The appropriate way for the media to have handled the story would have been to state in headlines that there was a blast or explosion at a hospital in Gaza. The body of the story could have then cited Hamas’s claim while also noting that Israel was investigating the matter.
Gee, good question! I was the editor of my high school’s underground newspaper, the “Bull Sheet”. We had higher circulation than the “official “ school paper because we covered what students were really interested in and told the truth to the best of our understanding. Common sense concepts that seem to have evaded my contemporary Ivy League journalism grads...
Yes, there are, and sometimes they get censored or chastised because they tell the truth and haven't learned the trick of smoothly lying to make TPTB happy.
For a newspaper focused on student life, pop culture, faculty highlights, and school events, it is excellent! But they don't tackle much happening outside the school. Thank you for asking😊
And reporting a definite casualty count so quickly, when common sense would say that the scene would be far too chaotic to give an accurate count, should have been a huge red flag. But there are no red flags when advancing the narrative.
This is by far my biggest problem, “more than 500” is a staggering amount for a bomb going off, even in a crowded city. Possible? Yes. Probable? No. Publishing immediately from a single source, that being an organization whose incentive is to overstate casuality counts as much as possible is insane. Notice that the death toll for the Hamas massacre slowly climbed, when initially reported as “attacks”, then 100, then growing over the days to our 1400 final tally.
But this? Nope, the Times went whole hog, “over 500” which when the dust settles could be off by an order of magnitude.
Frankly we may never know the correct figure, hard to trust the reports from anyone on something like this.
“a staggering amount for a bomb going off, even in a crowded city. Possible? Yes. Probable? No.”
EXACTLY!
As a former FAC(A) I’ve seem lots of munitions dropped. When the story first posted as an airstrike and 500 dead I knew something wasn’t right. The only possible way was if the construction of the building was so shoddy that the entire hospital collapsed which know didn’t happen. I suspect the real number is in the 10s unless people hangout in Gaza hospital parking lots.
What I find interesting is that every Israeli outlet is scrambling to get the number down. Makes no sense to spin it that way if Hamas is behind the attack. As for the number rising, I'll take that bet.
I don’t find that interesting at all, because it seems to be true and they know a huge chunk of the population will blame them regardless of the truth so hey, may as well be blamed, whether you did it or not, for less people dying.
But you’re telling me, after we’ve seen the images of the hospital and parking lot, that that was the site of something that killed as many people as an entire V2 rocket exploding inside a packed auditorium?
Look up the casualty counts for individual bombs going off, look at the structural damage surrounding those events, look up the amount of ordnance required for those events, and the types of ordnance, compare those to the bizarre amount of fire damage:blast damage (kinda like the unspent fuel in a rocket sprayed everything and lit it on fire), and ask yourself, does that look like a JDAM strike, and one that could’ve killed 500 people?
Ignore “Israel evil, Palestine good”
That’s not my point, for this exercise I don’t care. Look at the damage type, amount, and compare with other explosions.
The count will be in the 10s not hundreds. I’m not sure what your background is but I was a FAC(A) (Forward Air Controller(Airborne)) when I was in the service. In short FACs are the ones who call in airstrikes. I’ve lots of bombs come of lots of planes and unless they were carpet bombing with B-52s, which they don’t have, one bomb wouldn’t cause that much damage. That’s just physics and nothing more.
Israel warned them they were going to do it. Afterward, their own people tweeted about it, then deleted. Come on. I also just realized why they need to get the number down - Hamas doesn't have that capability, only Israel.
I believe that is incorrect. It was a social media influencer, Hananya Naftali, who shills for the IDF but is not an official in the Israeli government who put out that story. It, like the 40 beheaded babies (original report was up to 40 babies murdered, some reportedly beheaded, not 40 beheaded babies), got caught up in a game of telephone, eventually leading to Naftali morphing into a "top advisor" to Netanyahu. As far as I am aware, Naftali was the only source of this "initial response."
Hardly anyone took a moment to think about that. My mom saw the article and did what most good NYT readers did - jumped to the conclusion that Israel bombed the hospital. The end. Furthermore, the story was accompanied with a picture of a bombed out building that had nothing to do with the hospital but was meant to deceive.
We know they know this. They did this because the Hard Left inside the institutions need Israel to be the aggressor not the victim. The ideology must bend the facts.
On the other hand, one of the easiest workarounds for "journalists" is to accurately quote a bigot. It's as easy as quoting a Hamas statement, while ignoring the Israeli statement. Strictly speaking, quoting the Hamas statement is accurate journalism. But it's also biased as hell.
I've watched in real time what Matt is referring to. Any effort, any pretense, of responsible journalism has been abandoned over the last few decades. "Journalism" is now an advocacy industry. They have the right, I guess, but they deserve no respect. And only simple-minded fools who like to take sides take it seriously. Many just want simple, easy to comprehend answers that they can feel comfortable with, rather than the angst of seeking comprehension.
Yes, but think logically for a minute. Who has the bomb to make such a blast: Israel or Gaza? Who "knocks on the roof" ahead of the bomb? Both answers are the IDF.
If the 'Leader' of Hamas were to come out and announce that he himself had fired the rocket that hit the hospital, his own followers would believe it was a Zionist conspiracy. These people cannot be reasoned with...
“Groups are social constructs”. Ah, like Gender. I see. Hamas is not a construct, it is a militant actual group of Muslims, related to another group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Just like the Nazis of 1930s and 1940s Germany they are a group, they were evil, and it is and was appropriate to refer to “them” and each individual as evil and as followers of Herr Hitler. Don’t get lost in an attempt to intellectualize the obvious. You bellybutton won’t help you.
All "groups" are abstractions. In reality they are a collection of individuals ie multiple. The practice of grouping people together and make them singular is abstracting, and then painting them all with the same brush is an abomination and one of the reasons we are in this predicament - lazy thinking. Maybe look past your own navel for once.
And ... you generalize. Maybe learn something wise.
Here’s a suggestion: “white people” is a group for which individuals likely have different views SUCH THAT treating each the same is inappropriate.
German Nazis of the WWII era had sufficiently identical views on any number of things SUCH THAT it is proper to refer to the individuals collectively and individually as evil.
Likewise Hamas in the current era.
Get it? (No that’s a silly question to put to you as your ego, narcissistic personality, and status as a community college teacher would be unraveled were you to admit I am correct).
Collective thinking as a principle is wrong and has to go. You can't allow it for some and not for others. It leads to the practice of holding an individual accountable for the sins of their group members. That is the core problem in our society. It's not proper ever. Get it ? Deal with it. Community college ? I'm a STEM professional with multiple advanced degrees and 30 years in banking. Who are you junior?
Yes it is generalizing to say all members of a group act or behave or believe a ceratain way. Individuals act, behave, believe but groups do not. Groups are social constructs which are abstractions. Applying language meant for individuals to groups is lazy and leads to misunderstandings and just generally bad thinking.
In this case "These People" are referring to Hamas, a group of people who voluntarily associate so in this context I think GC is correct in usage. If you're talking of US Marines and refer to them as those people kick ass, would it still bother you? I guess Hamas is on the up and up because they don't say those people they say Jews so I guess this is a better use of grammar and stereotypes?
I'm not saying "These people" is incorrect grammar, I'm saying it is bad thinking. And yes it's bad on the part of Hamas as well for killing innocent civilians because of the group they belong to. We talk in terms of groups because it is a simple shorthand, but it is lazy thinking to identify an individual with their group. It's a bad habit and is the core problem in our society. So go ahead and use the shorthand but don't let it infect your thinking.
The difference is... Israel's "idols" don't rape grandmas and behead babies. You might not like war, but when you start it - be prepared for a response.
You can equivocate all you want, but it doesn't stop you from tolerating evil. All the revisionist history in the world can't change the fact that Truman dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't the same as Hirohito's Rape of Nanking and Pearl Harbor.
Your war propaganda is getting stale. The White House retracted the babies story. The LA Times retracted the rape story.
Israeli survivors of the Oct 7th incursion tell of civilians getting killed in the crossfire by the IDF. Hamas was on a mission to capture hostages to trade for the release of some 5 000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and most likely get Israel to release its 17 year long choke hold on Gaza.
Curiously, Israeli war propaganda neglects to mention that the Palestinians captured scores of IDF soldiers, officers, and at least one, possibly two generals.
If resistance fighters had busted out of the Warsaw Ghetto and the exact same events had unfolded, people like you would be overlooking the civilian deaths and injuries, which as you say are an inevitable outcome of war, and you would be cheering the beleaguered Jewish fighters of the Ghetto.
Lastly, post the mass murders of WWII, new rules were promulgated outlawing as war crimes the deliberate targeting of civilians, hospitals, schools, water and sewage plants, and the like. Israel is doing exactly that - committing war crimes and people like you are spinning them if not outright cheering.
Here is an Israeli woman survivor of the events of Oct 7.
But the beheading story was also inexcusably exaggerated it appears. Both sides exaggerate. The problem is the news picks up these stories from unreliable sources and run with them as facts. This inflames and causes more hate of the other side. And is NOT journalism.
Parsing the number of rapes and beheadings does Hamas’ work in the court of public opinion. Slightly different from insisting that an inept jihadi rocket was actually an Israeli bomb targeting a hospital
It really went off the rails when it switched to “normative” journalism, that is, when they took on the job of telling how to interpret the news for a certain goal.
The objective news era was actually an aberration. I’d rather have impartial reporting, but that’s an ideal. It should be the reader’s job, not the writer’s, to reach a conclusion based on the available information. Instead we have a return of the partisan press, except this time they can’t admit it.
I agree; this was true when the country was first formed, a free press being the lesser of two evils, the other being a government controlled one. There are uncountable examples since then of media manipulation, William Randoloh Hearst comes to mind. The ideal is still worth aspiring to , though .
