THE AMERICAN PROSPECT refers to my mention of the Jenin aerial photos and says that small areas of destruction don’t prove the absence of a massacre: “For example, check out this aerial photo of Ground Zero. Gee, look at the rather small area actually destroyed. But of course, that misses the point entirely. A mass grave can be very small indeed.” Well, yeah — though that would be more persuasive if there had been, you know, skyscrapers standing there in Jenin beforehand. . . .

But I wasn’t linking to the photos to disprove a massacre. (The fact that the Guardian/Observer is backpedaling should be far stronger evidence of that). Rather — as I thought the post made clear — I was pointing out that news and TV reports make it look as if all of Jenin was levelled, rather than a couple-of-blocks-square area in the refugee camp that is itself only part of the town. I mean, scroll down and read the post for yourself. Speaking of “missing the point.”

Anyway, if you want Ground Zero analogies — though those hardly seem appropriate for a lot of reasons that should be pretty damned obvious — it’s as if the media gave the impression that all of Manhattan, and perhaps the Outer Boroughs, had been completely wiped out on September 11.

UPDATE: Several readers write to note that it’s not just the TV news folks, pointing out Jimmy Carter’s misleading reference to “the recent destruction of Jenin and other villages,” in his rather fatuous New York Times column from Sunday. The photos certainly disprove that claim, don’t they? But Carter — who seems to have gotten all his information from CNN — certainly seems to have been deceived by the very phenomenon I describe above.