The New York Times yesterday corrected an article by its journalist Robert Mackey, who had approvingly relayed a misquotation by anti-Israel extremist Ali Abunimah.It took four months for the New York Times to figure out what the Facebook page actually said?
Shortly after three Israeli teens were kidnapped in the West Bank, Mackey shared on his New York Times blog Abunimah's allegation that a popular Israeli Facebook page called for the arbitrary murder of Palestinians. "Kill a Palestinian ‘every hour,' says new Israeli Facebook page liked by 18,000," Abunimah claimed on Twitter.
...The Facebook page's tagline actually states, in Hebrew rhyme, "Until the boys return — every hour we shoot a terrorist."
After CAMERA informed New York Times editors of the mistranslation, the newspaper published the following correction:
Correction: October 28, 2014
An earlier version of this post referred imprecisely to an Israeli Facebook page demanding retribution for the abduction of the Israeli teenagers that was cited by Ali Abuminah, a Palestinian-American activist, in a Twitter post. The Facebook page urged Israelis to kill a Palestinian prisoner held on terrorism charges every hour; in his tweet, Mr. Abuminah referred to the proposed victims as simply "Palestinian."
At the time, I noted that Vanity Fair made the same accusation, and that it also seemed to be sourced to Abunimah. Yet Vanity Fair at least issued a correction within a day or two.
And as I mentioned then, the English-language "About" description of the Facebook page said explicitly that it was referring to terrorists. The NYT didn't even need to find someone in New York City that knows Hebrew to find out that Ali Abunimah's assertion was a lie.
So why did it take four months for the New York Times to get this corrected, way past the time that anyone would read the original article?
Even Haaretz issues its many corrections in a more timely manner than the Times.
It seems likely that Robert Mackey, whose NYT blog this was written on, resisted the change. Because the truth is not exactly what interests him - the story of Jews wanting vigilante justice in killing innocent Arabs was too good to check.
On Thursday, the same Ali Abunimah who was caught in this lie published a bizarre conspiracy theory to exonerate the shooter of Yehuda Glick. It puts 9/11 conspiracy theorists to shame, but like them, it of course blames Jews for the shooting. Check out this part:
According to “eyewitnesses” quoted in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition, the assailant asked Glick “Are you Yehuda Glick?” before firing three shots.Wow! Some Israelis come from Arab countries, and have similar accents, so it could have been an Israeli that shot Glick! What more proof do you need? (The motive, of course, is a false flag attack. Really.)
The four words in Hebrew are “Ha’im ata Yehuda Glick?”
The assailant also reportedly said, “Yehuda, you annoy me” – in Hebrew, “Yehuda, ‘itsbanta oti.”
Except for one instance of the letter ‘ayn, these two phrases do not contain any of the consonants whose pronunciation easily distinguishes a native Arabic speaker of Hebrew.
“If indeed a pharyngeal ‘ayn was pronounced, that could indicate an Arabic accent,” Uri Horesh, linguist and assistant professor of Arabic at Northwestern University, told The Electronic Intifada. “But it could also indicate the accent of a Jewish Israeli of Arab descent.”
Yet even though this post is only one among many that prove that Abunimah is an unhinged hater whose grasp of reality is worse than tenuous, reporters who write for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and many others believe him implicitly.
Anyone who swallows Abunimah's idiotic ramblings can only do so if they have a similar bias to begin with. And that, in short, is why it takes four months to get the New York Times to issue a simple correction that anyone who bothered to visit the actual Facebook page could have done in four minutes.