Leveling the Playing Field: An order of ten both ways

Richard Landes
Augean Stables
15 December 09

I have often tried to argue that the situation is the Arab-Israeli conflict is not only exaggerated by the media, but inverted, and that statistics play a critical role in this process.

Now we have two key pieces of evidence of how this works.

Exhibit A: Exaggerate Israeli-inflicted damage by an order of ten.

Palestinians constantly make wild statistical claims, as in when Mahmoud al Zahar of Hamas accuses Israel of killing 8000 in the first, “peaceful” intifada, when the Israelis and the Palestinians killed about 1000 each.

Or when al Zahar accuses Israel of imprisoning one quarter of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian “human rights” NGO, Adalah gives a number to the fraction: 700-750,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons since 1967. This figure, absurd by any careful statistical analysis – was cited by an Adalah representative who testitifed before the Goldstone Commission. Again the figure is off by an order approaching ten.

But the Goldstone Report took the figures and rounded them down by a mere 50,000 (making the real number of prisoners since 1967 a statistical error):

¶1444. It is estimated that during the past 43 years of occupation, approximately 700,000 Palestinian men, women and children have been detained under Israeli military orders. Israel argues that these detentions are necessary on grounds of security

And now, Martin Kramer noticed that in the Goldstone report, the number of factories knocked out by Israel resulted in 40,000 jobs lost, when the original report only stated 4,000.

(Continue article)

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Human Rights Complex Take 13476:

HRW Does Hatchet Job on IDF and (silently) exculpates Hamas

Richard Landes

Augean Stables

13 August 09

HRW continues its assault on Israel based on methodologies that, were they used in science, would have us still living in the Ptolemean universe (i.e., human rights revolve around the Palestinians). Fortunately, both NGO Monitor and the IDF are responding vigorously.

Begin with what HRW doesn’t want to mention: i.e., that Hamas “operatives” systematically use civilians as shields, including those who wave white flags. Here’s IDF aerial footage from January 7, 2009 showing just such an incident.

Why does the HRW report contain no mention of these Hamas tactics, despite the fact that elsewhere they do acknowledge the problem? I think for two reasons.

1) It takes the moral heat off of Israel. How can you get your back into accusing Israel for shooting at people with white flags when there are combattants hiding among them. (Idem for ambulances, checkpoints, etc.) Exhibit B is the explanation for this twisted morality. Noah Pollak over at Contentions explains how both Sarah Leah Whitson of Saudi notoriety and the author of the report, Joe Stork, have long careers and anti-Israel advocates (”pro-Palestinian” would be too twisted a term for people who have no problem with the Palestinian treatment of their own refugees).

And 2) it raises a huge problem of the validity of the testimony they collect among Palestinians. If Hamas will fire from the midst of civilians, hide behind white-flag toting refugees, and keep them cooped up in areas to which they draw fire, then surely they are not going to be very happy with Palestinians complaining about that behavior. Once HRW grants that such matters go on within the same report in which they present Palestinian evidence as their key source for their allegations, the epistemological house of cards begins to fall.

So exhibit C is an analysis of a particular case which I treated at some length in the aftermath of operation Cast Lead — the tale of the Abed Rabbo family. Here Elder of Ziyon examines the way in which HRW uses testimony whose only value is to document how unreliable Palestinian witnesses tend to be, in order to indict Israeli soldiers.

Finally, NGO Monitor produced its own critique: HRW’s ‘White Flags’ Report Surrenders Morality.

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