# Al-Jazeera broadcasting leaked "Palestine Papers" **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 24, 2011, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/al-jazeera-broadcasting-leaked-palestine-papers/568808 "2011-01-24T17:31:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 180
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2011, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/al-jazeera-broadcasting-leaked-palestine-papers/568808/180 "2011-01-29T00:11:50Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > I think it has something to do with teh constitution of this board. Lotsa Jews, not a lot of Palestinians. By your own admission you’ve never met any Palestinians, though you rather arrogantly insist you know how they feel and if you think most Americans Jews are all that knowledgeable about the conflict, then you haven’t met many. I seriously doubt most American Jews could pass a test on Israeli history if their lives depended on it. For myself, since you seem to be concerned about the ethnic origins of the the posters, I’m Iranian, though I’ve lived in the US since I was two. > [@](#): > > I don’t think you appreciate my position. I’m not saying that ignorance\>knowledge. **I am saying I have enough knowledge to form an opinion** and your insistence that I read a clutch of books before I engage in this debate is stupid.\*\* I know enough from reading wikipedia\*\* and your claims that this is insufficient doesn’t go very far when you can’t identify what information i am missing that wikipedia does not provide. I’m sorry, but claiming that “I know enough from reading wikipedia” on ANY subject is not only incredibly stupid, but it’s also incredibly arrogant. Wikipedia is nearly universally acknowledged by most academics to be a horrible source of information. Each year, increasingly large numbers of college professors forbid there students from using wikipedia in their papers for a good reason. The director of the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Rutgers University once said, “the next wikipedia article on the Middle East that’s not riddled with errors will be the first”(yes, he was obviously being hyperbolic). Now, when acknowledged experts on the Middle East say that you shouldn’t trust wikipedia when it comes to the Middle East, well, then you shouldn’t trust wikipedia. Arguing otherwise is frankly anti-intellectual. Now, if you want you can do so, but doing so simply reinforces the perception that you’re aggressively in denial of reality and impervious to logic. > [@](#): > > II don’t sepdn time slowly digesting new facts into my gestalt of what is going on in the middle east, instead I find myself trying to fifure out how new facts can be incorporated into a narrative against Israel and I have to make a conscious effort to retain objectivity and that really bothers me I’m sorry, but you’re trying to defend the above statement really hurts your credibility. You come across to any reasonable, impartial observer as someone with an embarrassingly superficial understanding of the conflict who, by his own admission rejects any facts that don’t fit into his preferred narrative. > [@](#): > > Yeah, I agree it doesn’t argue one way or the other but it was the only thing I could find and I haven’t been able to find anything that supports the notion one way or the other. So I said YMMV and I was told that this was not a YMMV situation. Is the burden still on me to prove it one way or the other or is the burden on the person who tells me that this is not a YMMV situation? Ok, you’re damaging your credibility even more. When you first linked to this you insisted it validated your claim that there was far more media criticism of Israel now than in the 1980s. You’re now conceding that it says no such thing. Essentially, you’re admitting you tried to fit “facts” into the narrative you wanted rather than allowing “facts” to determine the narrative. > [@](#): > > “Many American media outlets openly criticized Israel in a way that they had not before.” > from The Iron Wall; Israel and the Arab World (a book I think someone may have recommended in this thread. > > But I have not found any cite for the calim that criticism of Israel was worse then than it is now. The wiki entry on the subect [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critici...eli\_government](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critici...eli_government) doesn’t seem to be as clear on the subject as you seem to be. > > So can you provide an objective cite taht criticsm was worse in the 1980s than it is now? Was the criticism sharper, more sustained, more vitriolic, how was it worse back then? I’m genuinely shocked that you have to ask such a question since you feel so passionately about the subject and you grew up in the 70s and the 80s. You don’t remember how virtually every night during the first several years of the Intifada, CNN showed videos of unarmed Palestinians getting shot or beaten by Israeli soldiers? You don’t remember TIME magazine getting sued by the Israeli Defense Minister? I’m sorry, but what you’re doing is the equivalent of asking me to prove that water is wet. > [@](#): > > I think that there is a consensus for a two state solution along 1967 borders with some horsetrading based on the notion that a failure to reach any trades defaults to 1967 borders (i.e. a lot of Jewish settlements end up in Palestine). Exactly who believes this “consensus” you’re talking about? Hamas doesn’t. The Israeli government doesn’t. Countless Palestinian intellectuals don’t. Frankly, I find the idea the idea that a Palestinian State consisting of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be economically more viable than any of South Africa’s Bantustans asinine and I’ve never met any Palestinians on the West Bank who believe that and such hostility is even more pronounced in the Gaza Strip. One last thing. I don’t mean to come across as a jerk, but could you please remember to capitalize properly and use proper spelling? Occasional typos are one thing, but it’s quite distracting and annoying to read. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/al-jazeera-broadcasting-leaked-palestine-papers/568808)._