If we are to aspire to a serious dialogue about Operation Cast Lead or recent developments in the Middle East, we must, as a campus, commit. A recent article in Student Life, “Rockets in Gaza fuel discussions” (Feb. 2, 2009) does not show such a commitment. Patting ourselves on the back for “discussing” an issue which too many people discuss without any credibility, objectivity or necessary knowledge is, at best, pathetic.

I am the CAMERA campus fellow for Wash. U. While our initials are simple, our real name is quite a mouthful: the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. While my colleague at UC Berkeley is dealing with blatant anti-Semitic remarks and an effort to remove a Jewish board-member for their support of Israel, I spend most of my days lazily contributing to the national effort to combat misinformation.

Yes, I am lazy. That much is true. But I do not neglect the duties of my fellowship for naught. These “student groups [trying] to see through the sparks,” as the article’s subhead stated, are sure going about it in an interesting way. Amnesty International, one of the three groups participating in this “renewed” campus dialogue, is only slightly more credible when discussing Israel than is the United Nations, the organization which classified Zionism as racism for nearly 20 years. A simple search on the CAMERA Web site for Amnesty International yields more than 10 pages worth of results, the most prominent of which remind the reader of AI’s wonderful, helpful role at the Durban World Conference Against Racism – an Israel-bashing party.

But I digress. If we are truly trying to “see through the sparks,” should we not show such a commitment by checking our facts? The article claims a few weeks of rocket attacks, neglecting the thousands that have rained down on Israel since the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and which were the original impetus for the operation. The article then cites the same casualty statistics floating around the mainstream media (MSM). But unlike the MSM, which at least pretends to differentiate between terrorists and civilians, the article makes no such distinction. The article doesn’t even mention the operation by name.

Furthermore, the article pushes an amateur agenda within Robert Fares’ quote, where he repeats the questionable casualty count. Nowhere could I find a real discussion of anything. There was no mention by the author or Fares of the disproportionate representation of males age 15 to 17 in the “civilian” casualty count. No mention of the close to 80 percent support the operation enjoyed in Israel. Why? Because there is no real dialogue about these issues on campus. There are only ideologues on both sides, pitching their “solutions” to the wrong conflict. Until people make a real effort to educate themselves about the real conflict, I’ll go back to sitting on my couch wishing I had something substantive to do.