Saturday, November 26, 2005

i feel the hate

I'm pasting below a response to a column that I wrote for the Pitt News in February of 2004, because, well, it's comical in a "someone just libeled my name beyond belief in his blog" kind of way.

Allow me first, however, to run through the insults levied by "Omri" against this humble blogger: I am "not the honors-caliber student that Pitt is trying to attract," a "flaming hypocrite," "at most a B-/C+ humanities undergrad at Pitt", a possessor of "sneering self-righteousness," a member of the International Socialist Organization (yes, I consider that a bit of an insult), too stupid to be anti-Semitic because that would "require cognitive integration of facts," and, to boot, "a flaming idiot when it comes to math." Ann Coulter, I'd start to question my job security if I were you. Once you're done reeling from this highly dispassionate analysis you can continue to the full entry....if anyone sees anything worth responding to (pardon my French - "fat fucking chance") let me know.

(see original here, after scrolling down about 40 percent of the page - how are those for math skills?....oh, and memo to Scott Simeone, this is called "attribution.")

People Who Live In Glass Context Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones
Usually, I wouldn't bother fisking a college newspaper's opinion column. But since (a) we have the Pitt News on our blogroll so I feel kind of responsible, (b) it's a slow news morning (Kerry wins another race and more flu cases in Asia - be still my beating heart), (c) I hate to see my alma mater's paper fall to these depths, and (d) this article contains some very, very typical idiocy that you see elsewhere that can make it an instructive case study in how to take apart lies about Israel, I'm going to go ahead and blog it. And let's be honest: it's either blog this or do something productive, so it's a pretty easy choice.
So, with these things in mind, let's meet today's guest. One Kevin Funk, who's clearly not the honors-caliber student that Pitt is trying to attract nowadays. His main point is that the US media doesn't present the context for Palestinian deaths. The problem with getting through his (and I use this word generously) opinion, is that it's so filled with factual inaccuracies and snide insinuations that you sometimes lose track of the fact that he's a flaming hypocrite. I'll try to help keep you focused as we go through the article:

Thursday, Jan. 29, a Palestinian detonates a shrapnel-packed explosive on a crowded Jerusalem bus. He kills 10, plus himself. He wounds 50 more.
Even more tragic than this reprehensible act is the fact that, as wrong as it is, it is dwarfed by Israeli crimes.
Technically false. According to Amnesty International Palestinian terrorism constitutes a crime against humanity, which is a juridical category of the most severe magnitude. Israel has yet to be formally accused of crimes against humanity by anyone who, well, knows what that is (Al Jazeera editorialists don't count - they don't exactly have much game on international law). But that's not the point.
The Palestinians, incidentally, also regularly violate international law by using children as soldiers, treating civilians as human shields, utilizing ambulances as combat vehicles, and storing weapons in mosques. But that's not the point either.
The point of this post is context and hypocrisy. So lets see what context he provides. Civilian vs. Combatant deaths? No. Accidental vs. Intentional Deaths? Not so much. Remember, the distinction between targeting civilians versus targeting terrorists is the heart of the moral case for Israel's self defense - and fortunately it's an intuitive distinction that's very, very hard to answer. Ergo the "maybe if I don't talk about it people won't notice it" strategy that this rhetorical genius uses. Hypocrite.

As the BBC reported -- apparently, foreign media outlets try to give context -- at least 2,600 Palestinians and 875 Israelis have been killed since the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada -- Arabic for "uprising" -- in September 2000. For the math-impaired, this means that Palestinian deaths -- at least 439 of which were victims younger than 18, according to Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem -- outnumber Israeli deaths three to one.
If this sounds new, thank the press.
Sigh. Where to begin?
First of all, it's factually misleading. It wasn't the BBC that compiled these statistics it was a report from If Americans Knew, a Berkeley based group (I know, I know - he says "reported" - but his point is that everyone on this side of the Atlantic is hopelessly biased). Their website is here. Lets talk about it for a sec. They present some charts proving that Israelis are evil. They say that "Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by none" - without mentioning that the UN is structurally biased against Israel and makes it the only country on the planet, among dictators, thieves, tyrants, and murderers, that is banned from sitting on the Security Council. They say that "920 Israelis and 2,706 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000" - without distinguishing between civilians and combatants. They say that "The Israeli unemployment rate is 10.4%, while the Palestinian unemployment is estimated at 37-67%" - without mentioning that every time Israel tries to let Palestinians into Israel, a suicide bomber attacks and they have to shut down the border crossings again. They say "106 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 513 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000" - without mentioning that many of those children died while being used as human shields by Palestinians, and at least some of them died as suicide bombers themselves. So lets be careful with the whole "foreign media outlets try to give context" thing, shall we?
So that's hypocrisy in his source. Now lets talk about his own hypocrisy. For some real statistics, we go over to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism for a look behind the numbers. Now, while If Americans Knew (gosh, the name just reeks of professionalism and legitimacy, doesn't it?) does indeed have bar graphs, the ICT does some actualnumber crunching. This is where I go off on guy's sanctimonious little line about "the math-impaired." It's true that numbers help us understand things - but something that every first year stats student learns (you know, the non-math-impaired among us) is that numbers can be deceiving and you can't just take two numbers and conclude that you have meaningful results - only ignorant ideologues do that. So the ICT actually did some analysis and came up with the following (and I urge you to click through to their site - their analysis is imposing):

