New York Timser who Blamed Israeli Teens for own Murders, Spreads more Fake News about Israel - Daniel Greenfield

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by Daniel Greenfield

Max Fisher is standing by his fake news. And the New York Times refuses to correct its latest fake news on Israel.

Max Fisher is a graduate of Vox's fake news factory. How bad is Vox's fake news when it comes to Israel?

Its imaginary bridge has become legendary.

Perhaps most unforgettable was the charge, by Vox senior reporter Zack Beauchamp, that Israel limits Palestinian traffic on the bridge connecting West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It was an imagined affront, as it must be when speaking about an imagined bridge. There is not, and never has been, such a span linking the territories.

Vox’s fantastical Middle East — home of the region’s longest bridge...

Max Fisher though was Vox's worst Israel fake news guy. 

A 2014 article about a lack of symmetry in the conflict between Israel and Palestinian terror organizations like Hamas, for example, relied on erroneous fatality statistics and had to be corrected. “I had misread B’Tselem’s data tables in a way that significantly under-counted Israeli deaths, as well as some Palestinian deaths,” admitted author Max Fisher.

The same author was called out for redefining the age-old Jewish community in Hebron as “newcomers,” apparently to take the edge off the 1929 mass slaughter of Jews by their Arab neighbors. (In contrast with the supposed Jewish interlopers, Fisher dubbed the attackers Hebron’s “native” population.) Vox refused to correct the error. Fisher has since been hired by The New York Times.

Max Fisher is also a terrible human being. When writing about the murder of 3 Israeli teens by Hamas... he had this to say.

As children, the kidnap victims surely cannot and should not be held personally culpable, but they could be considered an extension of the occupation, which has been far from a peaceful endeavor.

And Fisher is up to the same old fake news games at the old gray lady.

Max Fisher of the New York Times has taken to Twitter to defend his claim that David Ben-Gurion “emerged from retirement in July 1967 to warn Israelis they had sown the seeds of self-destruction.” According to Fisher (in an article that ran on the front page of the Times on July 23), "Ben-Gurion insisted that Israel give up the territories it had conquered. If it did not, he said, occupation would distort the young state, which had been founded to protect not just the Jewish people but their ideals of democracy and pluralism."

Such a statement would have been out of character for Ben-Gurion. And, as Martin Kramer conclusively demonstrates, it never happened.

The twelve pages of the transcript don’t include even a hint that Ben-Gurion made the dramatic renunciation of territorial acquisition that Fisher, relying on Hertzberg, claims he made. Ben-Gurion alluded only once to a possible withdrawal: “If Nasser wants to take back the Sinai or a large part of it, let him make peace with us.” The transcript may be incomplete, a possibility I noted in my article. Still, while it is pointless to speculate on what else Ben-Gurion might have said, it would be bizarre if something as earth-shaking as a warning of Israel’s possible “self-destruction” didn’t make it into the transcript.

Or into Ben-Gurion’s diary, which I can now add as additional source. In his diary entry of July 12, Ben-Gurion summarized his own remarks. (This, after complaining that he had to sit through a long-winded speech by Hertzberg, who also introduced Ben-Gurion “with several inaccuracies about my life.”) Ben-Gurion’s own summary tracks the transcript, and includes nothing whatsoever on territorial concessions. I’ve uploaded it here.

Nor is there any corroboration in the Mapai party newspaper Davar of July 14. It summarized Ben-Gurion’s remarks to the Conservative rabbis (Ben-Gurion, it noted, “was preceded by a lecture by Prof. Hertzberg”). Here, too, as in the transcript, there is no attribution to Ben-Gurion of any territorial position, except this quote about Jerusalem: “We will not return Jerusalem—and no force in the world can take it from us.”

So we have three contemporary sources for this event, and not even one corroborates Hertzberg’s belated account of it.

So of course Max Fisher is standing by his fake news. And the New York Times refuses to correct its latest fake news on Israel.

I look forward to the extensive New York Times piece on the imaginary bridge connecting the West Bank and Gaza.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270967/new-york-timeser-who-blamed-israeli-teens-own-daniel-greenfield

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