The Sting (updated)

I don't usually spend much time on the anti-Israel blogosphere, but most readers here are probably familiar with  wrong-headed, thin-skinned, and notoriously unreliable blogger Richard Silverstein.

Since last year the Seattle-based blogger has made a career of publishing news items that were censored by the Israeli military. He has made a name of himself more recently by taking unsourced allegations from people who email him and publishing them as scoops from highly-placed sources in the Mossad.Yet no matter how bizarre his claims, he was getting coverage from lazy newspaper reporters for his increasingly fantastical "scoops" (for example, that Israel sent a booby-trapped drone into Lebanon with the sure knowledge that Hezbollah would carry the drone to a highly sensitive indoor spot where the IDF could blow it up.)

Aussie Dave of Israellycool performed a classic sting on Dickie. In one fell swoop, he proved that:

• Silverstein will publish anything that he hopes to be true, with no fact checking whatsoever.
• Silverstein has no moral compunctions about revealing private details of people he hates.
• Silverstein knows nothing about Israeli culture, even though he claims to.
• Silverstein will come up with fanciful conjectures out of thin air - and post them.
• Silverstein is a liar.

Read Aussie Dave's post explaining the sting.  It is a thing of beauty.

And given that it is many hours later and Silverstein still hasn't deleted his post (his usual method when he's been made into a fool) nor admitted he was scammed, so we have also learned that he cannot bring himself to admit  he was wrong.

In my experience, those who cannot admit mistakes are the ones who are the least reliable of all. Hubris and truth do not intersect.

Maybe he thinks it is Purim.

UPDATE: Silverstein finally admitted he was scammed, and is showing righteous indignation - because Aussie Dave used a fake Facebook account. Richard the Moral reported him. After all, it is a violation of Facebook rules! It's OK to defend Hamas, but creating a fake FB account to prove an idiot blogger has no clothes - well, that's going over the line!

You can't make this stuff up.