the jenin hoax

Fri, Aug 2, 2002 at 8:39:23 am PDT

James Bennet of the New York Times sounds quite disappointed in his story about the UN report on Jenin.

The Times has very helpfully provided links in the right sidebar to “Related Articles” that show why Bennet is taking the news so hard: he was one of the more enthusiastic promoters of the Jenin massacre hoax. Here’s the opening of his story on April 13, with the balanced and fair title “Jenin Refugee Camp's Dead Can't Be Counted or Claimed.”

JENIN, West Bank, April 12 — Palestinians here describe bodies cut in pieces, bodies scooped up by bulldozers and buried in mass graves, bodies deliberately concealed under collapsed buildings. They describe people drinking out of sewers and people used by Israeli soldiers as human shields.

Muyasar Abu Ali, 43, said she fled the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin on Wednesday, when the Israeli assault on the area was already a week old. "Whenever I passed a few meters, I saw two or three bodies," she said. "The bodies were covered with dust."

Mrs. Ali said she had been told that one of her sons, a fighter, had been killed, adding that she had witnessed the deaths of 10 people, killed in a house destroyed by a rocket attack. "They were screaming, `Oh God! Oh God!' " she said. "After a few minutes, I couldn't hear anything." Bulldozers, she said, were used by Israeli soldiers to load the bodies into three trucks.