Getting at the Truth

A friend recently emailed me with a concern about the difficulty of judging the reliability of various news sources that report on casualties and possible war crimes being committed in the war between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. Maybe you'll find what I wrote back to him to be helpful as you try yourself to decide what to believe:

I agree that it's sometimes difficult to know who or what to trust, but there are a couple questions that I think are helpful when I read anything that makes Israel look villainous. The first is the lawyer's question, cui bono? For example, when it's reported that Israel has bombed a hospital or fired on ambulances I have to ask why would they do something like that intentionally?

In war, accidents happen. Sometimes there's bad intelligence. But how does it help Israel to deliberately or indiscriminately attack civilians? How does it benefit them to have the world despise them even more than it already does? The Israelis aren't cold-blooded killers like the Russians in Ukraine, nor are they stupid.

They have nothing to gain from purposely killing civilians so I'm very skeptical of any reports that suggest that they did.

The second question I ask is what's the track record of the source? For instance, a news organization that rushed to report that Israel had bombed the Al Shifa hospital when in fact all the evidence eventually showed that it was an errant Islamist rocket that hit the hospital parking lot has eroded their credibility.

Or consider a newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post that buried on page 20 the news that several hundred thousand people turned out in D.C. on Tuesday to rally in support of Israel appears to be playing favorites and has thus diminished their reliability with me.

I'm also skeptical of almost any news report having to do with casualties. The latest report is that there are 11,000 fatalities among Palestinians, mostly women and children, but this doesn't really tell us much. How many of those 11,000 are Hamas fighters? How many of the "children" are between 12 and 18 and fighting on behalf of Hamas? How many of those who are truly innocent were killed by Hamas either deliberately or accidentally or indirectly because Hamas used them as human shields?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions but in lieu of those answers no one can draw any firm conclusions from the casualty figures.