Israel Matzav

The difficulty of disproving hundreds of lies

David Hazony weighs in on the Goldstone Report.

This week the IDF issued its preliminary rebuttal to the Goldstone report, and to read it is to get the same feeling of the futility of the corrective argument. Ok, so maybe you didn’t deliberately destroy a flour mill factory. But you attacked that sewer system. Ok, so maybe not that either — but how can you account for the sheer number of reports, of accusations, of claims of Israeli war crimes?

The IDF report definitively refutes Judge Goldstone’s complaints about a small number of incidents. Alan Dershowitz has done a superhuman job going over the vast tome of Judge Goldstone’s report with its 1,223 footnotes. The bloggers have joined in as well, showing the fast and furious way with which Judge Goldstone’s “fact-finding mission” reported the most absurd statistics as fact — like the claim that the destruction of Gaza factories led to the loss of 40,000 jobs, when the Palestinian report on which the claim was based said it was only 4,000.

We can play this game forever.

But the game is rigged. It is a public-relations version of the Kassam and Katyusha rockets that terrorists rain down on Israeli civilian centres.

Israel and the West could spend billions of dollars developing sophisticated missiles and “kinetic interceptors” to shoot them down, hoping that one day the world will understand that the bad guys are the ones launching rockets at schoolyards and hospitals, not the soldiers shooting at rocket-launching squads who position themselves inside schoolyards and hospitals in order to make their next fabrication more plausible.

But just as it is much easier to build and launch Kassams than to build and launch Patriot missiles, so too is it much easier to manufacture claims about Israeli inhumanity than it is to refute them.

The sheer volume of lies that Israel has to refute makes the task almost impossible. And that's without even considering the fact that most people believe that where there's smoke, there's usually fire somewhere nearby.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:54 PM