Archive (including paywall bypass): https://archive.is/KeCzT
The Israeli Defense Forces on Sunday accused a prominent journalist– who in recent months has reported regularly for Al Jazeera from Gaza – of moonlighting as a senior Hamas commander.
The Israeli Defense Forces have published photos they say were discovered on a laptop in Gaza that show Al Jazeera journalist Mohamed Washah engaged in Hamas terrorist activities.
Neither Al Jazeera nor the Qatari government have responded to the Sun’s request for comment.
The claims are simple:
1 - Hamas has not released any statistics about the total number of Hamas fighters killed.
2 - Hamas has acknowledged a small number of specific, individual deaths
Claiming that either of these statements are false - now that you have been presented with evidence of both - is precisely sealioning. Claiming that someone is being dishonest - in presenting evidence that does not fit a pedantic standard beyond the scope of the discussion - is precisely sealioning. For example, suggesting a source that reads “Abu Anas al-Ghandour and three others had been killed” as being semantically incompatible with “number of its dead soldiers is like three” is sealioning.
If you would like to present any evidence of counterclaims, that is perfectly fine. Perhaps Hamas has published losses of soldiers in the time since these articles have been published. I and the rest of the world would certainly like to see those numbers.
However, continued requests for further evidence or insistence that the evidence does not say what it says, or pedantic claims that deliberately misinterpret a statement will only be evidence of bad faith.
while i tend to be on your side about this, i hate that link you gave for sealioning. it smacks of twitterati circlejerking. it’s the kind of thing that shocked me when i joined mastodon: being called a “reply guy” for participating in a public conversation. casting doubt on unevidenced claims is an essential part of intellectually honest conversation.
The original source is a comic that demonstrates it fairly well, although the current definition is a bit broader. I look out for:
i have often been accused of trolling, and while i do like to argue with strangers on the internet, i don’t really think of myself as a troll (most of the time). i think i’m just intellectually honest, and demand others i share space with practice intellectual honesty.
i will say that i have found that just avoiding interrogatives is a great help in my “crusade”. i will do everything i can to avoid answering direct questions as they are ALL TOO OFTEN bad faith, and i extend the same courtesy, almost never asking anything of my interlocutors.
but i feel that the entire topic of trolling is overblown and possible entirely fictional. it seems like a thought-terminating cliche or an ad hominem meant to not-deal with the substance of what is being discussed and attack the speaker.
i caught a 2-day ban for discussing whether people are owed genuine discussion about bad ideas under the accusation that i was trolling.
i’m starting to ramble and have already resisted the temptation to start over twice, so i’ll leave this just reiterating that