which they used two weeks ago.