This week offered two milestones in the history of the Palestinian media war against Israel. Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, publicly apologized for an editorial run in 2002 which declared that the Israeli operation in the Jenin refugee camp was “every bit as repellent as Osama Bin Laden’s attack on New York on September 11.” The Jenin operation, it will be recalled, was originally dubbed a “massacre” by the Palestinians and much of the Western world, but later was revealed to have been one of the most careful operations in the history of urban warfare, fighting house-to-house in the most entrenched terrorist wasp nest in the Palestinian areas, taking unprecedented risks to their own forces to avoid civilian casualties.

Second, an independent ballistics expert testified to a French court that the Mohammed Al-Dura could not possibly have been shot by Israeli forces. The incident in 2000, in which film footage showed what appeared to be a Palestinian child being shot to death by the IDF, became a rallying cry for the second intifada, yet serious evidence later emerged suggesting that the entire film was staged.

There is something tiresome about all this. If the Palestinian cause is so righteous, why do its proponents need to fabricate so much? One would hope that the Western media would learn to double-check itself, or at least that some kind of organic, internet-based mechanism would emerge to keep them in check. Oh wait: That’s us.