Did you mean to post this in the Pit?
In any case…
Then you are not paying attention.
To be fair, the lament from the knee-jerk, anti-Israel faction is often that, why, whatever position they take I have a well-cited, well-reasoned refutation for it. So obviously, if people who can’t bother to find out the basic facts first or who twist them in service of a partisan narrative find that I’m always disagreeing with them, it must be that I’m for everything that Israel does. It’s a little bit like a 9/11 Truther declaring that those folks disagreeing with them must believe/support everything that the US government does.
That you think Ibn is an Israeli apologist rather seals the deal for the fact that you’re truly not paying attention and are, in fact, counting anybody who cares about factual accuracy and intellectual honesty in he discussion as an “apologist”.
I’ve posted twice in this thread.
-Once was in response to newcomer’s ignorant nonsense about how people had “forgotten how this all came about” (ironic in light of the Three Noes and the '48/'67 wars) coupled with his claim ha Israel’s behavior was the cause of violence against in (ironic in light of the fact that there was massive violence against Jews in the region before Israel existed, let alone won the '67 war, that the PLO was founded before the '67 war, that one of the main forces for Arab nationalism pre '48 was an ally of the Nazis and he Nazis had broad Arab support for ethnically cleansing the Middle East during WWII…)
-The second was in response to newcomer’s ignorant nonsense about how occupying soldiers were fair game for “whatever happens to [them]” and that “[civilians] who resist] the occupying force and [get] arrested for whatever [are] still arrested illegally and [they] did nothing wrong”. There, I pointed out the actual facts of the laws of war, and that in fact an occupying power’s soldiers are no fair game and the occupying power can legally take downright draconian measures in order to maintain order and security.
In both cases, it was newcomer who came to a conclusion without basic factual knowledge and ‘reasoned’ himself backwards from his conclusion of ‘Grrr, Israel am bad!’ to finding ways to justify it. In both cases I had actual knowledge of the facts which I used to point out why his rationalizations were erroneous. That you choose to see this as me working backwards from a conclusion is, of course, an interesting mistake to make. Just like naming Ibn an “apologist” because he has a habit of pointing out when people are ignorant of basic facts or are adopting irrational anti-Israel narratives (based on double standards and/or simply being reflexively anti-Israel rather than actually being concerned about the Palestinian people).
Reminds me more than a bit of a few Truthers who’ve come here and made claims like “Everybody at the SDMB is a slavish follower of Bush, because none of you will question the Official Story!”
There it’s more obviously ridiculous because Truthers are in the extreme minority, but the same type of argument made by the knee-jerk anti-Israel crowd here is less obvious (to some) because theirs is the majority position.