That's strictly a minority opinion. Unless you're a regular commenter on the Racket threads, where it's gospel. Deranged efforts for deranged men.
Isaiah 30:12: "...Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel, Because ye despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon:"
What an era to experience! I can imagine some future historian scratching their head over why Trump was so disproportionally hated. Or maybe we’ll find out in this lifetime. It still puzzles me.
The “fact checkers” employed by the DNC don’t actually recognize as facts anything that is inconsistent with leftist preferred narrative or that makes their employers look bad. Instead, they claim there is “no evidence” for the fact in question or that it “lacks context” by which they mean it isn’t really a fact unless it is accompanied by leftist “spin.”
Frankly it’s the authoritative statement of “more than 500” that’s the most egregious.
That would be one of the highest death tolls from a single airstrike in the history of warfare. Is it impossible? No, but with 500 to 2000 lb bombs, it would be extremely unlikely, the kind of statement if I were in a newsroom I’d say “we need way more evidence on this”.
For context, the Oklahoma City bombing was around 5,000 lbs and killed 168, and on the higher scale, the Beirut bombing in 2020 was, on the low estimate, 0.3 kilotons of TNT equivalent and killed 218.
This to me is a good example of the rot that has happened in newsrooms, especially the younger hires just not having any real world experience, all being from extremely privileged backgrounds, going to Ivy League schools to get degrees that teach them absolutely no critical thinking skills, and at least in this specific case, having a kneejerk hatred of Israel. This caused multiple mainstream media outlets to immediately single source believe Hamas(!) a Jihadist group whose main motivation is to maximize claimed casualty counts, regarding what would be one of the single deadliest individual airstrikes, ever.
It's a lot and feels like an overestimate but it's not at all implausible for an 500 lb bomb airburst over the precise center of a densely-packed crowd filling a courtyard -- that's pretty much best case scenario for inflicting casualties. I'd actually be surprised if any of them survived. Two hundred lbs of HE at that distance will turn your insides to jelly. Anyway, number of bystanders and their proximity to blast are far more important than tonnage (whose effect falls off as the cube root of distance), so I wouldn't get too worked up over that metric, except to note that the explosion shown in the video is incompatible with the 10-20 kilos used in Hamas rockets -- you'd have to have immediately vaporized and ignited the fuel in the car park as well and that should look more like a BLEVE than what we see.
Quite true, that’s why I went with “extremely unlikely”, basically we’re talking either a direct hit on a crowd or a bomb going through the roof of a wide open interior space, like a packed theater or arena, I believe that happened with a V2 once.
It’s why in WW2 when the Allies were just trying to kill as many people in densely populated cities, they used mass firebombings.
Inverse square law applies to cross-sectional areas of dispersal - light and other forms of radiation etc. But for explosive blasts, it's the overpressure that (mostly) does the damage, so it's inversely proportional to the volume of the pressurized area (PV=nRT) at the moment the overpressure hits (very roughly -- this is assuming static equilibrium which obviously is a poor assumption, etc.). Apparently this is called the Hopkinson-Cranz scaling law: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/blast-radius#hopkinson-cranz-scaling-law. So that's neat.
Your casualty estimates are irrelevant because you don't know the density of people packed into the blast radius of this hospital. It could well have been over 500 if news report that thousands were using the hospital as shelter are true.
It’s a fair point but we’re talking 2 different types of probabilities. My main point is that this would be one of the largest mass casualty events from a single airstrike, we’re talking a single airstrike killing a significant percentage of the death toll you see when a city is leveled.
If I hear a claim, single sourced, that a single airstrike killed more than 500 people, I immediately pause no matter where it is claimed the bomb hit, because in the history of bombs hitting things, this would be historical, and humans have dropped a lot of bombs.
Bard seems to get extremely confused when I ask the question because it keeps coming back with the death toll from entire carpet bombing campaigns, but the point is over 500 is a huge amount.
This could be considered fallacious reasoning but I’m going off “deaths per bombs detonating in cities” generally and you’re going off of “deaths per bombs going off if a scenario like this actually occurred”.
In my hypothetical newsroom, as mentioned, I hear “500 dead in an airstrike”, my skeptic alarm starts beeping and says “this is possible, but I need some real concrete evidence before we run with this” not “no way, impossible, ignore the story completely.”
Gotta say this is the first philosophical conversation I’ve ever had about the probabilities of bombs exploding in cities but I’m all for it.
They get new hires who have never done any real research.
Papers written in college today go like this: I come up with a thesis. I then find quotes I can use to prove my thesis. I ignore books full of information that contradict my thesis. I write a fake strawmam argument I can easily debunk. Then I conclude my thesis is correct. I make sure to use spell check and grammarly and I limit my paragraphs to 5-6 sentences as my professors now instruct me to do (likelybecause anything longer would definitely be unreadable). I get A+ if my teacher can read and understand what I wrote because most students no longer know how to write a cohesive paragraph let alone a ten page research paper.
Liked your comment before reading it through to the end, so delighted was I by the reference to elite newspapers' privileged (blissfully ignorant) child journalists. So you honestly think these Ivy League grads turned NY Times journalists hate Israel and love Hamas? Not my impression. I think the paper was reacting in a knee-jerk way to growing public sympathy for Palestinians trapped in Gaza who were/are being indiscriminately killed in huge numbers because Bibi clearly believes all Palestinians must die (he has repeatedly said as much), Hamas supporters or not. The Times does not want people to think it is biased in favor of Israel (I would argue that most of its editors if not reporters are) because, obviously, this would cause ALL readers to lose faith in the accuracy of its reporting. It's a slippery slope once that begins and the Times is threatened by online competition from the likes of Substack. It literally can't afford to look either incompetent or biased.
Great point. Common sense is lacking. You gotta know when some claim just doesn’t seem right. I wouldn’t be against early reporting that might be wrong but it should be extremely clear that early reports are uncertain.
When do "younger" hires in any business or occupation bring "experience" to the office or workplace? And I urge caution using boomerang terms like "knee-jerk." Throw it at someone and eventually it comes back to you.
My entire working career has been in tech, at various times doing a bit of everything, including startup stuff. Many people in tech are from hypereducated backgrounds, myself included, although I took a very windy road to get there.
Young hires, even entry level ones, from working class backgrounds very much contributed to people seeing things from other perspectives, including helping me learn not to be so much of an elitist asshole.
As long as a new entry level employee isn’t an extremely privileged timebomb, young hires from backgrounds outside your company’s culture can be very helpful.
But if I was hiring, and you’re Ivy League graduated post-2014, I’m not saying you wouldn’t get a job, but I’d need to see some damn good evidence you’re not going to be one of those extremely privileged timebombs.
"Evidence." You absolutely sound like a tech bro insofar that you also sound like a cop which is to say ---insufferable. I imagine for most people not being hired by you would be one of their lucky professional breaks they could eventually look back on with amused resignation.
One thousand years ago, when I was a journalism student, a classmate who prefaced a statement with, "I think...." would face the Kiss of Death from our professor.
The professor's response was, "No one gives a damn what you think. What do you KNOW?"
I think Glenn Greenwald noted the video released then removed by Israel had a different time (and possibly date) than the time the hospital strike occurred.
A blame neutral NYT headline would have been proper. You just asserted in your previous piece that Israel didn't do it (i.e., "it never happened"), conclusively. What is that assertion based on?
Please take a look at some of the critical analysis of the bombing, e.g., Channel 4's report, and Al Jazeera's analysis of the Al Jazeera video of the bombing that Israel used to try to make its case. And, if you haven't yet, maybe get a few neutral munitions experts to watch the original footage of the blast and listen to the sound of the incoming ordnance.
Al Jazeera's video report is wrong, as it claims Israel's iron dome which intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza, and that it was the remnants of THIS, falling on the hospital that is the cause.
Except that's not how the Iron Dome works - it doesn't explode rockets so soon after being fired (as this shows), largely because it wouldn't have had time to calculate the trajectory by that point - it doesn't stop all incoming rockets, just ones that are going to land where people live.
Secondly, you cannot see in any of this "analysis footage" the intercepting ordnance.
Thirdly, when an iron dome missile hits an incoming rocket, there is a massive explosion and only small shrapnel would be landing - never enough to do the type of damage caused at the hospital. The falling pieces of an iron dome interception are not going to kill "hundreds" of people, like ever.
Fourthly, the iron dome missiles intercept over Israeli territory proper, and not over Gaza.
Fifthly, go watch videos of actual iron dome interceptions. They don't look like this.
CJ is right, Matt. You need to see the Al Jazeera investigation posted by Michael Tracy. I can only assume you haven't seen it. And the New York Times needs to report it as well. It establishes that a rocket fired from Gaza did *not* cause the damage.
Then, Matt you need to retract your original claim that Israel did *not* bomb the hospital while discussing the Al Jazeera report with your readers. That's only what I would expect from you.
Taibbi already walked back his comments ever so slightly.
His new positions is.
"it’s not known absolutely for certain what happened at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. There are still claims out there that it was indeed an Israeli attack, or could have been."
I love the heavy dose of dismissive ambiguity in the last sentence. "There are claims out there" Taibbi says, as if these claims are some disgusting muck stuck to the bottom your shoe that refuses to release itself.
Gosh I seem to remember an episode of This Week in which Taibbi criticized the mainstream media for adding so many qualifiers to their headlines, leading people in a direction of what they should think rather than laying out the facts and letting readers decide for themselves. Then Taibbi writes "Its not known ABSOLUTELY FOR CERTAIN what happened." without a hint of irony.
This is legitimate journalism and should be applauded.
The way Taibbi wrote it however was "It's not known ABSOLUTELY for certain what happened" in the context of he just walked back a statement where he declared absolute certainty about what happened. The implication in this phrase is, "I know exactly what happened, but it just hasn't been proven yet."
thegrayzone had a good discussion, claiming the blast was far bigger than anything Hamas's rockets could do. Still there is nothing definitive and the Israeli propaganda, like Ukraine's, cannot be questioned.
