Lies and Ignorance of the New York Times: the case of MICHAEL SLACKMAN. I really feel sorry for you if you base your knowledge of the Middle East, or the world for that matter, on the New York Times. Based on my area of study, I can reliably and certifiably tell you that many of the Times' correspondents and columnists are plane clueless when it comes to the Middle East. Take this guy today, Michael Slackman. It is obvious that he does not know Arabic, and has no knowledge of the controversies associated with the film that he is writing about. He has totally missed the point, and misunderstood the movie (and the book that it is based on), and even the controversies that they have generated. It is most inaccurate to claim that the movie promotes normalization and peace with Israel, when every Arab media source has reported the opposite: that the popularity of the movie in Egypt stems from its opposition to peace and normalization with Israel. Hell, even the Israeli government according to Arab media accounts protested to the Egyptian government about the movie. And the movie does not mock Arab leftists, when the director (I heard him say so on MBC TV--an Arab TV channel) himself said two days ago, that Adil Imam represented the Egyptian people, and the ending (where he gets married to the leftist woman) symbolizes the alliance between Leftism and the Egyptian people. And the director denied the accusation that he mocked the poem of Amal Dunqul, which he knows by heart, and has invoked in two of his movies, but that there were some fans of Dunqul who protested its citation by the main character while smoking hashish. I don't know where to begin. If I have the time and resources, I would hire a staff to write a daily publication that refutes the lies and falsities of the New York Times. It could be a daily magazine given the magnitude of their lies and fabrications (and a large volume of innocent and not-so-innocent ignorance). And in the acknowledgement of the edition I have of the book on which the movie is based (`Amarat Ya`qubian), the author `Ala' Al-Aswani credits Jalal Amin (a well-known leftist who opposes normalization with Israel) for helping to promote the book to publishers. And `Adil Imam himself is also fiercely opposed to normalization with Israel, but there is none of that in this article. You see the New York Times is now very much like MEMRI: they specialize in presenting only those Arabs who are either Bin Ladenite Kooks or fans of Bush and Israel, while the majority of Arabs fall in neither camps. Notice that New York Times foreign correspondents in the Arab world now have "native" assistants, who get credit at the end of the article. And I was amused by this passage: "But that is not what her father came away with. "The movie is a reminder for people to wake up and understand Israel," said her father, Gamal Abdel Nasser. "It is a very difficult problem to solve, and the only way to solve it is by force. Whichever was taken by force should be restored only by force."" Don't you think that this guy made up this name to mock the NYTimes reporter, especially when you know that his last sentence was actually said by Nasser himself? Yon know the story of the famous American anthropologist working at a village in Ghana? How the villagers gave her their names, and all were obscene words in their own language, and the anthropologist could not tell until after the publication of the book?