# The usual fatality count quoted in news articles presents an inaccurate and distorted picture of the al-Aqsa conflict, exaggerating Israel�s responsibility for the death of noncombatant civilians... our database shows a total of 603 Israelis killed, compared to 1596 Palestinians... numbers in general agreement with media reports... But such numbers hide as much as they reveal: They lump combatants in with noncombatants, suicide bombers with innocent civilians, and report Palestinian �collaborators� murdered by their own compatriots as if they had been killed by Israel. Correcting for such distortions, we can arrive at a figure of 617 Palestinian noncombatants killed by Israel, compared to 471 Israeli noncombatants killed by Palestinians.
# While Israeli fatalities in the al-Aqsa conflict have consisted of 80 percent noncombatants... Palestinian fatalities have consisted of more combatants than noncombatants
# The �combatant gap� � that is, the �excess� of Palestinian combatants killed by Israel over Israeli combatants killed by Palestinians � has continued to grow over the life of the conflict.
# If we restrict our view to each side's noncombatants killed by the opposing side, the gap in the percentage of females among those killed is even wider: 40 percent of Israeli noncombatants killed by Palestinians have been female, compared to 8.4 percent of Palestinian noncombatants killed by Israel... In absolute terms, many more Israeli females have been killed than Palestinian females. If we include combatants and fatalities for whom responsibility is unclear, 70 Palestinian females have been killed; the corresponding Israeli figure is 190... Restricting ourselves to cases where clear responsibility can be reliably assigned for noncombatant deaths, we see that Israel has been responsible for killing 52 Palestinian noncombatant females, while Palestinians have killed 187 Israeli noncombatant females � more than three times as many

And so on... The cool thing about this part of the fisking is that it points out that this guy is not only a hypocrite because he intentionally takes figures out of context to demonize Israel, but he's also a flaming idiot when it comes to math. Want to read his line again? "For the math-impaired, this means that Palestinian deaths... outnumber Israeli deaths three to one. " Snide little hypocrite. Moving on.
According to a recent study of Middle East coverage in the San Jose Mercury News -- a representative part of that intractable U.S. liberal media -- "the killing of an Israeli was over 19 times more likely to show up in a front-page headline than the killing of a Palestinian." Nor was the paper likely to mention who's footing the bill -- only 1.1 percent of articles mentioned U.S. aid to Israel. Similar figures exist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
This may explain why only 12 percent of respondents in an August 2002 poll correctly identified Israel as "mainly to blame for the violence."
Sure it's clunky and awkwardly written. But we're past that by now.
First, I actually remember when this poll came out, and the significant result was that "When asked who is mainly to blame for the violence in the Middle East, those who blame both equally has increased from 26% in July last year to 44% today [August 2002]." Now, you're thinking - "what? this guy insists on context, but then makes it seem as if the media is fooling the public into supporting Israel?!?! What a flaming hypocrite!!" And I sympathize. But I'm afraid it gets worse.
You see, they count each causality for their figures, not each attack!! That means that, for instance, when there's a spectacular suicide bombing in Israel and 50 people die, it makes the front page and each of those people get counted individually!! I know, I know - can you believe the mendacity?
Read it again: "math-impaired." But wait - this next part is even more sanctimonious and snide.