Good points. I have seen compelling arguments for both cases. I think context is most important here. This is one incident in a huge set of incidents that is killing, injuring, displacing, and endangering so many people. Being too hung up on who did this feels weird. And like a way to give Israel a pass. Like, "Hey, they may not have bombed a hospital and killed hundreds. They definitely did kill more than hundreds, including hundreds of kids, they definitely are targeting civilians, etc. But don't look at that! Look at the fact they they MAY NOT HAVE BOMBED THIS HOSPITAL THIS TIME!"
Of course the NYTimes messed up, but as someone who faced rocket attacks at Balad Air Base on an almost daily basis, russian-made and far more deadly than Hamas home-made rockets, and after seeing videos of the incoming noise and blast that hit the Baptist-supported hospital in Gaza City, there is no way on earth I will ever believe that this was anything other than an Israeli strike, despite the daily propaganda we've seen from US and Israeli media sources. And Israel always denies their war crimes, always, until the proof comes out months later that yes, they did it, but, gee, it was a one-off, accidental, incident... hundreds of them.
I hate to agree with the original NYTimes headline, but there's a good chance it may have been correct.
But after you look at satellite images after the bombing to asses damage at the hospital, tell me which buildings at the site were razed ti the ground after the blast?
Can you please provide a link to that 40 beheaded babies report? Because I saw it when it first broke. The reporter stated that up to 40 babies were murdered, some reportedly beheaded. 40 babies murdered, not all beheaded.
True enough, but it is being used to discredit the Israeli reports of the massacre. Subtly implying that the reports of the massacre are overblown and hyperbolic.
Since only cars in the parking lot were heavily damaged, you decide how many is accurate. Japan News is reporting the story is innacurate and that satellite images show no buildings were damaged from this bombing.
Who would have the most to gain in the international political/opinion arena by an attack on a Palestinian hospital? Who would suffer world condemnation?
Since "the first casualty of war is the truth,” something I've seen play out over & over, & since both the Palestinians & the Israelis both have their own agendas, as does the US & Europe & Saudi Arabia & Egypt, etc., etc., what is the point in bickering about this shit? No one on here knows what "the truth" actually is. And no one will know for a long fucking time, if ever.
America had been attacked. It was time to come together as Americans, to put aside our political differences, to rally around the flag, and the president, and go and kill a whole lot of people who had absolutely nothing to do with it.
You might be too young to remember that time. I remember it vividly. I remember it in detail. I remember how the nation “came together.” I remember how the Western world “stood with America.” I remember how we declared a “Global War on Terror,” how we “took the gloves off,” both at home and abroad, how the government and the media whipped the public up into a bloodthirsty, jingoistic frenzy. I remember being called a “traitor,” a “Saddam apologist,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” because I wouldn’t wave the flag, and “stand with America,” and get on board with murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.
So, forgive me if what follows seems a bit cold. As I said, I’ve seen this movie before. -
- I am not going to condemn the Hamas attack, as hideous as I think it was. I do not condemn things on command, or perform any other kind of tricks on command. If that’s what you’re looking for, get a dog.
That said, I am not going to call the Hamas attack “resistance” or try to justify it. I refuse to justify mass murder. If you’re OK with mass murdering civilians for your cause … OK, but own it. Call it what it is. And spare me the “legitimate resistance” bullshit.
Same goes for Israel. If you “stand with Israel” as it murders civilians, fine. Own it. Give me a break with the “Israel has the right to defend itself” bullshit, and own it.
Whatever “side” of this conflict you are on, at least have the integrity to call things what they are.
Here is what things are, in a nutshell.
Israel is a nation-state. It is doing what a lot of nation-states have done throughout the history of nation-states. It is wiping out, or otherwise removing, the indigenous population of the territory it has conquered. It has been doing this for 75 years. The indigenous population, i.e., the Palestinians, have been trying not to get completely wiped out, or otherwise removed from their indigenous territory, and lashing out at Israel in a variety of ways (i.e., from throwing stones to committing mass murder).
That is what is happening. The rest is PR. Public relations. Propaganda. - CJ Hopkins
I saw it in 1948 when Orwell wrote 1984 . It was 1984 then and it is still 1984. Voltaire said: Perception is reality. Real history informs us the Boston Patriots were an LLC Public Relations firm and Paul Revere's great talent was Photoshopping events like the Boston Drunken Mob non Massacre.
In 1820 Jefferson was saying America needed a new constitution every 19 years but old Jefferson was a scientific philosopher who studied evolution before Darwin was conceived. Jefferson didn't believe in miracles by magic. he was not a theologian or legal sophist.
The scale of slaughter in Gaza is no different than it was 3000 years ago. The only difference is now we can watch live and in colour instead of analyzing the ashes.
Y'know Moe, given the nonstop bloodshed that has greeted the Jewish people on their return to their "ancestral homeland" I can't help thinking that this entire "repatriate the Jews to Israel" plan was the biggest act of anti-semitism ever.
The fact that we can watch this like an episode of "Combat" is exactly why I disconnected my TV from the outer asylum years ago.
My ancestors were building synagogues on the Black Sea before the Immaculate Conception my paternal ancestors fled The Basque in 1492 to escape the vengeance of The Prince of Peace. If Jews didn't exist you would need to make them up.
Orwell understood Big Brother needs Emmanuel Goldstein.
I've never understood the hatred that people have for Jewish folk.
Can't think of any Jewish people who have ever wronged me.
I could name some Christians though.
One of my best friends drifted towards white power about 25 years ago. Jews were big on his hate list. Doubt that he ever actually met a real Jewish person in his entire life.
I maintained contact for a while, hoping I could talk him out of it. Then 911 happened and the rhetoric became loud & insufferable. We haven't spoken in 20 years.
I know lots of Jews it started with my parents and no two are the same just like everyone else. Here in Quebec there is no longer such a thing as Jews. In Quebec there is no such thing as Moslems , or Christians because no body knows what fantasy looks like. We have fools that think they are wise and wise men that know all men are fools.
There is no such thing as us and them there is only one human genome and it tells the story of Noah and the flood.
In Louis Ginzburg's Legends of The Bible Jewish Publication Society 1908 still in Print .
The story of Noah is the story of the world's drunkest drunk. Noah made Adam and Eve Saintly by English middle class standards.
Milton's Jesus needed Satan even as Milton was a Unitarian.
Shakespeare never met a Jew and wrote The Merchant of Venice. Jews disappeared from England when Richard returned from the Crusades and England celebrated by sacrificing its Jews. There were no Jews in the Court of King James to translate Hebrew and Aramaic.
Thank you. You and I have had the exact same experience. The dog was wagging the tail over 9/11 and the dog is wagging tails here. There is a lot of hyperbole, assumption, and outright fake news being reported as fact right now to justify war.
Stop and think. No babies were beheaded. The Baptist Hospital is still standing in Gaza. All else is lies.
This will probably make me look paranoid, which I probably am, but it appears that there are elements in play that want a 3rd world war.
Maybe the pandemic didn't kill enough people.
Or maybe there are unconscious forces that we don't understand that are driving us toward annihilating a sizable chunk of the world's population.
I don't understand how anyone on this board can possibly take any "news" report seriously after the endless stream of lies, obfuscations, misdirections & glaring omissions that have characterized the western media's output for a while now.
To be honest I'm staying away from this latest atrocity exhibition. I've come to realize that every major event that occurs these days occurs in a cloud of bullshit, and that cloud won't begin to clear for years. I'm tired of being manipulated so I'm just opting out.
It may not be "known absolutely for certain" what happened, but there is credible evidence, the veracity of which has not been questioned by anyone in any meaningful public way, versus "Hamas says..."
Here's part of an exchange I had with a leading journalist in the summer of 2017. The topic: standards at the NYT.
"That’s a good question. Can they get any lower? We’ve had roughly 8 years of extremely high quality reporting on the arts and sciences and I fully expect that to continue. It shouldn’t have taken Hillbilly Elegy and other tomes, to get wage stagnation before the public eye. The San Jose Mercury is one of the few papers to inform readers that 3/4 African-American males of high school age can’t read or write. That sure sounds like news to me, and would be were the NYT and other ‘liberal’ outlets actually concerned about the plight of minorities and the poor.
It’s a joke. I correspond with folks of your stature now and then. I’m a big fan of Dexter Filkins and he’s been good enough to reply on occasion. But getting Iraq wrong? My favorite NYT headline of the Obama years was ‘The Invisible Poor-how did we miss them?’ Eyes tight shut, perhaps? If you want to get a sense of just how out of touch the media is go and watch the network/cable coverage of election night 2016 available on Youtube. If you haven’t you should.
Clue-free right right up to Florida going for Trump and long after that in many cases. I’ve paid for TNR, Mojo, and others over the years, not to mention academic journals. The notion advanced at the NYT and elsewhere that the last thing we need these days is an objective paper of record tells me (anyway) all I need to know about where this mess is going. The ‘golden shower’ dossier is the new gold standard of reporting in 2016-17. Sad!
If we're talking about "standards" at the NYT, the paper has none. That's been abundantly clear. Just ask Bari, Don, et al. That's why so many former subscribers are here.
Keep up the great work, Matt and the Racket News team!
For quoting multiple paragraphs in a row, would posters PLEASE follow standard style and use an open-quotation mark in front of EACH paragraph? That helps the reader know the quote is ongoing.
There's only one close-quotation mark, and that's at the end of the entire multi-paragraph quotation.
Nah. They have standards, just not impartial reporting standards. The standards are now to stand by the ruling class which the paper imagines it belongs to.
Matt, you and your readers would do yourself a favor by reading Chris Hedges newest article "Israel's Culture of Deceit." Much like Chris, I spent time in the West Bank and Gaza. There is a very high probability that Israel was behind the Hospital explosion, but aside from that let's not lose sight of the fact that already Israeli had blown up schools, other medical facilities and UN safe haven locations.
