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Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Hizballah replacing "Israeli" with "Zionist" in wire service stories

Al Manar is the Hezbollah newspaper in Lebanon. On Sunday, for fun, I ran a story from it about how a "Zionist" company was chosen to make heads-up display helmets for the F-35 fighter jet:

An Zionist company has been selected to take part in manufacturing hi-tech helmets for pilots of the US F-35 stealth fighter, Zionist Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said Sunday.
Commenter Zvi noticed the strange use of "an" in "An Zionist company..." and surmised that Al Manar just copied the text from another media source, replacing "Israeli" with "Zionist."

Sure enough, that's exactly what happened. The original story was from AFP.

Today, we see a similar story of another successful Israeli venture in Al Manar:
Facebook has agreed to purchase Onavo, a Zionist data compression developer for mobile applications, Facebook confirmed Monday.

...Under the agreement, Onavo's office would remain in Tel Aviv, a move which will give the Zionist entity its first Facebook research and development center.

Onavo is based in Palo Alto, California and employs 40 workers, 30 of whom work in the occupied territories of Palestine. ...This is the third large acquisition by the world's largest social network company in the Zionist entity.

In this case the original story was from Xinhua, word for word except for the bolded portions.  Al Manar didn't give Xinhua credit, merely giving "agencies" as the source.

I wonder if wire services are OK with having their words mangled to be politically correct in Hizballahstan.

Al Manar did make one mistake, though: the headline today is "Facebook Acquires Mobile Israeli Startup: Onavo."

I hope the headline editor isn't beheaded. It must be painful enough to have to report how successful "Zionist" companies are without having to worry about accidentally saying "Israel."