When Even the Retraction is Dodgy 2

The Australian's Foreign Editor, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan has been forced to resile yet again from some of the more egregious porkies in his Paean of Praise to Israel, Deep inside the plucky country (19/1/08). [See my post, Gullible's Travels]

You will remember how Sheridan was forced to climb down from his figure of 7,500 Israeli civilian victims of Palestinian "terrorists" from 2000-2005 in Israel proper (19/1/08) to 1100 (2/2/08), which, as I demonstrated in When Even the Retraction is Dodgy was itself dodgy, because it included all Israeli fatalities, civilian and military, in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Well, the following was appended to his latest (9/2/08) opinion piece (Obama vote touches on race, undeniably) in The Australian: "Several readers have drawn attention to an ambiguity in my...article, Deep inside the plucky country (January 19). Israel has indeed been subject to thousands of rocket attacks over the decades. But since its withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, the rocket and mortar attacks have numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands as I reported."

This, second, retraction is as dodgy as the first. First, there's his attempt to pass off an assertion ("Where [Israel had] done that [ie go back to its 1967 border] in southern Lebanon...the result has been disastrous. It was subject to thousands of rocket attacks from southern Lebanon until it went to war with Hezbollah...") as "an ambiguity." Second, there's his attempt to pad out "rocket attacks" with "rocket and mortar attacks."

More importantly, however, his revised figure of "hundreds" of such attacks since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 is as incorrect as his earlier "thousands."

And here's the proof:

a) According to UN figures cited by Stephen R Shalom of the Faculty of Political Science at William Paterson University in the US, 48 rockets fell on civilian areas of northern Israel in the period from May 2000-July 12 2006. [Lebanon War Question & Answer, 7/8/06 www.wpunj.edu/hmss/polisci/faculty/shalom/shalom/htm] So much for "hundreds." (For the purposes of this post I will not discuss who fired them or the context of same.)

b) Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs' list, Hizbullah attacks along Israel's northern border May 2000-June 2006, offers the following sketchy data (in reverse chronological order): "Katyushas"/"6 Katyushas"/"mortars & Katyushas"/"20 mortars"/"1 anti-tank missile"/"missiles & rockets"/"heavy rocket, mortar fire." No "hundreds" here either.

c) Zionist propaganda website, CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), cites only one instance (9/4/02) of "Katyushas" being fired into northern Israel within this time frame. [Timeline of Hezbollah Violence, 17/7/06, www.camera.org] "Hundreds" would surely have received more prominence than this.

d) Daniel Sobelman's August 2004 Strategic Assessment for Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Four Years after the Withdrawal from Lebanon: Refining the Rules of the Game, analyses cross-border conflict from 2000-2004. Sobelman finds that "In the second half of the period since the withdrawal, Hizbollah emerges as an organization wishing to preserve the status quo in the north...After the IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Hizbollah turned the Shab'a Farms area on the slopes of Mt Dov into its major, nearly exclusive theater of operations against Israel...Despite the ongoing demand that Israel withdraw from the disputed area in Mount Dov, Hizbollah today is to a large extent an organization that preserves the existing rules of the game on the Israeli-Lebanese border, which are regulated primarily by the principle of 'measure for measure'...A senior official in the organization, Nawaf Musawi, in charge of external relations, even went so far as to define the organization's relations with Israel as a 'cold war'...Since January 2003 the north has enjoyed the longest periods of quiet that the region has known in several decades, and particularly since the withdrawal." No joy for Sheridan here.

Whether he is plucking "thousands" or "hundreds" out of the air, Sheridan's pathetic attempt to paint the period 2000-2006 on Israel's northern border as some kind of protracted Khe Sanh redux places him on the same level as the most artless of pro-Israel cyber-warriors.