Huffing posts on Israel

Lileks found a moron on Huffington Post (what are the odds of that?) who wrote a particularly stupid anti-Israel post (and what are the odds of that?). I found it via AbbaGav, who can still manage to be funny even during times like these.

The gist of the post is that Israel is all wrong, disproportionate force, yadda yadda, blahblahblah, yeah, sure, tell me something I haven’t heard. But there is this little gem, that Lileks picked up on:

Just a final thought – although I doubt it, is it totally beyond the pale that these two Israeli soliders were instructed to allow themselves to be kidnapped in order to foster the chain of events I have just described?

Well, you’d have to be sixteen different kinds of stupid not to pick up on a thought like that, but you’d have to be about forty different kinds of stupid to actually believe it. Because gee, that’s exactly the orders that the IDF gives its soldiers on a regular basis: “Men, if you’re sneak-attacked by Hezbullah launching mortars at your humvees, if you don’t die, make sure you are kidnapped by the terrorists so we can start a war over you!”

I swear, it’s in the manual. Any one of my friendly neighborhood Israel bloggers could find that for you.

But here’s the thing you have to realize: On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. What that means is that you can pretty much pretend to be anything you want, or, put another way, you don’t really have to have any expertise in the field of which you are currently blogging. Now, before people leap up to point out that I am, after all, a writer and web developer and editor and whathaveyou with zero experience as a war analyst or Israel pundit, let me point out something: I have never pretended otherwise.

For the past several years, I have read thousands of news articles and analyses of the situation in Israel and the Middle East. I read a wide variety of sources, and include blogs on that source list. I give you my opinions of what I read, and you can figure out where I stand quite clearly. I rarely write any kind of analysis, because I am not a policy analyst. I’m just someone who reads a lot, absorbs the information, and gives it back to my readers with a few of my opinions thrown in.

But Russell Shaw, who wrote the idiocy quoted above—this guy’s a tech writer. Period. Look at his CV on his website. Let’s see… tech writing. Tech blogging. Tech writing. More tech writing. ZDNet. Weblogs Inc.

Oh, yeah. This guy is eminently qualified to write about Israel on the Huffington Post.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog—but people can figure out pretty quickly that you’re an idiot.

The bar is set abysmally low at HuffPo.