Is this question based on a straw man argument?

Question

This question is a follow-up from a PoliticsSE answer, essentially asking to what extent the content of the cited quote is based on truth.

Let me be clear: I don't question OP's or anybody's intentions. At first I thought this was a valid and interesting question myself and I upvoted it. However in retrospect I'm uncomfortable with it and I now think that the question is subtly biased:

• Unavoidably the short extract (one paragraph from a 400 pages book) gives an extremely narrow picture of the author's arguments. Additionally the extract focuses on a point based itself on a very specific part of an official report. The author informally argues that there is an apparent contradiction in this particular part of the report. Needless to say, I doubt anybody involved in the question or any answer read the book or the report (I certainly didn't).
• The question opposes this quote with a news report given as evidence of the destructiveness of the rockets. To some extent this makes sense: in the extract the author appears to downplay the destructiveness of the rockets even though there is evidence of their destructiveness, so OP is asking where exactly is the truth between these two opposite views. However by opposing the very specific point the author makes with the damage rockets can do in general (which is uncontested), the question drastically simplifies the debate, or at least invites a very simplified interpretation.

In particular this answer clearly shows how the question can be interpreted as if the author denies that any rocket is destructive: if one omits the very specific context of the quote, it looks as if the author claims that Hamas rockets are always just "enhanced fireworks" which cannot cause any serious damage. And of course it's very easy to "debunk" this "conspiracy theory", which is a complete travesty of the author's point.

To me this looks like a straw man argument: the claim of the author is presented in the question as if it contradicts the destructiveness of any rocket (which it doesn't). Then it's easy for answers to dismiss the claim.

Additionally there is another bias that I mentioned in my answer: we all naturally like to have answers and whenever there is some data available we want to use it. A clear-cut answer backed with statistics and "hard facts" is always more satisfying than an acknowledgement of ignorance. But data is not neutral and objective by itself, and in this case the source of the data is the least objective possible source, it's precisely the one criticized by the author of the quote. This is a circular reasoning: X is wrong to criticize Y because of some evidence provided by Y and not confirmed by anybody else.

Answer 1

Having answered the original question I still think Erwan has some point here, you simply cannot answer such questions using credible sources because they don't exist.

I don't think it is an Israeli PR stunt, there is no censorship and the truth might be this or that- but we can't present it as such in a Skeptics forum.

The question is a great topic for discussion, it brings a lot of emotions and politics but unfortunately can never be fully answered, at least not in the next few decades

Edit: Actually this question has the same problem

Answer 2

I fully disagree with you on every point that you raise, both in this question and in the answer you provided.

Misquoting or taking out of context.

To me, reading the quote provided makes a very clear claim by Finkelshtein, Hamas rockets are ineffective by themselves, regardless of Israel's efforts to stop them and protect its citizens. If this is a straw man, misquotation or is taken out of context can be shown quite easily, the source of the quote is shown, just checking the book to see if it was misquoted is enough, and reading the section where this quote is in should give the proper context. If the context needed for a single quote is so large that a whole 400 pages book is needed to properly understand it, then the quote is wrong. Especially in the way that this quote is presented, it's very decisive and doesn't really any opening for a possibility of nuance and elaboration.

Trustworthy sources

I get that you don't trust the Israeli sources as to the seriousness of the threat and that you think that Israel in general and Netanyahu specifically have a vested interest in up-playing the threat from the rocket attacks. This however disregards several very important issues. The Iron-Dome specifically is credited to Amir Peretz, a political rival to Netanyahu, downplaying the importance of the system would play into Netanyahu's hands, in fact, this was a point in Peretz parliamentary campaign.

Moreover, there is another organization that boasts about the danger from the rocket attacks to Israeli citizens, Hamas, PIJ and other terrorist organizations active in the Gaza strip boast about the military capabilities of the rockets and their potential threat to Israel, not only individually about each rocket, but also about their use of the rockets and that they can overwhelm Israel's defence system and hurt its citizens even under the protection of the Iron Dome. While Hamas doesn't say the exact number of rockets that they fired, they also declare that they fired thousands of various rockets.

Trustworthy sources specifically about the specs of the rockets

Israel publicized the specs of the rockets that Hamas have, but you don't need to trust only Israeli sources on this. Hamas names the rockets with names that tell about their performance, the M-75 has a range of 75 km, the J-80 has a range of 80 to 100 km. I'll let you guess what is the range of the R-160 rocket. In addition, Hamas is using rockets made in Iran/Syria whose properties are known and the rockets that Hamas creates on its own are based on reverse engineering existing rockets from the same established sources, the M-75 is based on the Iranian Fajr-5 and the R-160 is based on the Syrian M-302.

So I do believe that the quote as presented is easily verifiable that it's not out of context, and that the sources, from both sides of the conflict, verify each other and agree on the facts of the capabilities possessed by Hamas, PIJ and the other terrorist organizations.