I'm waving Hedge's pulitzer exonerates his record for factual accuracy. The Camera report cited by Sullivan, while certainly bearing marks of ideological bias, does a) seem to list errors of fact by Hedges on water policy, b) quote amazingly incendiary writing by Hedges -- Israeli soldiers "soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport" -- that does not seem substantiated or widely credited by other sources.
I know Hedges from a hole in the wall, of course. But from perusign his latest book ("War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning") I can imagine he'd be an insufferable commencement speaker...
I'll grant there are probably some errors of fact in the Hedges piece. I've seen some interviews with him and I'll grant he's probably insufferable. But he's most certainly not a hack as Sullivan alleges and the passage about the "mice...murder...sport" is from the seventh page of the Gaza Diary I linked to and worth reading for some context (elsewhere in the piece Hedges surmises that the soldiers doing these shootings aren't Israeli, but Lebanese, judging by their accents--if that makes a difference).
Hegdes is a political hack and nothing more. He calls Bush's war on terrorism wrong, but Clintons wars in Yugoslavia was brave. nationalism is a myth. The simple fact is that more people have been killed in the name of altruism.
Chris Hedges has been extensively villified for what he claims to have seen in the sand dunes of Gaza - but as far as I can tell, it's a case of people attacking the messenger because they cannot deal with the message. In the early stages of this intafada there was quite a bit of this deliberate shooting of kiddies going on.
By way of consolation, the IDF may well have mended it's ways as a direct result of what Chris Hedges wrote. The death toll of youngsters started off very high and seems to have fallen off steeply.
However, the IDF is faced with a new threat, international observers and activitists who uphold the highest standards of humanitarian Christian societies, people like Rachel Corrie.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1248.shtml
Corrie's sacrifice will never be forgotten By Mustafa Karkouti, GN, 3/25/03
"No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it, and even then you are always well aware that your experience is not at all the reality."
This is an excerpt from an e-mail of February 7 to the parents of Rachel Corrie, the young courageous American activist killed on March 16, by an Israeli bulldozer, while trying to prevent its soldier driver from demolishing a Palestinian house in Rafah Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip.
Describing the tragic situation of daily life for Palestinians under Israeli occupation, Rachel expl-ains: "What with the difficulties the Israeli army would face, if they shot an unarmed U.S. citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and, of course, the fact that I have the option of leaving."
Rachel Corrie was a university student from Evergreen State College in Washington and she had been in Gaza trying to help prevent house demolitions for two months before her killing, as a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).