Whoops! 'NY Times' Op-Ed Used Bogus Quote

The New York Times is often accused, by critics on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of serving as a credulous outlet for the other side's propaganda. For once, the critics are exactly right.

Today's Times op-ed page features this Editor's Note:

An Op-Ed article on Jan. 8, on misperceptions of Gaza, included an unverified quotation. A former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, was quoted as saying in 2002 that "the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." This quotation, while cited widely, does not appear in the Israeli newspaper interview to which it is usually attributed. Its original source has not been found, and thus it should not have appeared in the article.

To say the quotation was "unverified" and "its original source has not been found" appears to be putting it mildly. According to (the strongly pro-Israel) Commentary, the incredibly inflammatory words attributed by Columbia professor Rashid Kalidi to Yaalon are actually a highly distorted version of remarks the former IDF chief made to Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2002. Yaalon never said the Palestinians are or should consider themselves a "defeated people"; instead, he said Israel's victory required "the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us."

The provenance of the quote should have raised red flags: Commentary says it "has been cited ad nauseam by Arab news services, neo-Nazi websites and leftist bloggers, though only occasionally with reference to the venue of Yaalon's alleged remark and never with a hyperlink to the actual article where it supposedly appeared."