Those of us concerned with reality may also be interested in a larger view of human rights in the Occupied Territories.
With all the subtlety of a G Unit album, Israel is building a "security fence," which, as even the hawkish New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, "is apparently part of a broader [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon plan to unilaterally create an interim Palestinian state in about 50 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, and leave Israel with the rest."
So Kevin Funk, who I imagine is at most a B-/C+ humanities undergrad at Pitt, authoritatively describes Tom Friedman as a hawk while telling the rest of us to be "concerned with reality." His opinion of "reality" can be usefully contrasted with that of Dr. Cori Dauber (Phd, Northwestern), arguably the leading security studies media analyst in academia, who takes it as a given that Tom Friedman has a basically liberal bent.
"Concerned with reality." Is there a name for Funk's combination of flaming ignorance and sneering self-righteousness? Please email me - I'm running out of synonyms for "idiot."
I won't get into the land-grab issue. It would involve introducing some background to the Israeli/Arab conflict that is found nowhere in this article (why introduce nuance, right?), which would be satisfying, but might get in the way of highlighting over and over and over again how this hairpiece is wrong about even the things he does write about.
The list of abuses goes on, from Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement that have "crippled the Palestinian economy" (over two-thirds of Gaza Strip residents now live in poverty), to the "war crime" of the destruction of more than 4,000 Palestinian homes in the last three years.
Do you wonder why war crime is in scare quotes? It's because Israel's house demolitions are so specifically targeted against terrorists that they don't rise to the level of collective punishment, which is what is necessary for a war crime. So when Funk says war crimes, he actually means not war crimes. I know, it gets confusing (for those of you keep track at home, this is the point in the article where he actually crossed the line from blatant hypocrisy to out-right lying).
And although I suppose it's overkill by now, it's probably also worth noting: (a) that Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement have been repeatedly lifted and re-imposed after suicide bombers slipped out within a couple of days (it took me 30 seconds on Google to confirm this with specific examples from Bethlehem and Tul Karm - so you can see what kind of research a Pitt News opinion writer is obligated to do these days), and (b) that the threat house demolitions directly stop terrorist bombers from killing Israeli schoolchildren.
Lest we operate under the delusion that this constitutes yet another instance of a faraway people who suffer through no fault of our own, a glance at the downright insulting U.S.-brokered "peace process" is in order.
Lest we operate under the delusion that this constitutes yet another instance of a faraway people who suffer through no fault of our own, a glance at the history of the Middle East shows not that the vast majority of the Arab world has rejected peace in the past, but that the vast majority of the Palestinian public supports continued war with Israel even if they were offered peace again.
The United States, furnishing Israel with around $3 billion each year in military aid, has single-handedly rejected dozens of U.N. Security Council resolutions on the conflict that are accepted virtually unanimously throughout the world.
Ahh. The United Nations.
The fate -- and the blood -- of the Palestinian people lies in our hands.
I agree. For instance, if Clinton had never brought Arafat to the White House, just think how many lives could have been saved. If Carter had never pressured Begin to give up the Sinai, Israel would have a self-sufficient economy and not even need U.S. loans.
Of course, it's probably unfair to use historical examples. For brave activist students like Funk, the Middle East conflict didn't really begin before he picked up his first International Socialist Organization pamphlet as a starry-eyed college first-year.
Even his signature is annoying:
To preempt accusations of anti-Semitism, Kevin would like to say that only people with strong fascist tendencies equate the criticism of a government with the criticism of a religion.
First of all, I'm not sure what the reference to fascism here is supposed to do. I think it's a word he learned as a synonym for "bad." I'm also getting increasingly tired of the Left's criticism-stifling strategy of fighting the straw-argument of anti-Semitic accusations (it's a weird reversal - they bait or accuse their opponents of accusing them of anti-Semitism so that they can get indignant about being called anti-Semites). But Funk isn't anti-Semitic. I don�t think he�s capable of anti-Semitism - that would require conspiracy theories, which in turn require cognitive integration of facts, which requires at least a bare minimum of fidelity to the way the world actually is rather than the way Kevin wants it to be.
So, in the interest of restoring the Pitt News to a level of respectability, I�ll review the relevant and necessary facts that the paper should remember: (1) Either Kevin Funk is criminally ignorant or he's a flaming hypocrite. Either way, he should be forced to pass a series of basic aptitude tests before being allowed to publish again. (2) Penn State still sucks.

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