Talk:Sabra and Shatila massacre/Archive 3

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Contents

Section on Media Coverage, starting again

Again, my questions:

1) Is it NPOV to assign the job of analyzing media coverage of the massacre to Bernard Lewis?

2) If the statement is true, then why is our presentation of the massacre so categorically at odds with that of "most reports"?

3) If the statement is false (as I think it demonstrably is), then why are we quoting it as established fact?

4) Why are we quoting one scholar-pundit's opinion about a controversial matter as established fact in the first place?

The article on Hamas provides an illuminating contrast. There, the consensus of "most reports" forms the basis and starting-point for the lede. That indeed seems to be the usual procedure for Wikipedia articles on contentious issues. In this article, however, the consensus of "most reports" is corrected for by Wikipedians, and then handed over to a single partisan pundit for analysis and rebuttal. What gives?--G-Dett 02:59, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, I think it is clear that in "Most reports focused on the Israelis and usually failed to mention the Lebanese Maronite militias" while the first statement is arguably and probably true (Israel has always gotten more coverage than Maronite militias) , the second statement is unsupported OR, quite unlikely - use common sense - (and it is contrary to my own recollections FWIW) - & almost certainly false. So at least, it should be removed. Probably Chomsky or Said might be used to balance Lewis on these issues.4.234.15.135 04:35, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

If one wants a lefty for balance, Robert Fisk would be better than Chomsky or Said on this issue; although Chomsky did write a serious and influential critique of the Kahan report, Fisk's Pity the Nation is perhaps the canonical account of the Lebanese civil war. But we hardly need another analyst, lefty or not, to refute Lewis on this point. The New York Times coverage from then-Beirut correspondent Thomas Friedman (one of the first and most influential Western journalists in the camps after the massacres, whose work set the tone and framing for mainstream coverage of the event) would suffice to make nonsense of Lewis' crazy claim, which we have assimilitated and presented as neutral fact.
In fact, what Friedman's reports and "most reports" subsequent to his did was simply describe the event: the Israeli sealing off of the camps; the 2-day slaughter conducted day and night by Phalangists, with illumination provided by Israeli soldiers sending flares into the sky; the communications throughout between Israeli commanders and Phalangist soldiers; the grim aftermath. The vast majority of sources since 1982, both journalistic and scholarly, have accepted some degree of Israeli complicity in the Phalangist massacre while debating the meaning of the two most cited phrases from the Kahan report: "indirect responsibility" and "personal responsibility." Our article, on the other hand, avoids and/or tries to correct for the bias that Wikipedians perceive in this overwhelming scholarly and journalistic consensus, and then creates a special section for the partisan pundit (and scholar, but not of Lebanon much less of the Palestinian refugee diaspora) Bernard Lewis to misrepresent and dismiss the very sources our article has theretofore studiously avoided. This tendentious analysis constitutes the whole of our section on "media coverage"; there are not only no opposing voices, but also no other voices period, and not a single expert on the Lebanese civil war or the Palestinian refugee camps is cited. A pretty grave betrayal of WP:NPOV, all told.--G-Dett 15:31, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Does Lewis actually make this claim - that most reports didn't even mention the Maronites? (I assume this is what you are calling the crazy claim). It is not clear from what we have that he did, which is why I called it OR. If he actually did (I hope not) it is a fringe view, an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, so still shouldn't be here. I agree that arguments against Israeli complicity (or worse) are rather tenuous (and not widely accepted, not in Israel in particular) - they would have had to be blind and deaf to not see what was happening under their noses. 4.234.15.45 17:12, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
It's a good question. The possibility that it was just out-and-out OR, not to mention wildly inaccurate OR, hadn't occurred to me; it seemed too outlandish even for a page as plagued by bias as this one. If it is OR, that will certainly make getting rid of it easier. Bernard Lewis is a serious scholar (though an obviously biased pundit); what I assumed happened was that he made a rhetorical statement (something along the lines of "all you hear about is Israel, nobody's talking about the Phalangists") from which we dropped both the rhetorical context and the quotation marks in order to present as fact. Does anybody know where the sentence in question came from? I'll put in a fact tag for now, but some serious work is needed here.--G-Dett 18:50, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Recent changes

While going through Recent Changes, I noted an anon had changed a lot of content on this page. While some of it appears to be vandalism, I believe part of it may be of some use to the article.

