Today’s National Post (Canada) has a column by Ron Podalny on the Globe & Mail fabrication from last week. Excerpt:
The image of Palestinians being thrown out of their homes by the Israelis presents a particular obsession for much of Western media. False stories, such as Edward Said’s claim that he grew up in Jerusalem and was made a refugee, have been amplified by the media. (It was later discovered that the late Columbia University professor spent most of his youth in Cairo and his parents did not even own a house in Jerusalem.) Similarly, claims of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian birth were for years accepted by the media at face value, despite ample evidence he was born in Egypt.
Canadians recently experienced such inaccurate reporting firsthand when Carolynne Wheeler, a Globe and Mail reporter in Israel, described the June 21 meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as having taken place “on disputed home turf,” in “Sharon’s flag-draped residence in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City,” from which the Arab tenants were “removed” after Sharon “purchased it.” None of this is true.
View the article in the Post’s electronic edition here — at the bottom of page A16.
