Thread: Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Assassination

Originally Posted by Syme

I think the whole "they look Jewish" thing is a crock of shit.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/pi..._Assassins.jpg

Going from top to bottom, left to right: #1, maybe 2, 6, and 8 maybe 10 look "stereotypically Jewish"; #3, 5, 9, and 11 look generically Caucasian to me; #4 and 7 could as easily be Arabs as they could be anyone else (probably it looks that way because of the facial hair). These are the original 11 of course, I haven't seen pictures of the other 15, but I doubt that most or all of them looked "remarkably Jewish" either. I think people are grasping at straws and/or letting themselves be swayed by their a priori assumption that Mossad is responsible, so that when they then look at the faces they say to themselves "oh yeah, what a bunch of Jews they look like".

Well frankly, I don't think that you or I are qualified to assess if these individuals appear to be Israeli Jews or not, so your assessment of whether they are or are not would seem to be moot.

What I do know however is that individuals of a given racial group ARE better able to identify individuals from their own racial group, far better than individuals from other racial groups are able to. I can probably dig up some links to studies that prove this if you like.

This means that if you want to ask someone "is this person a Jewish Israeli", the best people to ask are the exact same people (i.e the Jewish Israeli public) who are seemingly already convinced that the operatives were in fact Jewish Israelis.