  • The IP's last edit gave this version - this
  • The original version was - this.

I would like to request all editors looking over this page to have a look at these edits and see if theres anything worth keeping from there.

regards,xC | ☎ 18:48, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Numbers

An anon made some additions to the numbers section a while ago, which I don't think were entirely helpful. Benwing and I did some work there a couple years ago - see section 29: claims of 2750 deaths, and it had survived basically unchanged for 2 years. The problem is that the Lebanese account is not reliable enough to be put in the introduction, which should only have solid info. As I explained, in talk section 5 above, the problem is that the number of women and children - 35 is impossibly low, as Al-hout's book has several photographs of the victims that show more than that number of women and children. I think Schiff and Ya'ari may cast some doubt on this estimate for the same reason. The list of nations of origin has no cite, and conflicts with the Lebanese vs. Palestinian estimate given below which I got from Helena Cobban's PLO book, following Thomas Friedman (She had lived and worked in the camps until a couple months before the massacre, so I think her & Friedman's judgment is weighty.) It strikes me as very unlikely, unlike the reasonable Palestinian + Lebanese estimate for a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, from which PLO fighters had departed. So I removed it. I left the stuff about the civil war in, and moved the 35 number to the appropriate place, although it perhaps could use more explanation.John Z 09:48, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

"No idea of what was going on inside"

In the intro there is the sentence "[...] although the Israeli military personnel who were there stated that they had no idea of what was going on inside". The sentence stroke me as I was reading the article after listening to a radio transmission which indicated into a different direction (German radio SWF2). Of course, the latter might be biased; I can't say. Also, the article contradicts itself by saying later "However, the Commission recorded that Israeli military personnel were aware that a massacre was in progress without taking serious steps to stop it". This is part of the controversy section, but probably cannot be considered a lie, right? Therefore, I think the sentence should be dropped unless there are clarifying sources for this. (Actually – but this is my personal opinion – this sentence should be dropped unless there is an "objective" source: Simply having somebody from the personnel stating he/she/they had no idea constitutes a possibly biased view and therefore should go into the section on controversy.) -- hbf 19:27, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

So any objections to changing the affected sentence to "The camps were externally surrounded by Israeli Defence Forces throughout the incident; the degree to which the Israeli military was involved in the incident is a matter of controversy (see below)."? -- hbf 11:37, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
No objections. That edit will be an obvious improvement.--G-Dett 16:37, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

"Paraphrase" of Lewis

Any editor who paraphrases "almost failed to mention" as "usually failed to mention" should probably be kept on a short leash when it comes to source materials. Even if the difference between the two were only one of degree, this would be unacceptable. All the worse when the difference is categorical. To say that reports "usually failed to mention" the Maronite militias is an empirical observation, a statement of fact – which just happens to be completely false. (The fact that it's utterly false isn't really Lewis' fault, since he never said it.) To say that reports "almost failed to mention" the militias, on the other hand, is a rhetorical statement; Lewis believes that reports were too hard on the Israelis. Lewis can take solace in this article, which tries to rectify things by throwing NPOV (as well as the overwhelming majority of RS's) to the dogs, sticking hard and fast to the official Israeli version of events.

