Saturday, December 07, 2013

Scot-Free of truth telling

The context is this article:

"Eid’s desire to become an informant in the late 1990s came naturally. Fluent in Arabic and English, he grew up in Hezbollah-dominated south Lebanon, the youngest of nine siblings in a family of Maronite Christians. He was 13 when the Israelis punched through southern Lebanon in their 1982 campaign to root out Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. When the Israelis later pulled out, parts of the Christian community — which had collaborated with the invaders — came under attack from the Muslim majority. Roland never forgot"
Prof. AbuKhalil's dirty slip is showing ("dirty slip" being a metaphor for a soiled undergarment showing under the ostensibly clean and respectable dress of a sanctimonious woman) when he claims here, with a straight face, that this statement:

 "When the Israelis later pulled out, parts of the Christian community — which had collaborated with the invaders — came under attack from the Muslim majority..." 
is false:
 "Of course, that did not happen and even Israeli collaborators and torturers for Israel were left scot free."
First things first:

What is the meaning of "scot-free"?    "to get away without penalty"

Now that we have ascertained the honest professor's meaning in this declaration on his blog, let's google some information.

Oh, what's that?

 "A Beirut military court Wednesday sentenced another 73 Lebanese to prison terms ranging from three weeks to 15 years for collaborating with Israel during its occupation of southern Lebanon.
The majority of the sentences were for one to two years, and were handed down against people who had served in the Israeli-backed militia, the South Lebanon Army.
The heaviest sentences, of three to 15 years, were reserved for people who had worked directly for Israel or for the SLA's intelligence arm.

Those included in the latter group were also forbidden from entering the former occupied zone for periods equal to the length of their prison terms.

One of those charged, a doctor, had been tried for "treating enemy agents." While found innocent of that, he was nonetheless sentenced to one month in prison and a fine of 700 dollars for having gone to Israel.

The latest verdicts bring to 869 the number of Lebanese sentenced since June 5th, when the court began holding marathon sessions to wade through the 2,200 people charged with collaborating during Israel's 22-year occupation, which ended May 24th - BEIRUT (AFP) "
 And here:

"By the next month (June 2000), 3,000 former SLA members were in the custody of the Lebanese government; by the end of the year, about 90 percent had been tried in military courts. It has been estimated that a third of the SLA members were sentenced to less than a month and another third received one-year sentences. Two members of the SLA accused of torture at Al-Khiam prison received life sentences. The death sentence was recommended for 21 SLA members, but in each case the military reduced the sentence. Certain other individuals were barred from returning to Southern Lebanon for a number of years.[9]"

So, is Prof. AbuKhalil using the term "scot-free" in a way that does not immediately and readily come to mind when regular, English speakers do?

If he changed the meaning of 
"scot-free
that is designated in the dictionary to mean 
without any penalty
 to:  
sentences for one to two years, of three to 15 year, life sentences 
and death sentences (though later commuted), 

should he not have informed his readers* about his creative perversions of universally established lexical meanings?

________________ 

* To AbuKhalil's credit, he does inform his readers when an error is made, either deliberately or unwittingly. But it is a selective kind of self-incrimination. And he blames this on "a certain rashness in my personality." 

So here is the thing: Our perpetually pissed prof is not unaware of his propensity to misreport, or disreport, but he is indifferent to any misreports and misinformation he furnishes about Israel. That means he is fully conscious and conscientious about the necessity for ethical and truthful reporting, except in special cases. Is this not a de-facto admission that when it comes to Israel, AbuKhalil is an unreliable narrator who is not to be trusted on any account? That when it comes to Israel, any lie, distortion, myth and false facts are admissible? And why does Israel get this special treatment of "anything goes" from the Prof? Could it be that feasting on his hatred for the Jewish state is more important than truth? Whatever is the reason, it is not an impulse we would expect from a professor in an academic institute in a democratic country.
__________

Addendum, December 14 2013:  When someone feeds on an exclusive and steady diet of this sort of poisonous food, no wonder they get to a point where they openly hallucinate about murdering Jews (or, as the ever politically-correct prof, would say, Zionists, or Israelis), as in this case:

"It is the sharpest thing I own and cuts through everything like butter and just holding it makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier "

1 Comments:

At 4:24 AM EST, Blogger SnoopyTheGoon said...

Hm... unreliable narrator - a new politically correct euphemism for "liar"? OK, so be it.

 

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