Avid Editor in the comments alerts me to a
ridiculously biased BBC report quoting those ever-present "eyewitnesses" to the IDF supposedly clinically executing civilians. The most patently absurd claim in the article was perhaps this one:
On Monday morning, he said the family heard an announcement over a loudspeaker. "The Israeli army was saying: 'This is the Israeli Defence Forces, we are asking all the people to leave their homes and go to the school. Ladies first, then men.'
"We decided to send the women first, two by two," he said.
First to step outside was the wife of his cousin, Rawhiya al-Najar, 48.
"The army was about 15 metres (50 feet) away from the house or less. They shot her in the head," he said.
The woman's daughter was shot in the thigh but crawled back inside the house, he said.
So the IDF, able to destroy the entire building in five seconds, in the middle of battling Hamas terrorists, decided instead to kill the women and children first, in single file?
Apparently, the Palestinian Arabs have discovered that any claims they make can get headlines if they call B'Tselem. B'Tselem, of course, decides that it should act as morally as possible, by maliciously spreading unverifiable and absurdly over-the-top lies:
B'tselem said it had been unable to corroborate the testimony it had received, but felt it should be made public.
So, let's look at the trustworthiness of Palestinian Arab civilians when making such claims in just the past year:
September, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" reported seeing a settler shoot a boy at point blank range 20 times. It turns out he had been killed by a grenade, and no Israelis were involved.
July, 2008: A Hamas work accident levels a house and kills 7. "Eyewitnesses" said it was an Israeli airstrike.
June, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" say that Zionist settlers release wild pigs to destroy their crops.
February, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" reported that an explosion in the Bureij camp that killed 8 was caused by Israeli airstrikes, but it was an work accident.
Honest Reporting has
many more examples of "eyewitnesses" who are found to have made up the entire story.
In all of these cases (besides the wild pigs) the false claims were loudly parroted by the media, and any corrections - if they occurred at all - would be days later.
And just last week we saw a Gazan family start screaming how they "
have no food" as soon as they saw a reporter, who saw plenty of food right there with them.
One would think that after years of lie after lie after lie from "eyewitnesses," verified to be false often by Palestinian Arab sources themselves, that they would start to catch on to the fact that PalArabs know the game and play reporters as patsies.
Journalists, of course, have a vested interest in a "good story," especially with a human component. The idea that people would lie to their faces is distasteful and it implies that they cannot tell the difference between truth and lies, so they are reluctant to correct mistakes.
NGOs have a much greater vested interest in furthering their agendas, regardless of facts, as we see from B'tselem here (at least they admit that the stories aren't verified - many other "human rights" organizations have no problem making up the lies themselves.)
What could it take for the media to wake up and start looking at Palestinian Arab claims with the same skepticism that they would give Western politicians?
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Elder of Ziyon