Perhaps Israel hit the hospital; perhaps not. In the big picture, it doesn't matter. Does Israel target hospitals, ambulances, medical personnel, schools, people evacuating? Did it tell people to evacuate hospitals, even though the ill could not survive that? Yes. This is documented. Whether this particular case was an Israeli attack is a detail. Looking into the history of coverups and the integrity of this Israeli government are crucial.
It’s war, so you’re right, it doesn’t matter. It’s a messy business, so there will always be “collateral damage.” An extreme case: If we should engage in nuclear war, will anyone care who started it, or who was “right” or who was “wrong?”
Israel lies. Biden lies. Netanyahu lies.The Biden administration lies.
An independent investigator is someone with no connection whatsoever to those interested parties and someone not from Palestine, Israel, nor the United States.
I thought we were supposed to believe the victim? That's especially true when there is an serious imbalance of power like how Israel is far more powerful than Hamas.
Until the hospital incident, no one except the Squad would have called Hamas a victim. After all, it was Hamas that coordinated the initial barrage of bombs aimed at Israel. Yes, Hamas claims it is a victim, but radio interceptions have Hamas internally reporting that one rocket misfired and hit the side of the hospital. The stock photos of wholesale devastation run by the MSM were not of the actual hospital, but from elsewhere, as they themselves have acknowledged, but the MSM felt they were useful to prop up the sketchy story Hamas was peddling that well over 500 civilians were killed, because they all instinctively and uncritically believed Hamas, as you seem to want to do. As a practical matter, you may wish to get your news from a source other than Hamas (and the MSM). There is a reason they haven’t published a picture of the actual damage.
Why are we supposed to believe the victim? Do you apply that standard when a white girl says she was raped by a black man, or in that case do you look at all the evidence, including the testimony of the victim and the alleged criminal? Here you do not discuss any of the evidence. The statements by the parties - "Israel did it" "Islamic Jihad did it" -- aren't evidence at all and are not entitled to any weight. The forensic and signals evidence are all that matter.
You were the only one who caught it. I'm sick of arguing about the war and feeling ill thinking of the death and destruction. Mostly I'm sickened my my government's role in war crimes.
I mean Taibbi claims that Israel did not bomb the hospital as a fact (“The Times obviously never “knew” Israel bombed the hospital, because that never happened.” ~Matt Taibbi), despite the fact that we don’t know what happened.
Big old OOPS all around I guess.
We do know that Israel said they were going to bomb the hospital, then criticized the victims for not evacuating. Later tried to claim it was Hamas and released a video of a rocket, only to then delete that video because the time stamp didn’t match. We also know that homemade rockets don’t have the capability of leveling buildings, so evidence kind of points one way. But it’s true that we don’t know for certain and an independent investigation is needed.
Okay, I honestly don’t know. But what’s with all hate toward Netanyahu? Is this like Trump derangement syndrome or what has he done. Simple examples will suffice.
Netanyahu (1) formed a coalition with the most right-wing and ultra orthodox communities, who are determined to unlawfully settle the West Bank with Jewish settlements, (2) was in the process of trying to weaken the judicial branch, so that the ultra right-wing-laws passed by this coalition could not be challenged by the court, and, most importantly,
(3) diverted the Israeli army, IDF, up to the West Bank from down near Gaza, so it took them hours to get down to Gaza once the Hamas attack was reported and
(4) completely missed plans for this attack, so that the IDF was caught totally off-guard.
There's more. But Israelis are incandescent with rage against Netanyahu and his cabinet for these reasons. As they should be.
Can’t repost pics here I don’t think. I saw them on X & I am critical when it comes to sourcing. That doesn’t mean there were not civilians crowded in the courtyard
With all due respect, you're losing the plot here.
By this standard the media can't report on war, because you can't independently verify it in anything approaching real time. Should the story of the past week be Israel may have bombed something in Gaza, or that there may have been casualties? Should we have waited a couple of days to say that anyone in Israel was really killed? Call it an unverified crisis in the Middle East?
Maybe everyone in Israel and Gaza are just on the beach, listening to Jimmy Buffet - I don't know - I can't verify it personally.
The bigger thing though is that this doesn't matter. Israel is bombing the hell out of Gaza. The natural assumption when they are doing so, and something blows up is that they did it. If this does in fact happen to be wrong in this case, it makes very little difference. It doesn't change any important narrative. They are still bombing the hell out of Gaza.
Ask yourself, how many people are upset b/c of journalistic standards, as opposed to being upset because they want the media to report what they want to hear. The Intercept criticized the decapitated baby story, Michael Shellenberger didn't. The same is true in reverse. This is just people being upset that their side isn't deemed the morally clear one - there isn't any principle.
In order to make your point, which you still aren't really backing down from, you are relying on the Israeli government, weak corroboration from the US Government, and a very small number of "weapons experts" who presumably get paid by defense contractors. This doesn't make them wrong, but it sounds like you're gearing up to invade Iraq. That's the point where you should have taken a deep breath and written about something else.
Why are you guys always so loquacious? It seems that perhaps he doth protest too loudly. Narratives don’t stand alone. If they take a stand it can either be right or wrong. If one is reporting "the news" it only has value if it has the facts right. If it’s wrong it has no value at best and is pernicious propaganda at worst.
The appropriate way for the media to have handled the story would have been to state in headlines that there was a blast or explosion at a hospital in Gaza. The body of the story could have then cited Hamas’s claim while also noting that Israel was investigating the matter.
High school newspapers know this! The New York Times has humiliated itself. Ivy League journalism? What a joke.
One question: Are there high school newspapers anymore?
Gee, good question! I was the editor of my high school’s underground newspaper, the “Bull Sheet”. We had higher circulation than the “official “ school paper because we covered what students were really interested in and told the truth to the best of our understanding. Common sense concepts that seem to have evaded my contemporary Ivy League journalism grads...
yes
I guess that's a good thing--depending on the teacher.
We have a grandson who was editor at his high school newspaper as a senior.
Well yeah, but they ain’t printed.
Yes, there are, and sometimes they get censored or chastised because they tell the truth and haven't learned the trick of smoothly lying to make TPTB happy.
Yes. In our high school, the weekly newspaper is created and issued by the students of a media/journalism class.
Is it a good newspaper?
For a newspaper focused on student life, pop culture, faculty highlights, and school events, it is excellent! But they don't tackle much happening outside the school. Thank you for asking😊
And reporting a definite casualty count so quickly, when common sense would say that the scene would be far too chaotic to give an accurate count, should have been a huge red flag. But there are no red flags when advancing the narrative.
This is by far my biggest problem, “more than 500” is a staggering amount for a bomb going off, even in a crowded city. Possible? Yes. Probable? No. Publishing immediately from a single source, that being an organization whose incentive is to overstate casuality counts as much as possible is insane. Notice that the death toll for the Hamas massacre slowly climbed, when initially reported as “attacks”, then 100, then growing over the days to our 1400 final tally.
But this? Nope, the Times went whole hog, “over 500” which when the dust settles could be off by an order of magnitude.
Frankly we may never know the correct figure, hard to trust the reports from anyone on something like this.
“a staggering amount for a bomb going off, even in a crowded city. Possible? Yes. Probable? No.”
EXACTLY!
As a former FAC(A) I’ve seem lots of munitions dropped. When the story first posted as an airstrike and 500 dead I knew something wasn’t right. The only possible way was if the construction of the building was so shoddy that the entire hospital collapsed which know didn’t happen. I suspect the real number is in the 10s unless people hangout in Gaza hospital parking lots.
What I find interesting is that every Israeli outlet is scrambling to get the number down. Makes no sense to spin it that way if Hamas is behind the attack. As for the number rising, I'll take that bet.
I don’t find that interesting at all, because it seems to be true and they know a huge chunk of the population will blame them regardless of the truth so hey, may as well be blamed, whether you did it or not, for less people dying.
But you’re telling me, after we’ve seen the images of the hospital and parking lot, that that was the site of something that killed as many people as an entire V2 rocket exploding inside a packed auditorium?
Look up the casualty counts for individual bombs going off, look at the structural damage surrounding those events, look up the amount of ordnance required for those events, and the types of ordnance, compare those to the bizarre amount of fire damage:blast damage (kinda like the unspent fuel in a rocket sprayed everything and lit it on fire), and ask yourself, does that look like a JDAM strike, and one that could’ve killed 500 people?
Ignore “Israel evil, Palestine good”
That’s not my point, for this exercise I don’t care. Look at the damage type, amount, and compare with other explosions.
Like I said, I very much doubt Hamas did it. And the count will be in the hundreds. But let's wait and see.
The count will be in the 10s not hundreds. I’m not sure what your background is but I was a FAC(A) (Forward Air Controller(Airborne)) when I was in the service. In short FACs are the ones who call in airstrikes. I’ve lots of bombs come of lots of planes and unless they were carpet bombing with B-52s, which they don’t have, one bomb wouldn’t cause that much damage. That’s just physics and nothing more.
Israel warned them they were going to do it. Afterward, their own people tweeted about it, then deleted. Come on. I also just realized why they need to get the number down - Hamas doesn't have that capability, only Israel.
This is delusional. Re "wait and see," may I ask what sort of evidence would be sufficient to convince you one way or the other?
Or call a source in Israel and ask why they think they didn’t do it. The response would’ve been live surveillance video. And put that in the story.
Israel's initial response was that it was a legitimate target on the grounds that Hamas had a base in the hospital. They later changed their story.
