Haaretz analyst taken in by joke column about Jared Kushner (update)

Amir Oren is a senior correspondent and columnist for Haaretz and a member of the newspaper's editorial board.

He writes in Haaretz:

Foreign visitors stream to the White House, but there is an embarrassing emptiness there behind the power of Trump’s son-in-law-adviser, Jared Kushner, who boasted that, while waiting to board ski lifts on vacation, he read up on the Middle East on his smartphone.

The source for this story? A joke column written in The New Yorker by Andy Borowitz:

BAGHDAD (The Borowitz Report)—Jared Kushner said on Tuesday that he became “incredibly well-informed” on the Middle East by reading up on the region while waiting for the ski lift on a recent trip to Aspen.

“There would be times when you’d have to wait five or even ten minutes for the ski lift, and that’s when I’d take out my phone and read up on the Middle East,” he said. “I really got into it.”

Kushner said that the Middle East was a “truly fascinating region” because of “all the countries that they have there.”

“There is Israel, and Egypt, but there is also Yemen and places like that,” he said. “Sometimes I would start learning about a new country, but then the ski lift would come.”

Kushner said that, during a meeting on Monday in Baghdad, he “wowed” the Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, with knowledge that he had gleaned about the nation while waiting for the ski lift.

“I told him that Iraq’s main agricultural products include wheat, barley, corn, and rice,” he said. “He seemed really surprised that I would know things like that.”

“Something else that’s interesting about the Middle East is there is a country called Jordan,” he added.

This is the quality of Haaretz' analysts.

UPDATE: Haaretz is still not quite sure if Borowitz is a serious reporter on this topic. They updated the article:

Foreign visitors stream to the White House, but there is an embarrassing emptiness there behind the power of Trump’s son-in-law-adviser, Jared Kushner. The senior adviser boasted that (according to reports, that some say were satirical), while waiting to board ski lifts on vacation, he read up on the Middle East on his smartphone.

Some say Haaretz is an actual newspaper.

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