[Additionally, I’m going to close the thread which has strayed way beyond the accuracy of Goodheart’s piece, which was the point of my original post, and since I don’t have the time to monitor people slinging mud at one another CB]

For the record, BTW, I don’t normally like to get involved in tu quoque arguments about the practices of particular countries, but in a thread about whether country X is disproportionately criticized, such arguments are inevitable.

The Israeli High Court of Justice and the Supreme Court are the same thing (the Supreme Court has three types of jurisdiction, one of which is known as “High Court” jurisdiction). I believe that the 1996 ruling to which Luc refers was not a final decision but instead involved the denial of a preliminary injunction sought by the petitioners. The final judgment in 1999 banned torture, including the practices you cite, in no uncertain terms. I didn’t follow the case prior to 1999 and was not in fact aware of the interim orders. So point to you, but your information is still out of date.

In any event, if I had time, which I don’t, I could provide a “balance sheet” to your other examples (or, for that matter, cite a few matters you left out such as exactly who that “66 year old man in a wheelchair” was and that the single instance in which Israel besieged a church came after it was occupied – yes, that word – by gunmen). I think you’ll find that when Iran was last at war during 1980-88, it used methods that are as brutal as the ones Israel has used in its wars. You might also find that Iran is also using similar counterinsurgent tactics against the Ahwazis right now. That has nothing to do with the nature of Israel or Iran, and everything to do with the nature of war.

If you think that it’s solely Israel “causing the trouble”, that the Israeli leadership can be likened to the South African apartheid regime and that Israel as a whole can be compared to an impending natural disaster which threatens the survival of mankind on this planet, that the Arab states and organizations involved in this conflict are only interested in a peaceful coexistence and justice for the Palestinian people – yes, then you might find the LRB’s coverage of the situation unbiased.

The contents pages are online here
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n01/contents.html
if anyone else wants to check.

Well, I’m not sure I recognize “social science” as real science, but I’m pretty sure you don’t know we’re talking about a “non-probabilistic causal claim”.

“If there’s an entire bloody year where there are only two issues out of twenty-four that have ‘several’ pieces criticizing Israel, then the “almost every issue” claim is pretty surely false”

or just a sneer. If you want to make this claim, then Chris and k. williams were wasting their time after identifying multiple issues without anti-Israel articles. But that’s anyway irrelevant, as I think it’s of interest to people discussing the matter how many such articles appear in the LRB full stop.

“(unless you want to assert that this was a bizarrely unrepresentative year, which as a longtime LRB reader I can tell you that it wasn’t).”

I wasn’t interested in asserting anything, I was just interested in knowing what the LRB has been like. For all I knew last year was a good year and Goodheart stopped reading it carefully in ‘05 because of its monomania. If it averages one/issue, or one/two issues, that’s interesting.

the Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling in the GSS case was precisely the opposite of what you describe

I suspect if you knew about the Supreme Court ruling, you also knew about the High Court ruling it was reversing. So posting a comment suggesting that my report was precisely the opposite of the “truth” when in fact its only error was the word “Supreme” seems a tiny, tiny bit disingenuous to me. Am I correct?

I did not make the assertion you imply regarding Iran. I simply observed that its actions aren`t equivalent to Israel`s in general, and therefore it is hard to be “unbiassed” in giving equal weight to both countries. In order for you to suggest otherwise, you need to provide some kind of balance sheet. You can`t, which is why you have singled out the torture and arbitrary killing and ignored the other issues mentioned.

The reason for western magazines` occasional “bias” on Israel is quite simple – it is an issue which demands attention, especially when western governments are complicit in protecting the state causing the trouble. One could argue that there are a lot of science journals which have a “bias” towards global warming, as well, but that would be because the topic is kind of important and the problem is caused by western governments.

I’m not sure what’s more remarkable about this sentence: the fact that the Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling in the GSS case was precisely the opposite of what you describe, or your implied assertion that the Iranian government has never engaged in torture or arbitrary killing.

Of course it’s probably not intentional, but it does indicate a bias in editing, submissions, or of readership.

Lemuel – the Glass piece seemed to me to imply without quite saying so that Hezbollah was laudable, to minimize the influence of Syria etc. From what I know of the region – I hasten to add that I’m not a region expert – it seemed to me to be untrustworthy at best, and going to some rather spectacular lengths to make a nasty bunch of people sound rather nicer than they are. It left me feeling pretty uncomfortable when I first read it, and it hasn’t improved on the re-reading.

rilkefan – it’s a basic precept of social science and the scientific method more generally that a single disconfirming instance is sufficient to prove a non-probabilistic causal claim to be false. If there’s an entire bloody year where there are only two issues out of twenty-four that have ‘several’ pieces criticizing Israel, then the “almost every issue” claim is pretty surely false (unless you want to assert that this was a bizarrely unrepresentative year, which as a longtime LRB reader I can tell you that it wasn’t).

is anybody here seriously deying that the LRB is a tad biased when it comes to Israel

Criticising the wall, the use of cluster bombs, the “accidental” bombings of bomb shelters with big red crosses on their roofs, the assassinations, the Jewish settlers who shoot holes in Palestinians` water tanks, the forced separation of families and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands – this isn`t biassed. This is called “reporting”. Sure its biassed if they don`t report similar atrocities by Islamic states, but I think you`d find that its been a long time since the Iranians bombed a civilian shelter and killed a couple of hundred people; blew up a 66 year old in a wheelchair; laid siege to a church; or passed a law in the supreme court explicitly allowing their security forces to shake prisoners to death. And this despite having a bunch of anti-Iranian kurdish terrorists being funded by the US sitting just over their borders.

And this is without considering the general point that western newspapers tend to hold so-called western societies (which Israel claims to be) to higher standards.

Is there meant to be some kind of implication in the paragraph from which I drew this? Some kind of genocide-holocaust implication? Because if so it seems pretty rich. So far we have found 4 quotes, 1 dodgy, and a mosque bombing to support the contention that hezbollah are anti-semitic, but this is a far cry from the implications to be drawn from associating hezbollah with Iran`s bomb. I see very little evidence of eliminationist rhetoric (except as referring to a state, not its people); compared to the obvious eliminationist party of the past, the quotes are pretty thin on the ground.

Further, within this one paragraph we are expected to believe that hezbollah is anti-semitic on the basis of what its own people says, ignoring any nuances or their own historical experience of occupation; but on the other hand, we can assume that Iran is trying to build a bomb even though they have consistently denied that they are trying to do this.

I don`t think we should be able to pick and choose whose word is to be taken at face value. My preference would be to judge the Middle-East actors by a combination of their words, their intentions, their actions and their histories. But when abb1 does that some call it trolling.