I believe that is incorrect. It was a social media influencer, Hananya Naftali, who shills for the IDF but is not an official in the Israeli government who put out that story. It, like the 40 beheaded babies (original report was up to 40 babies murdered, some reportedly beheaded, not 40 beheaded babies), got caught up in a game of telephone, eventually leading to Naftali morphing into a "top advisor" to Netanyahu. As far as I am aware, Naftali was the only source of this "initial response."
https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/oct/19/explaining-a-deleted-x-post-that-said-israel-is-re/#:~:text=Hananya%20Naftali%2C%20a%20pro%2DIsrael,hospital%2C%20then%20deleted%20the%20post.
Nice takedown. Doubt he’ll reply..
It would have taken them a few minutes to create it.
So predictable from an idiot, David.
If it doesn’t fit my narrative it’s a deep fake. If it fits my narrative but maybe a deep fake it’s true🤡
🤡
I really doubt that they care. there are directions you can be wrong in and directions that have zero tolerance for error.
But the original NYT headline had the qualifier "...Palestinians Say"
Hardly anyone took a moment to think about that. My mom saw the article and did what most good NYT readers did - jumped to the conclusion that Israel bombed the hospital. The end. Furthermore, the story was accompanied with a picture of a bombed out building that had nothing to do with the hospital but was meant to deceive.
Doesn't matter. Damage done. Those who aren't skeptical will revert to their bias.
We know they know this. They did this because the Hard Left inside the institutions need Israel to be the aggressor not the victim. The ideology must bend the facts.
"The Hard Left inside the institutions." If the Hard Left has already been institutionalized, then they can't be a problem.
On the other hand, one of the easiest workarounds for "journalists" is to accurately quote a bigot. It's as easy as quoting a Hamas statement, while ignoring the Israeli statement. Strictly speaking, quoting the Hamas statement is accurate journalism. But it's also biased as hell.
I've watched in real time what Matt is referring to. Any effort, any pretense, of responsible journalism has been abandoned over the last few decades. "Journalism" is now an advocacy industry. They have the right, I guess, but they deserve no respect. And only simple-minded fools who like to take sides take it seriously. Many just want simple, easy to comprehend answers that they can feel comfortable with, rather than the angst of seeking comprehension.
Yes, but think logically for a minute. Who has the bomb to make such a blast: Israel or Gaza? Who "knocks on the roof" ahead of the bomb? Both answers are the IDF.
Ah, but that is journalism.
NYT and the rest do advocacy and narrative control.
A bad joke on us all
“ Israel is investigating the matter” WTF fox meat henhouse
“Israel investigating the matter” ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ad nauseam
Run along, Bernadumbass. You're embarrassing yourself.
Morehahahshahahaha
Nice try Zionist troll GFY
"Appropriate." You're now dabbling in media "etiquette," I see. Then again it might be the next big thing.
If the 'Leader' of Hamas were to come out and announce that he himself had fired the rocket that hit the hospital, his own followers would believe it was a Zionist conspiracy. These people cannot be reasoned with...
"These people" statements are always problematic. Stop generalizing.
"These people" statements are always problematic"
Isn't that generalizing?
Yes but not about people.
sorry could not resist.
to your point, Its a very weak description and actually lessons the force of one's argument.
DMC you got a laugh out of me with that one.
NO. IT’s CALLED EDUCATING.
If I've been told once, I've been told a million times, "don't exaggerate."
I am never, never, I say Never hyperbolic!
Hahaha
His followers would be Hamas. That is not generalizing.
“Groups are social constructs”. Ah, like Gender. I see. Hamas is not a construct, it is a militant actual group of Muslims, related to another group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Just like the Nazis of 1930s and 1940s Germany they are a group, they were evil, and it is and was appropriate to refer to “them” and each individual as evil and as followers of Herr Hitler. Don’t get lost in an attempt to intellectualize the obvious. You bellybutton won’t help you.
All "groups" are abstractions. In reality they are a collection of individuals ie multiple. The practice of grouping people together and make them singular is abstracting, and then painting them all with the same brush is an abomination and one of the reasons we are in this predicament - lazy thinking. Maybe look past your own navel for once.
And ... you generalize. Maybe learn something wise.
Here’s a suggestion: “white people” is a group for which individuals likely have different views SUCH THAT treating each the same is inappropriate.
German Nazis of the WWII era had sufficiently identical views on any number of things SUCH THAT it is proper to refer to the individuals collectively and individually as evil.
Likewise Hamas in the current era.
Get it? (No that’s a silly question to put to you as your ego, narcissistic personality, and status as a community college teacher would be unraveled were you to admit I am correct).
Deal with it Junior.
Collective thinking as a principle is wrong and has to go. You can't allow it for some and not for others. It leads to the practice of holding an individual accountable for the sins of their group members. That is the core problem in our society. It's not proper ever. Get it ? Deal with it. Community college ? I'm a STEM professional with multiple advanced degrees and 30 years in banking. Who are you junior?
like corporations....wait.
Yes it is generalizing to say all members of a group act or behave or believe a ceratain way. Individuals act, behave, believe but groups do not. Groups are social constructs which are abstractions. Applying language meant for individuals to groups is lazy and leads to misunderstandings and just generally bad thinking.
In this case "These People" are referring to Hamas, a group of people who voluntarily associate so in this context I think GC is correct in usage. If you're talking of US Marines and refer to them as those people kick ass, would it still bother you? I guess Hamas is on the up and up because they don't say those people they say Jews so I guess this is a better use of grammar and stereotypes?
TROLL
YES. it’s still generalizing. I know a lot of Marines who don’t kick ass they’re just fucking flunky Marines.
I'm not saying "These people" is incorrect grammar, I'm saying it is bad thinking. And yes it's bad on the part of Hamas as well for killing innocent civilians because of the group they belong to. We talk in terms of groups because it is a simple shorthand, but it is lazy thinking to identify an individual with their group. It's a bad habit and is the core problem in our society. So go ahead and use the shorthand but don't let it infect your thinking.
So there's different kinds of Nazis and should be judged individually, got it!
Are Israel's supporters acting any differently? Worse, they go into auto-pilot and spin apologia for their idol state.
The difference is... Israel's "idols" don't rape grandmas and behead babies. You might not like war, but when you start it - be prepared for a response.
You can equivocate all you want, but it doesn't stop you from tolerating evil. All the revisionist history in the world can't change the fact that Truman dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't the same as Hirohito's Rape of Nanking and Pearl Harbor.
Your war propaganda is getting stale. The White House retracted the babies story. The LA Times retracted the rape story.
Israeli survivors of the Oct 7th incursion tell of civilians getting killed in the crossfire by the IDF. Hamas was on a mission to capture hostages to trade for the release of some 5 000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and most likely get Israel to release its 17 year long choke hold on Gaza.
Curiously, Israeli war propaganda neglects to mention that the Palestinians captured scores of IDF soldiers, officers, and at least one, possibly two generals.
If resistance fighters had busted out of the Warsaw Ghetto and the exact same events had unfolded, people like you would be overlooking the civilian deaths and injuries, which as you say are an inevitable outcome of war, and you would be cheering the beleaguered Jewish fighters of the Ghetto.
Lastly, post the mass murders of WWII, new rules were promulgated outlawing as war crimes the deliberate targeting of civilians, hospitals, schools, water and sewage plants, and the like. Israel is doing exactly that - committing war crimes and people like you are spinning them if not outright cheering.
Here is an Israeli woman survivor of the events of Oct 7.
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/10/16/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/?fbclid=IwAR3NH9nSVnptttlE07qMnCVGNTddcrEMrtcY-kd1AK75S0XvWldDfS7Qejo
But the beheading story was also inexcusably exaggerated it appears. Both sides exaggerate. The problem is the news picks up these stories from unreliable sources and run with them as facts. This inflames and causes more hate of the other side. And is NOT journalism.
How many rapes and beheadings are acceptable to you? Just checking.
Excuse me? I am on Israel's side on this one. So...
Parsing the number of rapes and beheadings does Hamas’ work in the court of public opinion. Slightly different from insisting that an inept jihadi rocket was actually an Israeli bomb targeting a hospital
Nice try Zionist TROLL. false equivalency or analysis, bullshit.
Fuck you, Nazi scum.
Hamas or the NYT??
That would be his last official act as leader, but I don't think such a suicidal announcement from him is very likely.
Major news organizations spend more time fact checking RNC statements than they do Hamas.
I'm not sure news organizations, even the biggest ones, actually do fact checking.
I was a reporter for more than 20 years. None of the papers I worked for had fact checkers.
Newspapers mostly don’t, but a lot of magazines still do.
Matt, You keep thinking main stream media and the paper version thereof have integrity, silly boy.
We, as in reporters, were our own fact checkers.
Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn't.
The whole job is fact checking
Not anymore.
News organizations now are like the medieval church. They believe their job is to instruct people not enlighten them.
These are the kinds of people who persecuted Galileo.
It really went off the rails when it switched to “normative” journalism, that is, when they took on the job of telling how to interpret the news for a certain goal.
The objective news era was actually an aberration. I’d rather have impartial reporting, but that’s an ideal. It should be the reader’s job, not the writer’s, to reach a conclusion based on the available information. Instead we have a return of the partisan press, except this time they can’t admit it.
I agree; this was true when the country was first formed, a free press being the lesser of two evils, the other being a government controlled one. There are uncountable examples since then of media manipulation, William Randoloh Hearst comes to mind. The ideal is still worth aspiring to , though .
Matt, checkout my chat with ChatGBT concerning the implications of the Israel and Hamas war:
https://chat.openai.com/share/c8428ac5-4980-4224-b172-73e1963a85ad
Recent development
I blame desire to bring down Trump at any cost to integrity
Yes.
News organizations like the NYT didn't have much credibility left by the time Trump declared his candidacy. (WMDs, etc.)
They lost it all with their deranged effort to destroy him.
That's strictly a minority opinion. Unless you're a regular commenter on the Racket threads, where it's gospel. Deranged efforts for deranged men.
Isaiah 30:12: "...Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel, Because ye despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon:"
I can think of other words to describe the Democrat-media jihad against Trump.
