I don’t make a habit of reading Israeli newspapers, but when someone tweeted this link I had to find out for myself. Pretty hard-hitting.
Eh?
The full text is available for subscribers & registered users.
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In that case its worth mentioning that Haaretz is most definitely on the almost far Left within the spectrum of the Israeli press and that they freely mix editorial opinion and fact in their reporting. This may be fine for you and most readers of Boing Boing but one should always be aware of source bias and double or triple check for accuracy.
Translates to me as: ‘potentially somewhat credible, then’
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Yes full text please
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Personally I don’t try and assign credibility based on whether or not a press source agrees with my politics. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
My real issue with Haaretz is their blending of editorial opinion with factual reporting in such a way that they end up needing to be double checked for lies of omission. Unfortunately The Jerusalem Post have both suffered from this from time to time in their respective political coverage. Israel National News/Arutz Sheava is much better at separating op-ed from reporting, but you might not find them “credible”. I’m leaving out the non-English language Israeli press since I assume most here don’t read modern Hebrew.
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@Kimmo @peregrinus_bis weird… I click it thru a tweet, which is maybe why I was able to read it… here’s a pdf. Sorry for the idiotic format and size, I had to print to pdf from my mobile.
http://www.pdfhost.net/index.php?Action=Download&File=d4be7c275c046dfa758ed4d69538e596
PS @beschizza @codinghorror any chance we can get pdf support in the upload options? It would be helpful if I knew that links to pdfs I upload would live as long as BB.
@Israel_B FWIW Israel needs more Haaretz and JP and less rightwing publications. I feel much of the world reacts to Israel’s actions because right-wingers are noisier than the left, so it’s easy to forget that moderate people live there too. The reader commentary at the bottom of the article (which in this case is nothing but op ed) is depressingly common on anything written by any Israeli who dares remind the populace that it’s people who are dying, not just a war of ideologies.
Yes, but a clock that is set to the wrong time is never right.
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In fact there is a wide spectrum of press but in Hebrew which makes it unaccessible to most Westerners.
This is also a side effect of the fact that the English language press in and outside of Israel will often do lead articles which partially translate or quote out of context some of the far right Israeli press because this will lead to more article views.
OTOH the Western press seems to have a huge and almost willful blind spot when it comes to the Arabic press (excepting AlJazeera) in regards to this conflict.
Like I commented to Kimmo above, I try to check context and multiple sources when it comes to these matters.
I bet there is but those of us who want to read it, can’t. Yes, it’s a very small number, but we exist 
This is also a side effect of the fact that the English language press in and outside of Israel will often do lead articles which partially translate or quote out of context some of the far right Israeli press because this will lead to more article views.
I agree entirely with this. Sadly, clickbait still wins over truth. Interestingly the exact same thing happens to Iran… the whole “wipe Israel off the map” bit that was quoted from Ahmadinejad was a total mistranslation that was repeated time after time.
Thanks!
I know it involves effort but you could always search out the names of the sites and do machine translation to at least get an idea of whats going on. Fair warning though, for some on the left and right, some stuff is not going to make sense if it is discussing things from the perspective of Torah law if you aren’t already grounded in that subject. English language click bait sites love to pull those out of context during these times when the subject of the article is talmudic laws of warfare.
Exactly why checking multiple sources is important!
A) Don’t you back your own politics? If not, why even choose that perspective?
B) In this case I’m operating on the assumption of a pervasive right-wing bias throughout Israeli society (using white phosphorus apparently isn’t a war crime; illicit nukes are cool), and contrarians are always more interesting than me-toos.
…And now that I look at the PDF, it assumes more background knowledge than I have. All I can tell is that it’s a fucking mess, and the apparent Israeli stance has pissed me off far more often than not.
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I do stay informed in regards to forming political opinion but not based upon choosing only sources which are aligned with my existing opinions. Sometimes sources I strongly disagree with end up educating me on some point that I was uninformed about and that can get me to adjust my opinions.
