19 thoughts on “Israel’s Drone Crash and the Perils of Reporting on a National Security State – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. Well written and hopefully puts to rest this episode.

    You did a great job, consistently and persistently calling the IDF spokespeople’s bluff about Gazans being the attackers from across the Egypt border, thus exposing the pursuing IDF attack on Gazan targets as cheap diversion tactics. You win some, you lose some.

    Better present the info you have – and let us employ our own intelligence and knowledge to evaluate its probable accuracy – than stay mum and keep us in the dark.

      1. I think that many people understand what you do. Don’t be mislead by the know-it-all commenters who turn up whenever you stick out your neck. You are always honest about how much you know for sure and how much you surmise. As Yankel said, this makes it possible for your readers to use their own intelligence in making up their minds.

      2. In the absence of your kind of reporting, we would have only official and mainstream media stories and would never have a chance of knowing what’s going on. Keep trying to see things straight.

  2. Richard, as an Israeli , I would like to express my support and thanks for your utmost important job . The ultra militaristic society in which I live has turned me a pacifist.I share with you the same values ,fears and goals.

    Yishar Koach !!!

  3. If a Hezbollah drone entered Israel ‘under the radar’, how come know body in all of Israel looked up and saw it flying over the border or over the sea?

    Eyewitnesses near the base saw it just before it crashed so I presume the crash occurred during daylight.

  4. keep up the good work, richard. and a thick skin, and all that. your point about ‘certainty’, an unattainable mark set by many detractors, is spot on. if ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’ were the evidentiary standard, no reporting would ever be done on any national security matter. and only the irredeemably credulous would take the word of an IDF spokesperson as disproving your thesis.

  5. The IDF and Israeli government propaganda sites such as Debkafile create a continuous din of disinformation and misinformation about every single act the Israeli government undertake. Then they pick which of the stories or level of lies they can get away with, and for how long, and run with that

    Thanks for trying so hard to pierce their veils and get to the realities and truths behind their schemes

    Keep up the great work and give them hell

  6. “I’ll accept the brickbats of Dimi Reider, Dapna Baram and others for the sake of the greater good of exposing the dangers a rampant Israel may pose to the region and the world.”

    The problem you have is that a true assertion of fact that cannot be substantiated is indistinguishable from a fabrication. That is also the IDF/IAF’s problem.

    Your loved ones and blind/brain-ded admirers will believe anything you write just because you write it; the rest of the world is justifiably skeptical. Unless you are writing just for your family, it is this rest of the world that gives your blog any purpose or validity, and it has a lot of both.

    It seems that you are arguing that the dictum “credibility is everything” is less true for you than it is for Walter Conkrite. (Perhaps, Dan Rather would be a more pertinent MSM point of reference.)

    I would agree that bloggers’ credibility is not an issue only with respect to the entire blogosphere, which is huge and basically too stupid to assess credibility. If 50 readers quit coming here, 50 more will replace them in a week. Blog-readers are fungible, which is why you can blow them off like you do. But with respect to any one individual reader, your credibility is the only thing that keeps us coming back.

    It is the same with the IDF — the vapid Zionists will believe anything the IDF says for no other reason that that they say it. A lot of what the IDF says is true, and not everything they do is evil, but their credibility-gap undermines all of their goals to the point that the world not only ceases to believe the IDF, it despises them. Nixon had a similar problem.

    In the present case, neither the Hezbollah hypothesis nor the wing-fell-off hypothesis make a lot of sense, and neither are supported by any compelling “facts,” which is why this topic has generated so much heat.

    All we know as of the moment is: there is some video of what appears to be a wing in a bunch of orange trees. We don’t know where it came from, what aircraft it came from, what type of aircraft it came from, how it got there, or what it means. There are no images of any aircraft or crash-sites to support the IDF. But neither are there any images of any explosions, or photos of damage from any explosions to support the booby-trap hypothesis.

    The argument from ignorance to explain the lack of evidence supporting the booby-trap hypothesis runs something like this: the crashed drone cannot be photographed because it crashed into a missile base that is top secret; therefore the absence of photographic evidence proves that it crashed into the missile base because if it had crashed anywhere else it would have been photographed.

    But having had the courage to stick your neck out on this, should your Hezbollah story turn out to be true, you will become a super-star in the blogosphere and MSM overnight. And well deserved.

  7. Could Iran and/or Hezbollah and/or some similar party have taken control of an Israeli drone via electronic warfare and sent it (back?) to this secret base?

  8. With all the disinformation promulgated by the corporate media (Saddam or Iran’s WMD; Soviet Migs “on the way” to Nicaragua [now there’s a blast from the past!]), it is far better to take the risk and report the story even if it turns out to be wrong. No one is perfect; I for one respect your efforts and appreciate the accurate, indeed startling info you provide each and every day. Keep it up!

  9. When I first read your original report on this I thought “there’s no way that drone is from South Lebanon”.

    However, I may have been right and I may have been wrong. I was only working on the facts you made available. And that’s the point, isn’t it, I was working on the facts that you had made available.

    All to say that yes, you’re doing a great job and a lot of people understand your intent and your accomplishments. If you provoke others to divulge more information, or if you provoke your readers to reconsider, then you’re doing well.

    In this case, you seem to have done both. Hang in there.

  10. Richard, In case you haven’t noticed, the guys in Tzinor Lila are making fun of you. They don’t take you seriously anyway.

    1. That’s not exactly what they said, now was it? They said that many of my stories have been proven correct and some not. And frankly, I don’t care much how they present me as long as they quote me and allow me to speak on my own behalf. When you get taken seriously enough to be on Tzinor Layla let us know.

  11. First clue was when I linked your article and I got e-ssaulted by an official (IDF) Hasbara commando to a degree I had not yet met lol

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