Demented.
Lunatic.
Unhinged.
Yes, but why? The hatred is disproportionate to anything he said or did.
What an era to experience! I can imagine some future historian scratching their head over why Trump was so disproportionally hated. Or maybe we’ll find out in this lifetime. It still puzzles me.
The “fact checkers” employed by the DNC don’t actually recognize as facts anything that is inconsistent with leftist preferred narrative or that makes their employers look bad. Instead, they claim there is “no evidence” for the fact in question or that it “lacks context” by which they mean it isn’t really a fact unless it is accompanied by leftist “spin.”
Frankly it’s the authoritative statement of “more than 500” that’s the most egregious.
That would be one of the highest death tolls from a single airstrike in the history of warfare. Is it impossible? No, but with 500 to 2000 lb bombs, it would be extremely unlikely, the kind of statement if I were in a newsroom I’d say “we need way more evidence on this”.
For context, the Oklahoma City bombing was around 5,000 lbs and killed 168, and on the higher scale, the Beirut bombing in 2020 was, on the low estimate, 0.3 kilotons of TNT equivalent and killed 218.
This to me is a good example of the rot that has happened in newsrooms, especially the younger hires just not having any real world experience, all being from extremely privileged backgrounds, going to Ivy League schools to get degrees that teach them absolutely no critical thinking skills, and at least in this specific case, having a kneejerk hatred of Israel. This caused multiple mainstream media outlets to immediately single source believe Hamas(!) a Jihadist group whose main motivation is to maximize claimed casualty counts, regarding what would be one of the single deadliest individual airstrikes, ever.
some facts are too good to be checked. the rocket strike is getting swallowed in the "fog of war" but the death toll has been memory holed
Some news sources are too big to lie
really ? like who? unless that’s a joke
It's a lot and feels like an overestimate but it's not at all implausible for an 500 lb bomb airburst over the precise center of a densely-packed crowd filling a courtyard -- that's pretty much best case scenario for inflicting casualties. I'd actually be surprised if any of them survived. Two hundred lbs of HE at that distance will turn your insides to jelly. Anyway, number of bystanders and their proximity to blast are far more important than tonnage (whose effect falls off as the cube root of distance), so I wouldn't get too worked up over that metric, except to note that the explosion shown in the video is incompatible with the 10-20 kilos used in Hamas rockets -- you'd have to have immediately vaporized and ignited the fuel in the car park as well and that should look more like a BLEVE than what we see.
Quite true, that’s why I went with “extremely unlikely”, basically we’re talking either a direct hit on a crowd or a bomb going through the roof of a wide open interior space, like a packed theater or arena, I believe that happened with a V2 once.
It’s why in WW2 when the Allies were just trying to kill as many people in densely populated cities, they used mass firebombings.
"(whose effect falls off as the cube root of distance)"
You meant the inverse of the square.
Inverse square law applies to cross-sectional areas of dispersal - light and other forms of radiation etc. But for explosive blasts, it's the overpressure that (mostly) does the damage, so it's inversely proportional to the volume of the pressurized area (PV=nRT) at the moment the overpressure hits (very roughly -- this is assuming static equilibrium which obviously is a poor assumption, etc.). Apparently this is called the Hopkinson-Cranz scaling law: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/blast-radius#hopkinson-cranz-scaling-law. So that's neat.
Your casualty estimates are irrelevant because you don't know the density of people packed into the blast radius of this hospital. It could well have been over 500 if news report that thousands were using the hospital as shelter are true.
It’s a fair point but we’re talking 2 different types of probabilities. My main point is that this would be one of the largest mass casualty events from a single airstrike, we’re talking a single airstrike killing a significant percentage of the death toll you see when a city is leveled.
If I hear a claim, single sourced, that a single airstrike killed more than 500 people, I immediately pause no matter where it is claimed the bomb hit, because in the history of bombs hitting things, this would be historical, and humans have dropped a lot of bombs.
Bard seems to get extremely confused when I ask the question because it keeps coming back with the death toll from entire carpet bombing campaigns, but the point is over 500 is a huge amount.
This could be considered fallacious reasoning but I’m going off “deaths per bombs detonating in cities” generally and you’re going off of “deaths per bombs going off if a scenario like this actually occurred”.
In my hypothetical newsroom, as mentioned, I hear “500 dead in an airstrike”, my skeptic alarm starts beeping and says “this is possible, but I need some real concrete evidence before we run with this” not “no way, impossible, ignore the story completely.”
Gotta say this is the first philosophical conversation I’ve ever had about the probabilities of bombs exploding in cities but I’m all for it.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
They get new hires who have never done any real research.
Papers written in college today go like this: I come up with a thesis. I then find quotes I can use to prove my thesis. I ignore books full of information that contradict my thesis. I write a fake strawmam argument I can easily debunk. Then I conclude my thesis is correct. I make sure to use spell check and grammarly and I limit my paragraphs to 5-6 sentences as my professors now instruct me to do (likelybecause anything longer would definitely be unreadable). I get A+ if my teacher can read and understand what I wrote because most students no longer know how to write a cohesive paragraph let alone a ten page research paper.
That is scholarship today.
Liked your comment before reading it through to the end, so delighted was I by the reference to elite newspapers' privileged (blissfully ignorant) child journalists. So you honestly think these Ivy League grads turned NY Times journalists hate Israel and love Hamas? Not my impression. I think the paper was reacting in a knee-jerk way to growing public sympathy for Palestinians trapped in Gaza who were/are being indiscriminately killed in huge numbers because Bibi clearly believes all Palestinians must die (he has repeatedly said as much), Hamas supporters or not. The Times does not want people to think it is biased in favor of Israel (I would argue that most of its editors if not reporters are) because, obviously, this would cause ALL readers to lose faith in the accuracy of its reporting. It's a slippery slope once that begins and the Times is threatened by online competition from the likes of Substack. It literally can't afford to look either incompetent or biased.
Great point. Common sense is lacking. You gotta know when some claim just doesn’t seem right. I wouldn’t be against early reporting that might be wrong but it should be extremely clear that early reports are uncertain.
When do "younger" hires in any business or occupation bring "experience" to the office or workplace? And I urge caution using boomerang terms like "knee-jerk." Throw it at someone and eventually it comes back to you.
My entire working career has been in tech, at various times doing a bit of everything, including startup stuff. Many people in tech are from hypereducated backgrounds, myself included, although I took a very windy road to get there.
Young hires, even entry level ones, from working class backgrounds very much contributed to people seeing things from other perspectives, including helping me learn not to be so much of an elitist asshole.
As long as a new entry level employee isn’t an extremely privileged timebomb, young hires from backgrounds outside your company’s culture can be very helpful.
But if I was hiring, and you’re Ivy League graduated post-2014, I’m not saying you wouldn’t get a job, but I’d need to see some damn good evidence you’re not going to be one of those extremely privileged timebombs.
"Evidence." You absolutely sound like a tech bro insofar that you also sound like a cop which is to say ---insufferable. I imagine for most people not being hired by you would be one of their lucky professional breaks they could eventually look back on with amused resignation.
You actually got a laugh out of me with that one Feldspar, I’ll spare explaining why this time.
A hospital is densely packed, especially so in wartime. If a bomb caused a hospital to collapse I'd find this quite plausible.
But who knows.
One thousand years ago, when I was a journalism student, a classmate who prefaced a statement with, "I think...." would face the Kiss of Death from our professor.
The professor's response was, "No one gives a damn what you think. What do you KNOW?"
I adopted that policy when I became an editor.
Works for me.
It should work for the NYTimes.
So 20th century.
I must remember that!
Didn’t we also learn (Shellenberger) that The NY Times put a “stock photo” of decimated bomb site that wasn’t in fact the actual hospital?
Yes. They also referred to Hamas as a "Palestinian Group" in one headline.
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/the-real-misinformation-merchants
I think Glenn Greenwald noted the video released then removed by Israel had a different time (and possibly date) than the time the hospital strike occurred.
A blame neutral NYT headline would have been proper. You just asserted in your previous piece that Israel didn't do it (i.e., "it never happened"), conclusively. What is that assertion based on?
They never “knew” it, but you’re right, I should have put an “apparently” in there.
Please take a look at some of the critical analysis of the bombing, e.g., Channel 4's report, and Al Jazeera's analysis of the Al Jazeera video of the bombing that Israel used to try to make its case. And, if you haven't yet, maybe get a few neutral munitions experts to watch the original footage of the blast and listen to the sound of the incoming ordnance.
By Al Jazeera you mean the press office of the Qatari government? Why not just take Hamas's word for it?
No worse than the BBC.
Al Jazeera's video report is wrong, as it claims Israel's iron dome which intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza, and that it was the remnants of THIS, falling on the hospital that is the cause.
Except that's not how the Iron Dome works - it doesn't explode rockets so soon after being fired (as this shows), largely because it wouldn't have had time to calculate the trajectory by that point - it doesn't stop all incoming rockets, just ones that are going to land where people live.
Secondly, you cannot see in any of this "analysis footage" the intercepting ordnance.
Thirdly, when an iron dome missile hits an incoming rocket, there is a massive explosion and only small shrapnel would be landing - never enough to do the type of damage caused at the hospital. The falling pieces of an iron dome interception are not going to kill "hundreds" of people, like ever.
Fourthly, the iron dome missiles intercept over Israeli territory proper, and not over Gaza.
Fifthly, go watch videos of actual iron dome interceptions. They don't look like this.
Al Jazeera is wrong.
CJ is right, Matt. You need to see the Al Jazeera investigation posted by Michael Tracy. I can only assume you haven't seen it. And the New York Times needs to report it as well. It establishes that a rocket fired from Gaza did *not* cause the damage.
Then, Matt you need to retract your original claim that Israel did *not* bomb the hospital while discussing the Al Jazeera report with your readers. That's only what I would expect from you.
