The Plank
06.20.06
PALESTINIAN HOAXING:
I know David Frum was once a Bush speech writer. But he was a brilliant
speech writer, and he is a brilliant and fastidiously honest conservative. I
preface this plank with these assurances to ask your indulgence to cite one
of his columns in Canada's National Post of June 17 (which is available
here). It details a pattern in Palestinian propaganda which he says goes
back to 2000 (but actually goes back a hundred years) that Frum calls
hoaxing. James Fallows once did a devastating article in the Atlantic
Monthly on one such hoaxing, of the 12-year-old poster boy--
Mohammad al-Dura--who famously died at the start of the second intifada in
September 2000.
Alas for French Channel 2, which established the narrative of Israeli forces
killing the boy deliberately and in cold blood, its version--following the
script of the Palestinians--has turned out to be more than suspicious. In
fact, it has turned out to be completely specious. Channel 2 has refused to
release or even show its outtakes from the scene. Hoaxing was also the
strategy in the battle of Jenin, where CNN and BBC predictably saw a
"massacre" that, with equal predictability, was blessed by Peter Jansen,
Kofi Annan's surrogate in the West Bank. This also turned out to have been
completely false, with the Israelis exposing themselves to unusual perils in
battle and suffering unnecessary casualties.
This pattern of hoaxing by the Palestinians and the blessings of big media--
employing Palestinian journalists and frightened themselves of hotheaded
Palestinian gunmen, admitted to once by Tom Friedman in From Beirut to
Jerusalem-- on the fabrications is exposed in a relatively new web site,
SecondDraft.org, which richly deserves attention. (SecondDraft was started
by Richard Landes, a distinguished Boston University historian of nutsy
millennial movements which is certainly what the Palestinian irredenta is.)
I believe that the death of the Ghalia family on the Gaza beach ten days ago
is not a consequence of Israeli shelling, and certainly not of deliberate
targeting of the family. The details simply don't comport. Even without
these insistent details, I'd take the word of the Israelis over the
Palestinians, who make a specialty of speaking in forked tongues. And,
moreover, as Frum points out, when Palestinians kill civilians no one ever
calls it a mistake and certainly not the Palestinians. This is the way they
fight their battles, and innocents are their targets.
--Martin Peretz
http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=21495
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