A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Bradley Burston: How to Tell When a Mideast Expert is Lying

Interesting column by Israeli-American Ha'aretz columnist Bradley Burston: "How to Tell When a Mideast Expert is Lying." (And no, the answer is not, "his lips are moving.")

Of course it's a bit of a loaded argument since he uses official Israeli and close-to-the-PA Palestinian sites to show that they weight their answers according to their own ideological agenda.

My biggest problem: does anyone consider either the Israeli Foreign Ministry or miftah.org "Mideast experts" as opposed to say, sources of regime propaganda? There are dozens of Israeli and Palestinian figures who could genuinely explain things, but they weren't asked: this isn't really about "Mideast Experts" but about polemicists. Of course, the Western media doesn't always distinguish between those groups.

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