Taibbi already walked back his comments ever so slightly.
His new positions is.
"it’s not known absolutely for certain what happened at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. There are still claims out there that it was indeed an Israeli attack, or could have been."
I love the heavy dose of dismissive ambiguity in the last sentence. "There are claims out there" Taibbi says, as if these claims are some disgusting muck stuck to the bottom your shoe that refuses to release itself.
Spin it a little harder please daddy.
Gosh I seem to remember an episode of This Week in which Taibbi criticized the mainstream media for adding so many qualifiers to their headlines, leading people in a direction of what they should think rather than laying out the facts and letting readers decide for themselves. Then Taibbi writes "Its not known ABSOLUTELY FOR CERTAIN what happened." without a hint of irony.
And what is the alternative? If you don’t know, admit it. That’s commendable
This is an irony-free zone, among other things.
It isn’t spin to admit you aren’t certain. More uncertainty please.
There are two ways to write this.
One is "It's not known for certain what happened"
This is legitimate journalism and should be applauded.
The way Taibbi wrote it however was "It's not known ABSOLUTELY for certain what happened" in the context of he just walked back a statement where he declared absolute certainty about what happened. The implication in this phrase is, "I know exactly what happened, but it just hasn't been proven yet."
thegrayzone had a good discussion, claiming the blast was far bigger than anything Hamas's rockets could do. Still there is nothing definitive and the Israeli propaganda, like Ukraine's, cannot be questioned.
Except oops it wasn’t
"get a few neutral munitions experts"
"listen to the sound of the incoming ordnance"
Are we all trusting the experts again now?
Yes, let us stick with the propagandists.
🤣🤣🤣
Good points, CJ!
Good points. I have seen compelling arguments for both cases. I think context is most important here. This is one incident in a huge set of incidents that is killing, injuring, displacing, and endangering so many people. Being too hung up on who did this feels weird. And like a way to give Israel a pass. Like, "Hey, they may not have bombed a hospital and killed hundreds. They definitely did kill more than hundreds, including hundreds of kids, they definitely are targeting civilians, etc. But don't look at that! Look at the fact they they MAY NOT HAVE BOMBED THIS HOSPITAL THIS TIME!"
In addition to being an irony-free zone, Racket News is also refreshingly free of context.
Depends what portion of it is yours at the time.
Good one.
Look at satellite images taken after the bombing and make the case a building blew up rather than just cars in a parking lot.
You made the same kind of mistake you criticize the NYT for.
Of course the NYTimes messed up, but as someone who faced rocket attacks at Balad Air Base on an almost daily basis, russian-made and far more deadly than Hamas home-made rockets, and after seeing videos of the incoming noise and blast that hit the Baptist-supported hospital in Gaza City, there is no way on earth I will ever believe that this was anything other than an Israeli strike, despite the daily propaganda we've seen from US and Israeli media sources. And Israel always denies their war crimes, always, until the proof comes out months later that yes, they did it, but, gee, it was a one-off, accidental, incident... hundreds of them.
I hate to agree with the original NYTimes headline, but there's a good chance it may have been correct.
But after you look at satellite images after the bombing to asses damage at the hospital, tell me which buildings at the site were razed ti the ground after the blast?
Thanks for the comment, Matt! I was going to ask a question similar to CJ's.
is anybody still standing by the 300-500 death toll anymore?
Palestinian officials say 471. US Intelligence officials say 100-300. Israeli TV channel that brought us the "40 beheaded babies" story says 10-50.
Can you please provide a link to that 40 beheaded babies report? Because I saw it when it first broke. The reporter stated that up to 40 babies were murdered, some reportedly beheaded. 40 babies murdered, not all beheaded.
A distinction without a difference.
True enough, but it is being used to discredit the Israeli reports of the massacre. Subtly implying that the reports of the massacre are overblown and hyperbolic.
Why wouldn't Hamas show all of those body bags?
Since only cars in the parking lot were heavily damaged, you decide how many is accurate. Japan News is reporting the story is innacurate and that satellite images show no buildings were damaged from this bombing.
That it appears in photographs that the parking lot was hit. Civilians very well may have been there
Not 500. That would make this an historically deadly bombing. Only cara were hit. A dozen or so. Not driving, parked.
Read The Grey Lady Winked. NYT’s very long history of lying, and supporting Nazis. I’m surprised they survived that alone.
Who would have the most to gain in the international political/opinion arena by an attack on a Palestinian hospital? Who would suffer world condemnation?
Since "the first casualty of war is the truth,” something I've seen play out over & over, & since both the Palestinians & the Israelis both have their own agendas, as does the US & Europe & Saudi Arabia & Egypt, etc., etc., what is the point in bickering about this shit? No one on here knows what "the truth" actually is. And no one will know for a long fucking time, if ever.
https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/israels-911
- Sorry, but I’ve seen this movie before.
I saw it in New York in 2001.
America had been attacked. It was time to come together as Americans, to put aside our political differences, to rally around the flag, and the president, and go and kill a whole lot of people who had absolutely nothing to do with it.
You might be too young to remember that time. I remember it vividly. I remember it in detail. I remember how the nation “came together.” I remember how the Western world “stood with America.” I remember how we declared a “Global War on Terror,” how we “took the gloves off,” both at home and abroad, how the government and the media whipped the public up into a bloodthirsty, jingoistic frenzy. I remember being called a “traitor,” a “Saddam apologist,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” because I wouldn’t wave the flag, and “stand with America,” and get on board with murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.
So, forgive me if what follows seems a bit cold. As I said, I’ve seen this movie before. -
- I am not going to condemn the Hamas attack, as hideous as I think it was. I do not condemn things on command, or perform any other kind of tricks on command. If that’s what you’re looking for, get a dog.
That said, I am not going to call the Hamas attack “resistance” or try to justify it. I refuse to justify mass murder. If you’re OK with mass murdering civilians for your cause … OK, but own it. Call it what it is. And spare me the “legitimate resistance” bullshit.
Same goes for Israel. If you “stand with Israel” as it murders civilians, fine. Own it. Give me a break with the “Israel has the right to defend itself” bullshit, and own it.
Whatever “side” of this conflict you are on, at least have the integrity to call things what they are.
Here is what things are, in a nutshell.
Israel is a nation-state. It is doing what a lot of nation-states have done throughout the history of nation-states. It is wiping out, or otherwise removing, the indigenous population of the territory it has conquered. It has been doing this for 75 years. The indigenous population, i.e., the Palestinians, have been trying not to get completely wiped out, or otherwise removed from their indigenous territory, and lashing out at Israel in a variety of ways (i.e., from throwing stones to committing mass murder).
That is what is happening. The rest is PR. Public relations. Propaganda. - CJ Hopkins
Thanks Spiderbaby.
I saw it in 1948 when Orwell wrote 1984 . It was 1984 then and it is still 1984. Voltaire said: Perception is reality. Real history informs us the Boston Patriots were an LLC Public Relations firm and Paul Revere's great talent was Photoshopping events like the Boston Drunken Mob non Massacre.
In 1820 Jefferson was saying America needed a new constitution every 19 years but old Jefferson was a scientific philosopher who studied evolution before Darwin was conceived. Jefferson didn't believe in miracles by magic. he was not a theologian or legal sophist.
The scale of slaughter in Gaza is no different than it was 3000 years ago. The only difference is now we can watch live and in colour instead of analyzing the ashes.
Y'know Moe, given the nonstop bloodshed that has greeted the Jewish people on their return to their "ancestral homeland" I can't help thinking that this entire "repatriate the Jews to Israel" plan was the biggest act of anti-semitism ever.
The fact that we can watch this like an episode of "Combat" is exactly why I disconnected my TV from the outer asylum years ago.
My ancestors were building synagogues on the Black Sea before the Immaculate Conception my paternal ancestors fled The Basque in 1492 to escape the vengeance of The Prince of Peace. If Jews didn't exist you would need to make them up.
Orwell understood Big Brother needs Emmanuel Goldstein.
I've never understood the hatred that people have for Jewish folk.
Can't think of any Jewish people who have ever wronged me.
I could name some Christians though.
One of my best friends drifted towards white power about 25 years ago. Jews were big on his hate list. Doubt that he ever actually met a real Jewish person in his entire life.
I maintained contact for a while, hoping I could talk him out of it. Then 911 happened and the rhetoric became loud & insufferable. We haven't spoken in 20 years.
Que Sara Sara....
I know lots of Jews it started with my parents and no two are the same just like everyone else. Here in Quebec there is no longer such a thing as Jews. In Quebec there is no such thing as Moslems , or Christians because no body knows what fantasy looks like. We have fools that think they are wise and wise men that know all men are fools.
There is no such thing as us and them there is only one human genome and it tells the story of Noah and the flood.
In Louis Ginzburg's Legends of The Bible Jewish Publication Society 1908 still in Print .
The story of Noah is the story of the world's drunkest drunk. Noah made Adam and Eve Saintly by English middle class standards.
Milton's Jesus needed Satan even as Milton was a Unitarian.
Shakespeare never met a Jew and wrote The Merchant of Venice. Jews disappeared from England when Richard returned from the Crusades and England celebrated by sacrificing its Jews. There were no Jews in the Court of King James to translate Hebrew and Aramaic.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aramaic-language
I think this Kinky Friedman diddy from 1970s expresses my humble opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aS_i51Cyks
I don't know Moe, centuries of hate around the word "Jewish."
I can't muster more than 15 minutes of hate for anybody.
I get bored & start thinking of the 100 things I'd rather be doing than stewing over a gripe.
It all looks a tad deranged.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy3bJXep384
Palestinians are not an indigenous population by any measure.
Thank you. You and I have had the exact same experience. The dog was wagging the tail over 9/11 and the dog is wagging tails here. There is a lot of hyperbole, assumption, and outright fake news being reported as fact right now to justify war.
