Palestinians agree with Israel shock horror!

national | miscellaneous | news report Saturday May 04, 2002 05:48 by Mark Steyn - Columnist

I USUALLY save the I-told-you-so gloat for the year-in-review column, but I can't resist noting that Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation has now come round to my way of thinking on the Jenin refugee camp. "There was no massacre," I wrote here two weeks ago, when Robert Fisk and Fleet Street's other sob-sisters were running around weepin' and a-wailin' about mass graves and war crimes. The Israeli government's latest figures for Jenin put the death toll of Palestinians at 52. The Palestinians themselves put the death toll at - wait for it - 56.

That's right: 56. There are no missing zeroes on the end. The only missing zeroes are those gullible British hacks who swallowed that line about hundreds of dead civilians but have fallen mysteriously silent as the figures have been revised downward. The total of 56 dead was announced by Kadoura Moussa, the Fatah director for the northern West Bank, after four Palestinian Authority investigators reported their findings to him at his office in the camp. Is a discrepancy of four enough to qualify as a "massacre"? Twenty three Israeli soldiers died at Jenin, so the comparative death tolls sound less like a "massacre" and more like a - what's the word? - "battle".

So the Israelis and Palestinians are more or less agreed. The only guys who don't agree are excitable chaps such as Gerald Kaufman, who's demanding sanctions against Israel, and my colleague Armando Iannucci, whose droll killer-Jews-on-the-rampage column appeared on this page yesterday. Considering that the Telegraph Group is routinely dismissed by Richard Ingrams and co as a Zionist lackey, I do think we could do more to live up to the name.

In contrast, the other day the Independent's Phil Reeves criticised "the Palestinian leadership, who, instantly and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which as many as 500 died. Palestinian human rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories." They obviously weren't quite so clearly untrue a week and a half earlier, when a presumably entirely different Phil Reeves wrote about Israeli "atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians".

So, 52-56. Hmm. Where have I heard those numbers before? Why, in another famous media illusion - "the brutal Afghan winter", under whose gruelling conditions Kabul this January had to cope with average daytime temperatures of 52-56! It would, however, be unfair to suggest that in every ludicrous Fleet Street fiction the correct figure will prove to be 52-56. For example, when the Yanks were torturing al-Qa'eda suspects in "the searing heat of Guantanamo", the overnight low was 66 and breezy, or about the same as a late January day in Kandahar in the brutal Afghan winter, when the warlords and their catamites stroll arm in arm down the sun-dappled streets.

None the less, in recognition of my colleagues' spectacularly inept record since September 11, I am proud to announce the inauguration of the British Press Award For Total Fantasy. Journalists can enter as many of their reports as they wish. Can't decide whether that story based on a Hamas press release is more risible than that dispatch based on the Radio Taliban lunchtime news? Hey, send us both! Winners will receive a grand prize of FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS!!!! However, in keeping with traditional Fleet Street standards of numerical accuracy, when the cheque eventually shows up a month later it'll be for £8.47. The lucky winners will also get a year's subscription to the Independent, which will expire after six weeks. We'll announce the results in mid-September - the first anniversary of early sightings of "the fast-approaching brutal Afghan winter". Who knows? It may even have shown up by then.

But that's not the only columnar innovation this week. I gather Mr Kaufman is upset that Kofi Annan has called off his UN investigation into Jenin. The reason, according to taste, is either that the Israelis are being unco-operative or that there wasn't much point in the commission schlepping all that way just to discover that it wasn't 52-56, but 58, or 61, or 47. One of the three members was Cornelio Sommaruga, the former president of the International Red Cross who once compared the Star of David to the swastika. Anyone interested in pondering this comparison further can find the two emblems conveniently displayed in close proximity at an increasing number of European synagogues.

Anyway, as Kofi's commission isn't going ahead, I'm pleased to announce my own fact-finding investigation into - drumroll, please - the UN. Ex-ambassadors, European Foreign Ministers and former presidents of humanitarian organisations are welcome to apply to join my commission, but, if they're too busy, we'll make do with jes' regular folks. Among the issues we'll be examining: UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia; the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya; UN involvement in massive embezzlement in Kosovo; the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa involving aid workers demanding sexual favours from children as young as four; the UN-fuelled explosion of drugs, Aids and prostitution in Cambodia; the UN's complicity in massacres in pre-liberated Afghanistan; and, if we've any time left, the UN's collusion in terrorism in the Jenin refugee camp. As the organisation's own internal investigations usually put it, UN seen nothin' yet!