Thursday, July 16, 2009

Uninformed Comment

Long-term readers will remember that for a while I followed Prof. Juan Cole's popular Informed Comment blog, until I got tired of his silliness and stopped. (I even had a label in his honor, see below this post).

Though I no longer record his antics here, I still stop by his blog from time to time to see what his audience likes to hear. Yesterday he had a post that contained this fine nugget of non-truth:
Israel's war last winter on little Gaza achieved virtually none of its real (as opposed to its announced) aims. There had not been any rocket fire from Hamas against Israel during the period of cease-fire in 2008. Israel violated the cease-fire and even thereafter, no Israelis were killed in the lead-up to the invasion.

Unless perhaps there's another Gaza somewhere, from which prior to the war there was no fire at another Israel? And perhaps in that alternative universe, Hamas now does shoot at Israel in spite of the thrashing it received? That might explain it, because nothing else can.

2 comments:

rashkov said...

This could be a prevalent view among the left. Ira Chernus writes in Mother Jones, a lefty journal:

"Israelis generally know what most Americans still don't: Suicide bombing, supposedly the trademark of "Palestinian terrorism," has virtually ceased. As a result, Israel's chief complaint has switched to Hamas rocket attacks. How can we let them have the West Bank, the argument goes? Look what happened when we pulled all our settlements out of Gaza and got nothing in return but thousands of rockets. That's why we had no choice but launch our full-scale assault on Gaza in December 2008: to put an end to them."

"In fact, though, Hamas rocket attacks had ended in July 2008, when Israel agreed to the ceasefire Hamas had been asking for. That agreement held for four months until Israeli troops killed six Hamas operatives — shortly before Hamas and Fatah were scheduled to create a unified government. It's a familiar Israeli tactic: block Palestinian unity and then complain of "no partner for peace."

Anonymous said...

you forgot to highlight the most important "observation" Juan Cole:

...no Israelis were killed ...

he is practically leering at thinking of the "pity" of it, his logic presumably goes: if nobody was killed what are Israelis complaining about - against getting terrorized yoga is the better antidote

sorry but these guys in their ivory towers just make me mad
rgds,
Silke