September 09, 2007

Ha'aretz: Finkelstein says Jews abuse the holocaust

Now he doesn't actually say that. The Ha'aretz headline to an AP article say that he says that. Here's the headline: U.S. prof. who says Jews abuse Holocaust to curb critics resigns. Now, he says that the zionist movement abuses the holocaust to deflect criticism from Israel. In particular he has criticised the State of Israel for abusing the holocaust. So the headline is just a little bit misleading. But hold on a sec. What's this:
A Chicago university professor who has drawn criticism for accusing some Jews of abusing the legacy of the Holocaust
"Some Jews" now. Not "Jews" because that could imply all Jews. But now see this
His most recent book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, is largely an attack on Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel. In his book, Finkelstein argues that Israel uses perceived anti-Semitism as a weapon to stifle criticism.
Oh so now we've moved from "Jews" to "some Jews" to one named Jew and the state that's the main beneficiary of the holocaust and the assets of its victims. I'm glad Ha'aretz cleared that up, and in the same article too. Now, I've heard that headline writers are not the same as the people that write the articles which appear underneath them but you'd expect the headline to at least tally with the article.

I mentioned that the article came from Associated Press. Well I googled some words from it and sure enough the article also appears on Ynet, the online presence of Yediot Ahranot. The headline there is "Controversial Jewish professor resigns post." So we can assume it was Ha'aretz's lie, not AP's, in the Ha'aretz headline. Yediot Ahranot used to be to the right of Ha'aretz. That might still be the case but Ynet is getting more reliable than Ha'aretz these days. It could be the demands of a 24/7 global news market or it could be the age olld issue that the zionist left has always been more dishonest than the zionist right. Either way, Ha'aretz's headline was deliberately dishonest. I wonder how many of the (at the time of writing) 483 comments below the Ha'aretz article mention the disparity between its headline and the article itself. I wonder because there's no way I'm going to read them.

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