Stop and think. No babies were beheaded. The Baptist Hospital is still standing in Gaza. All else is lies.
This will probably make me look paranoid, which I probably am, but it appears that there are elements in play that want a 3rd world war.
Maybe the pandemic didn't kill enough people.
Or maybe there are unconscious forces that we don't understand that are driving us toward annihilating a sizable chunk of the world's population.
I don't understand how anyone on this board can possibly take any "news" report seriously after the endless stream of lies, obfuscations, misdirections & glaring omissions that have characterized the western media's output for a while now.
To be honest I'm staying away from this latest atrocity exhibition. I've come to realize that every major event that occurs these days occurs in a cloud of bullshit, and that cloud won't begin to clear for years. I'm tired of being manipulated so I'm just opting out.
It may not be "known absolutely for certain" what happened, but there is credible evidence, the veracity of which has not been questioned by anyone in any meaningful public way, versus "Hamas says..."
You say this like Israel is some paragon of truth telling.
Here's part of an exchange I had with a leading journalist in the summer of 2017. The topic: standards at the NYT.
"That’s a good question. Can they get any lower? We’ve had roughly 8 years of extremely high quality reporting on the arts and sciences and I fully expect that to continue. It shouldn’t have taken Hillbilly Elegy and other tomes, to get wage stagnation before the public eye. The San Jose Mercury is one of the few papers to inform readers that 3/4 African-American males of high school age can’t read or write. That sure sounds like news to me, and would be were the NYT and other ‘liberal’ outlets actually concerned about the plight of minorities and the poor.
It’s a joke. I correspond with folks of your stature now and then. I’m a big fan of Dexter Filkins and he’s been good enough to reply on occasion. But getting Iraq wrong? My favorite NYT headline of the Obama years was ‘The Invisible Poor-how did we miss them?’ Eyes tight shut, perhaps? If you want to get a sense of just how out of touch the media is go and watch the network/cable coverage of election night 2016 available on Youtube. If you haven’t you should.
Clue-free right right up to Florida going for Trump and long after that in many cases. I’ve paid for TNR, Mojo, and others over the years, not to mention academic journals. The notion advanced at the NYT and elsewhere that the last thing we need these days is an objective paper of record tells me (anyway) all I need to know about where this mess is going. The ‘golden shower’ dossier is the new gold standard of reporting in 2016-17. Sad!
I read RCP, as I’m sure you do. You’ll have caught Mollie Hemingway’s latest. She’s not neutral, but she’s not far wrong. http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/29/cnns-latest-retraction-just-tip-fake-news-iceberg/
Glad you’re still in the game.
Nice to chat once again,"
If we're talking about "standards" at the NYT, the paper has none. That's been abundantly clear. Just ask Bari, Don, et al. That's why so many former subscribers are here.
Keep up the great work, Matt and the Racket News team!
Excellent quote. One style quibble:
For quoting multiple paragraphs in a row, would posters PLEASE follow standard style and use an open-quotation mark in front of EACH paragraph? That helps the reader know the quote is ongoing.
There's only one close-quotation mark, and that's at the end of the entire multi-paragraph quotation.
Nah. They have standards, just not impartial reporting standards. The standards are now to stand by the ruling class which the paper imagines it belongs to.
Matt, you and your readers would do yourself a favor by reading Chris Hedges newest article "Israel's Culture of Deceit." Much like Chris, I spent time in the West Bank and Gaza. There is a very high probability that Israel was behind the Hospital explosion, but aside from that let's not lose sight of the fact that already Israeli had blown up schools, other medical facilities and UN safe haven locations.
Perhaps Israel hit the hospital; perhaps not. In the big picture, it doesn't matter. Does Israel target hospitals, ambulances, medical personnel, schools, people evacuating? Did it tell people to evacuate hospitals, even though the ill could not survive that? Yes. This is documented. Whether this particular case was an Israeli attack is a detail. Looking into the history of coverups and the integrity of this Israeli government are crucial.
It’s war, so you’re right, it doesn’t matter. It’s a messy business, so there will always be “collateral damage.” An extreme case: If we should engage in nuclear war, will anyone care who started it, or who was “right” or who was “wrong?”
Something we should all think about.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyjgARfAZ-i/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==
Yes, no doubt Ilhan Omar will agree with an “independent investigation”...🙄.
By independent, she means an investigator she pre-approves.
Israel lies. Biden lies. Netanyahu lies.The Biden administration lies.
An independent investigator is someone with no connection whatsoever to those interested parties and someone not from Palestine, Israel, nor the United States.
Exactly. Israel lies. Netanyahu lies. Biden lies. Hamas tells the truth!
I thought we were supposed to believe the victim? That's especially true when there is an serious imbalance of power like how Israel is far more powerful than Hamas.
Until the hospital incident, no one except the Squad would have called Hamas a victim. After all, it was Hamas that coordinated the initial barrage of bombs aimed at Israel. Yes, Hamas claims it is a victim, but radio interceptions have Hamas internally reporting that one rocket misfired and hit the side of the hospital. The stock photos of wholesale devastation run by the MSM were not of the actual hospital, but from elsewhere, as they themselves have acknowledged, but the MSM felt they were useful to prop up the sketchy story Hamas was peddling that well over 500 civilians were killed, because they all instinctively and uncritically believed Hamas, as you seem to want to do. As a practical matter, you may wish to get your news from a source other than Hamas (and the MSM). There is a reason they haven’t published a picture of the actual damage.
Why are we supposed to believe the victim? Do you apply that standard when a white girl says she was raped by a black man, or in that case do you look at all the evidence, including the testimony of the victim and the alleged criminal? Here you do not discuss any of the evidence. The statements by the parties - "Israel did it" "Islamic Jihad did it" -- aren't evidence at all and are not entitled to any weight. The forensic and signals evidence are all that matter.
Exactly. Ask Emmitt Till about #believeallwomen
🤔Poe’s Law has got me stumped here…
You were the only one who caught it. I'm sick of arguing about the war and feeling ill thinking of the death and destruction. Mostly I'm sickened my my government's role in war crimes.
More like a conclusion she approves of...
I mean Taibbi claims that Israel did not bomb the hospital as a fact (“The Times obviously never “knew” Israel bombed the hospital, because that never happened.” ~Matt Taibbi), despite the fact that we don’t know what happened.
Big old OOPS all around I guess.
We do know that Israel said they were going to bomb the hospital, then criticized the victims for not evacuating. Later tried to claim it was Hamas and released a video of a rocket, only to then delete that video because the time stamp didn’t match. We also know that homemade rockets don’t have the capability of leveling buildings, so evidence kind of points one way. But it’s true that we don’t know for certain and an independent investigation is needed.
Perhaps because surveillance photos show the hospital wasn’t hit but it’s courtyard was
It hit the courtyard not (apparently) the hospital.
Could you provide a link on that? I’d be curious to read it!
Okay, I honestly don’t know. But what’s with all hate toward Netanyahu? Is this like Trump derangement syndrome or what has he done. Simple examples will suffice.
Netanyahu (1) formed a coalition with the most right-wing and ultra orthodox communities, who are determined to unlawfully settle the West Bank with Jewish settlements, (2) was in the process of trying to weaken the judicial branch, so that the ultra right-wing-laws passed by this coalition could not be challenged by the court, and, most importantly,
(3) diverted the Israeli army, IDF, up to the West Bank from down near Gaza, so it took them hours to get down to Gaza once the Hamas attack was reported and
(4) completely missed plans for this attack, so that the IDF was caught totally off-guard.
There's more. But Israelis are incandescent with rage against Netanyahu and his cabinet for these reasons. As they should be.
I’m not sure for whom this question is directed.
Can’t repost pics here I don’t think. I saw them on X & I am critical when it comes to sourcing. That doesn’t mean there were not civilians crowded in the courtyard
Someone else posted before & after footage from IDF fyi - so decide yourself
https://www.idf.il/media/okpnsic3/before-and-after.jpeg?mode=crop&width=500&height=240
Much appreciated! I’ll give it look when I’m home from work.
Who is 'we'?
With all due respect, you're losing the plot here.
By this standard the media can't report on war, because you can't independently verify it in anything approaching real time. Should the story of the past week be Israel may have bombed something in Gaza, or that there may have been casualties? Should we have waited a couple of days to say that anyone in Israel was really killed? Call it an unverified crisis in the Middle East?
Maybe everyone in Israel and Gaza are just on the beach, listening to Jimmy Buffet - I don't know - I can't verify it personally.
The bigger thing though is that this doesn't matter. Israel is bombing the hell out of Gaza. The natural assumption when they are doing so, and something blows up is that they did it. If this does in fact happen to be wrong in this case, it makes very little difference. It doesn't change any important narrative. They are still bombing the hell out of Gaza.
Ask yourself, how many people are upset b/c of journalistic standards, as opposed to being upset because they want the media to report what they want to hear. The Intercept criticized the decapitated baby story, Michael Shellenberger didn't. The same is true in reverse. This is just people being upset that their side isn't deemed the morally clear one - there isn't any principle.
In order to make your point, which you still aren't really backing down from, you are relying on the Israeli government, weak corroboration from the US Government, and a very small number of "weapons experts" who presumably get paid by defense contractors. This doesn't make them wrong, but it sounds like you're gearing up to invade Iraq. That's the point where you should have taken a deep breath and written about something else.
Why are you guys always so loquacious? It seems that perhaps he doth protest too loudly. Narratives don’t stand alone. If they take a stand it can either be right or wrong. If one is reporting "the news" it only has value if it has the facts right. If it’s wrong it has no value at best and is pernicious propaganda at worst.
You report what people tell you. They can be wrong, but you’re not wrong to report what they said.
I don't disagree with your comment, news should be he said, she said. But is that was this story is about?
Clear attribution and admission of uncertainty goes a long way with early reporting.