Palestinians: "No Jews Allowed!"

[Scootaloo]

8. Well, so long as his ID doesn't say "A Palestinian Official" you'll probably be fine

That "A Palestinian Official" guy is kind of a bastard. So is his cousins, "Unnamed Minister" and "Anonymous Reporter." And frankly I don't blame these guys for being bastards, could you imagine going through life with a name like that? Their therapists must be rich beyond all imagining.

Your name helps too, of course. You're "JoDog," not "a reporter," or "Jewish Reporter."

What we have here is total anonymity for everyone involved - for the PA side and for the reporter side. These incidents happened "recently," and they occurred at some event or instance, in a place somewhere. You know, even Pam Gellar manages to utilize link technology, it's not that difficult. Elder of Ziyon sources and cites.

So then we consider the source that is telling us this vague, murky stuff. Khaled Abu Toameh is a journalist I probably wouldn't see eye-to-eye with politically, but he's an actual journalist, with plenty of writing credibility. But he seems to have forgotten how to journalize here. If he's trying for a gonzo "trust me I was there" style... he does a marvelously terrible job of it. But at the end of the article, his name is the only one we have to go on, and we're left having to take his word as truth. Which for a guy who participates in - no kidding here - Hasbara Fellowships," I have to say I'm a little reluctant to do

However, despite being a senior fellow at the Institute (another eye-roller for me) he's not an editor.

So we take a step up the ladder - the Gatestone Institute itself. I love these ultra-right bullshit "think tanks" that our "Liberal Zionist" posters swarm around like fruit flies. If you thumb through their stuff, there's a clear narrative at the GSI to portray Arabs and Muslims as howling devils out for flesh, unreasonable monsters who need to be resisted when not ignored. Unsurprising given its Neocon staffing, and its founder Nina Rosenwald's warm embrace of Geert Wilders and the invasion of Iraq (See, look, links! Names! Sources! Citations! Who-what-when-where-how-why!) When you realize this particular direction of bias in the articles and op-eds furnished by the Gatestone Institute, you begin to understand the murkiness of Mr. Toameh's piece a little better.

The goal is to demonize Palestinians, to portray them as unreasonable, hateful savages. Now with that in mind, let's guess that these events described are seeded in reality - I'm willing to grant Mr. Toameh probably has the journalistic integrity to not just make shit up and report it as fact. The question becomes, how close does the reality mirror what mr. Toameh is reporting? I don't know - and from Toameh's article, I can't find out. However I'm going to take a guess that it probably doesn't mirror it very closely - if it did, perhaps there would be links, citations, names, dates, something that can be backed up and verified and checked. What we're looking at is something that got spun so hard that the fact-finding trail just flew off of it like debris from a tornado.

And what we're left with is a hasbara writer, a senior fellow at an anti-Arab, islamophobic, neocon think-tank, assuring us that, trust him, the Palestinians are basically Nazis.