Does Anyone Out There Care About Facts?
Let’s face it, I disagree with the analysis that I read in the newspapers at least as often as everyone else. Every now and then, though, I see a bit of analysis that is so outrageous that the author can’t sustain it without falsifying facts. Last week, Marwan Bishara (a regular contributor) published this OpEd piece in the International Herald Tribune essentially calling for additional Palestinian terror attacks unless Israel promptly withdrew from the entire West Bank.
Fine. I’m certain that plenty of folks in the Arab world (and likely Europe) hold this opinion. If the IHT wants to give them a voice, that’s a problem--but at least it’s an opinion placed on the opinion page. What I found shocking, though, was that Bishara justified his position by asserting that Israel has evacuated territory only under fire, in direct contravention of the facts. So I called him on it with a short letter to the editor. To my (pleasant) surprise, the IHT printed my letter this morning.
. . . which, of course, leaves only two questions. First, why would the IHT print an article calling for violence? And second, don’t these folks have fact checkers on board?
If they didn’t care at all, they wouldn’t have run my letter. But Bishara’s nonsense remains in their archives, where it is quotable by those who either ignore facts--or more troubling, don’t know them.
This preponderance of “false facts” is a critical problem for the information age.
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