The larger question here, and I've raised it before but received no answer, is why this article gives Lewis such a platform to kvetch about how the world sees the Sabra and Shatila massacres and how unfair it all is. Lewis is a renowned though controversial historian of the Middle East. But he has no expertise about Lebanon or the Lebanese civil war, and certainly not about the Palestinian diaspora. Nor is he a renowned scholar and analyst of the media and its institutional biases, the way someone like Noam Chomsky is. He's here in this article partly in the capacity of political partisan, and partly in the capacity of a scholar of antisemitism (Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice is the book we're quoting from). But this isn't an article about antisemitism. It's an article about an infamous massacre of Palestinians. Let's use better sources. A word or two from Lewis-as-pundit may be appropriate, but the present interpolation of him is in gross violation of WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE.--G-Dett 16:43, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

It's worth pointing out that these are passing remarks from Lewis on Sabra and Shatila; the quoted material is all there is on the massacres in the entire book. Well, almost all: the editor who inserted it managed to leave out the following:

What is significant about the media response to the events in Sabra and Shatila is not that they received so much attention; that is normal where Israelis or other Jews are involved. Nor is it particularly significant that this attention seems so disproportionate when compared with the treatment of other crimes in other places. The Israelis – rightly – are judged by standards different from those applied to authoritarian governments, which in any case do not permit foreign news services to monitor their activities. The condemnation of the Israeli role was well founded, and many Israelis, and finally the Israeli authorities, joined in it.

So the opening paragraph of the section covering the "Controversy regarding Israel's role in the massacre", is given over to passing comments in a book about antisemitism by Bernard Lewis, a pro-Israel partisan with no special expertise or research interest in Lebanon, the Lebanese civil war, or the Sabra-Shatila massacres. Excised from the quoted material, however, are the portions where Lewis acknowledges that "condemnation of the Israeli role was well founded." Instead the POV-pushing Wikipedian focuses on Lewis' literary-critical take on the "language" of some reports ("the frequent usage of language evocative of the Nazis," etc.). In lieu of actually paraphrasing Lewis' argument and attributing it to him (i.e., something along the lines of Middle East historian Bernard Lewis contends that press coverage of the massacres emphasized the Israeli role and downplayed the Lebanese Christian role), the Wikipedian invents a ludicrous and demonstrably false argument (that "most reports...usually failed to mention the Lebanese Maronite militias"), presents it as uncontroversial fact in the lead-up to the Lewis quote, and then when called on it says it's a "paraphrase" of Lewis. This sort of thing inspires neither confidence nor trust. I wish it were an anomaly – but sadly, looking at the rest of the article, that appears not to be the case.--G-Dett 19:16, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia editor


I totally agree. The extensive quoting in the "Controversy regarding Israel's role in the massacre" completely unbalances the article, and is clear POV. Also, the introductory paragraph is simply contradicting the earlier part of the article, and is also wrong, stating the highest estimate is 2000, and also stating that this is a "Palestinian" estimate. This is frankly idiotic. I would not consider myself qualified to edit this article, as i am fairly partisan on this issue, but I would like to encourage anybody to clean up this section. -anon —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.118.113.164 (talk) 20:45, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Lack of bias in "events" section

The "Events" section states several controversial views of what happened as fact, which make it seem like Israel was aware of the massacre the whole time, but ignored it. I've flagged it as un-neutral.


Israeli troops WERE aware of the massacre the whole time. That is indisputable truth, as shown by sources. -Anon —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.118.113.164 (talk) 20:37, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Said Hammami

I would appreciate it if anyone who thinks his assassination is relevant to this topic or the 1982 war would explain here or on my talk page, though I may not be able to reply for some time as I will be travelling. There are deficiencies in Wikipedia on the runup and causes of this war, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. I changed the earlier wording because the Argov assassination was not precisely or wholly the "casus belli" for the war. Israel took it as an occasion for bombing PLO positions in Lebanon (and knew from the beginning that it was Abu Nidal), and the local PLO leaders (in Arafat's absence) took that as an occasion for the first rocket strikes in nearly a year, which were the immediate prequel to the invasion.John Z 22:03, 28 September 2007 (UTC)