Well wishers gather at a makeshift shrine outside the Percy Military Hospital, where Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is receiving treatment, in Clamart November 10, 2004. French military doctor and hospital spokesman General Christian Estripeau announced the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in Clamart, near Paris, early morning Nov. 11, 2004. (ALIX WILLIAM/SIPA/Newscom)

H.D.S. Greenway, whose column appears regularly in the Boston Globe, erred last week, wrongly stating in his Sept. 7 column (“Obama’s Mideast Quicksand”) that “. . . . Arafat finally died, holed up in a bunker under Israeli siege.”

Yasser Arafat died in a French military hospital, not in a bunker, and not under Israeli siege. As the Nov. 12, 2004 Boston Globe obituary for Arafat began:

Yasser Arafat expired politically long before he was declared dead yesterday morning in a hospital outside Paris.

A more detailed article the day earlier, by Charles Sennott and Charles Radin, opened:

PARIS — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died early today at a French military hospital where he had been in a coma lingering between life and death for the last week.

The Greenway column also appeared Sept. 8 in the International Herald Tribune. Stay tuned for corrections. . . .

Despite allegations of Gaza food shortages, Gazan food products are finding their way from the blockaded Gaza Strip to a movie set in Turkey, reports the New York Times.

For some, apparently, art comes before food.

In July we noted that media outlets which obsessively cover Israel — such as the New York Times and Washington Post — failed to report on Hezbollah’s buildup of weapons in Lebanese civilian areas in violation of U.N. Resolution 1701.

It seems that not even a massive explosion Sept. 2 of one of these facilities — whose aftermath was caught on film — was enough to wake those journalists from their slumber. While some, such as the Associated Press and Boston Globe, did cover the explosion in the town of Al- Shahabiya, the leading national newspapers — the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times — did not.

All the news that’s fit to print? Make that “some of the news.”

A video of the evacuation of arms from the building, released by the Israeli army, is below:

PA’s Karake honors the mother of four terrorists [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 28, 2010, courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch]

As we noted last week, any incident whiffing of Israeli incitement, including Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s vitriolic remarks make big news, but Palestinian incitement, including Abbas and Fayyad’s honoring of a mastermind of the Munich massacre, continue to go unreported.

With a new week, we are confronted with fresh examples of officially-sanctioned Palestinian Authority incitement, and yet again, the continuing silence of the Western press corps.

In the first incident, the Palestinian Authority’s Minister for Prisoner Affairs Issa Karake honored a mother whose four sons were involved in suicide bombings and other terror attacks. He praised her:

The Palestinian mother is a central partner in the struggle…
It is she who gave birth to the fighters, and she deserves
that we bow to her in salute and in honor.

Karake also visited the home of Ayyat Al-Akhras, who murdered two Israelis in a 2002 suicide bombing attack in a Jerusalem supermarket.

Second, the Palestinian ambassador to Tehran, Salah Zawawi, called for “eradication of the fabricated regime [ie, Israel] in due course.”

While this information is published in the government controlled Palestinian and Iranian media, and translated into English thanks to Palestinian Media Watch, Western journalists simply can’t be bothered to report Mideast incitement unless they can point a finger at Israeli Jews.

In an article in American Thinker, CAMERA’s Eric Rozenman and Myron Kaplan describe the ongoing problem of anti-Semitic callers finding a home at C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal”

As is often the case, a frequent anti-Israel caller is allowed to a) violate C-SPAN’s ostensible “one-call-per-thirty-days” rule, b) go completely off-topic, c) make preposterous anti-Israel and anti-Jewish claims (“the neocons — you know — the Israeli lobby, AIPAC is pushing us into more wars in the Middle East”) and d) cite fringe anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli websites. The host sits silently, and “Washington Journal” technicians don’t cut off the caller.

Sports reporter Mike Wise: benched for foul play in social media

The Washington Post ombudsman reports:

Popular Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise has been suspended for a month after knowingly sending a false tweet on Monday.

The action stems from a short scoop to his Twitter followers that said Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who has been suspended for six games by the NFL after allegations of misconduct, will only have to sit out five games. “Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told,” Wise tweeted.

That was big news for those who follow professional football, and it quickly spread on the Internet. But as Wise soon acknowledged, it was a hoax that was part of a misguided attempt to comment on the lowered standards of accuracy for information shared on social media.

Fabrication is a major journalistic transgression. He’s lucky he wasn’t fired. . . .

On Monday afternoon, after the fabrication became known, [sports editor Matthew Vita sent a note to his staff reminding them of The Post’s rules on social media. They say that in anything transmitted via social media networks, like Twitter or Facebook, “we must protect our professional integrity.”

“We must be accurate in our reporting and transparent about our intentions,” the guidelines read.

But Wise wasn’t reporting. He was fabricating, which is the greatest sin in journalism.

(more…)