My own politics range all across the spectrum depending on the topic.
Really bad assumption if you will pardon me saying so. My former rabbi an Israeli, put it like this “the land of Israel wasn’t blessed with natural resources but was blessed with an excess of political opinion instead.” Whether you look at the Left, Center or Right you find a whole range of opinions, disagreements and doctrines. The Israeli Left ranges from secular to religious, from one state to self hate and even on the far right you will find religious opposition to the State itself (hard to explain to a non Jew who isn’t familiar with our theologies). There are peaceniks across the spectrum as well as hawks. Same goes for the 20% of population who are Arab Israeli citizens.
Honestly it takes lots of time and effort to understand the history and the current situation. If something pisses you off but you don’t have the background knowledge, what is it that really angers you?
I’m angry that Israel are shelling, bombing and killing women, children and other innocents. I’m angry that Hamas push those people into danger by launching rocket/missile strikes on Israel. I’m angry that Israel’s actions are basically futile, but make headline news. I’m angry that Palestinian innocents are in harm’s way.
It’s pretty simple. Don’t need much background.
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John Snow is pretty objective
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And is right in there, in Gaza, reporting:
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We obviously have vastly different interpretations of the word “objective” since as I understand it that involves actually listening to what the interviewee is saying or at least pretending to.
I kind of roll my eyes at the fact that this sort of thing doesn’t go without saying; it’s pretty obviously a major fault of the human condition that our default is to defend an already-occupied position in preference to seeking eminently defensible positions.
I was lucky not be dealt an arseload of crap to unlearn; I haven’t been forced to change my position a great deal in response to further evidence, relative to many who’ve succeeded in attaining some grasp on reality.
I remember when I was eight, I told my dad I knew everything. For quite a while that was an embarrassing memory of course, but in retrospect I’m pretty sure what I was trying to say was this: thanks for answering my questions well, so that now my bullshit filter is up and running. Thanks for establishing a scientific style in my philosophy. When I come across an interesting bit of valid information, it tends to slot into place and go click with all these other bits of information. And although I may not know bullshit when I hear it for sure, it often leaves me feeling at least a bit uneasy… and if I think about it for a while, I see what’s wrong with it, and others tend to agree.
What I’m taking an inordinate amount of time to get around to saying, is that Lefties (for want of an even vaguer and more contentious term) are running later software; the conservatives, by definition, are clueless in the face of accelerating change. On the one hand, you have similar principles espoused to that of many schools of philosophical wisdom; on the other you have a pile of think-tank sourced individualist propaganda designed to divide and conquer and propagate dominion.
You have to squint pretty hard to say ice cream is equivalent to shit, and that’s just not a point of view I’m interested in. It only increases my free radical count.
There are peaceniks across the spectrum as well as hawks.
Divvying up reality into discrete concepts is inherently problematic, so I applaud this take on things from another angle. Whatever vehemence I direct towards the ill-defined Right, goes double for the hawks, and squared too because the bastards are in focus now.
(I’m taking your word for whatever these supposedly generic terms mean in Israel; I’m having a hard time picturing a Palestine-bashing Leftie with a nuclear dick.)
If something pisses you off but you don’t have the background knowledge, what is it that really angers you?
Anyone who doesn’t follow the Golden Rule.
How much knowledge is enough to make a judgement?
Perfect knowledge would be enough to make any behaviour understandable, no? Where’s free will hiding, anyway? Everybody does things because something else happened. If you can ever make a decision, that’s a miracle - you just transcended causality. Pff. So you can’t blame anybody for anything.
But that’s not how we roll; disapproval is the disincentive for breaking the Golden Rule, that’s how it tries to work. And of course, we operate on less than perfect knowledge, so we piff blame around. Especially when you get a group of folks talking and behaving in certain ways in a certain place since 1948.
Here’s how good Jon Snow is.
Not fucking very.
