Monday, August 07, 2006

Addressing vacuity at Terrorism News

I went through a few URLs to test them awhile ago. The link to the commentary thread at Terrorism News, the one connected to the absurd Clonan piece, still works. All the the earlier posts have been expunged, however.

There's still a ripple from the pebble I tossed, however.
As I said last night (or morning in the UK), if M. White is absolutely correct in every word what then? Then Israel's admission that there were no rockets fired from Qana on the day it was attacked doesn't count? Or the findings of HRW that Israel is being indiscriminate in its targetting [sic] suddenly doesn't count? That would be strecth [sic] for sure.
(DJEB, from the thread remnant)

Yeah, that would be a stretch for sure. Certainly it's stretched far beyond anything that I've suggested.
My argument deserved to be treated according to what it claimed, not according to imagined potential applications.
The appropriate conclusion was that the reasoning employed by Clonan was bad. Keep your article about Israel admitting that no rockets were fired from Qana on the day Qana was bombed. Clonan didn't mention that admission in any case.
Likewise, keep your article about the findings of Human Rights Watch (HRW). HRW isn't necessarily unbiased, but it's fair to report what they claim (and even more important to understand and assess the manner in which HRW reached its conclusion). Clonan didn't mention HRW, either.

If the discussion thread were to continue, DJEB and _H_ would no doubt continue to deny that they change the subject.
To attack Clonan's argument that rockets could not have been fired from the building site is to attack their overall picture of the conflict.
They don't tolerate that perceived challenge gracefully.

Note: The current absence of the story from the Terrorism News site may reflect an implicit realization by _H_ and company that the story wasn't worth hosting. Perhaps my point has been granted in retrospect.

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