(no subject)
Well, okay. Here's the first piece of writing I've produced in all of this that wasn't just a paragraph, so I'll crosspost it here. Originally posted on tumblr, lord help me.
Some thoughts before logging off for Shabbat¹ - obviously the unpacking and repercussions of the "Israel Totes Blew Up A Hospital" fabrication will last for a long time. One thing I can only hope for is international news outlets gradually, gradually, coming to their senses about the fact that several times a day they print as fact casualty numbers that come from a genocidal terrorist organization that very blatantly makes those numbers up out of their ass.
I'm not surprised that so far no one seems to be making any reporting changes based on the collapse of the hospital story; these things take time on a cognitive level. Right now the international press is at a moment I can only compare to when people suddenly realize they have had an abusive con artist close to them for a long time, and it doesn't happen all at once, it goes like:
Wait, if he was lying about being a secret Rockefeller heir and lying about where he was going every day...
What if he was also lying about having to go on all those secret missions for the CIA...
....because he was also lying about being in the CIA...
.......Wait, does this mean he could have been lying about which celebrities he saw at the secret CIA pedophilia parties in the basement of the pizza restaurant....
Wait..... wait.......... the only people who said there ever was a secret pedophilia party in the basement of the pizza restaurant were him and that other twitter account that misspells all the same things as him........
It's a humiliating personal journey to go on. The world doesn't have time for every reporter and editor who's been taken in to Kubler-Ross it, though. They belong to larger organizations, and if they don't have the ethical rigor to remove themselves from the Israel-Palestine beat then those organizations should do it for them, as they would for any other news professional who was obviously compromised by an unreliable source.
They won't, obviously, but they should.
Something I do think is happening, though, is that a great many people who are not in the news or commentary profession are quietly going through their own private version of this process. We're not hearing from them yet, because it's happening silently and privately as the early stages of such realizations often do. What they will choose to do next remains to be seen.
¹ [I realize I'm not doing great at that. -ed.]