I keep saying The Weekly Standard needs a blog. And here’s why. This observation comes from the latest WS “Scrapbook,” under the heading “Massacre? What Massacre?” (subscriber’s only):

The Scrapbook became rather suspicious when it heard Hasan Abdel Rahman, the chief Palestinian representative to the United States, tell Fox’s ‘Hannity Colmes’ last week that, with regard to the fighting in Jenin, ‘I never said it was a massacre.’

As everyone by now probably knows, the initial Palestinian claims of thousands of innocents missing and killed at Israeli hands turned out to be 56 Palestinian deaths, mainly combatants, and 23 Israeli soldiers. And we had the distinct feeling that Rahman’s earlier demands for Ariel Sharon to be tried for war crimes and broad condemnations of Israel just had to have included the word ‘massacre.’

To be fair, Rahman did tell the media that he would not ‘get involved in semantics, whether that is a massacre or not because I don’t know what makes a massacre.’ Too bad he didn’t heed his own advice on April 14, when he did in fact tell CNN that ‘I still believe that there is — was — a massacre committed by Israel in Jenin and in other areas, and that those practices of Israel are continuing.’

To paraphrase the old saying: Better to keep your mouth shut and have people suspect you of lying than open it and remove all doubt.

Now, here’re my observations — from May 7:

By the Palestinian Authority’s own reckoning, 56 Palestinians died in the Israeli military’s Jenin incursion — the overwhelming majority of whom were confirmed combatants. 33 Israeli soldiers died.

Still, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, shrieking and insistent dissemblage as a political tool has become so inveterate in the Arab world (precisely because it has proven so successful as a means of galvanizing “international opinion”) that Arab spokesmen rarely bother even disguising it anymore.

The one concession Arab spokespeople have made to the ‘massacre’ narrative they peddled in the immediate aftermath of the Jenin incursion is to alter their characterization of Israeli military action a bit, replacing “massacre” with “atrocities” — while denying they’d ever leveled charges of a massacre (liars!) in the first place (as Palestinian mouthpiece Hasan Rahman did last evening during his predictable FOXNews filibuster). [emphasis added]

So you see, The Weekly Standard needs a blog. And they need to hire me to run the freakin’ thing. I’d agree to watch my mouth a bit; and they’d get their observations out in real time.

Fred? Bill? You listening…?

…Hello…?

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