NYT's Neil MacFarquhar: The New Expert on Nervous Sunnis and Nervous Shi`ites. So Hassan Fattah and NEIL MacFARQUHAR are together in one article today. Is this a lucky day for me? The two together? Fattah is the in-house token Arab (neo-con), and MacFarquhar is the expert-in-residence dealing with his specialty: "nervous Sunnis." The article is about Hasan Nasrallah (does MacFarquhar know that he is not Sunni, or is he now writing on nervous Shi`ites too?), and MacFarquhar has really new information and revelations. I mean, I never knew that Nasrallah is a cleric until I read this very informative article. I have assumed all along that Hasan Nasrallah is a grocer--but wait. Is there more than one Hasan Nasrallah in Lebanon? MacFarquhar assured me that there is only one Hasan Nasrallah in the entire Arab world, and he asked the expert on nervous Hasans, Walid Jumblat. He then says: "Gone are the empty threats made by President Gamal Abdel Nasser's official radio station during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to push the Jews into the sea." This is a flat out lie. Those two writers made this quotation up. Nasser, as is well-known, never said such a thing. Israeli propaganda usually attributes that sentence to Ahmad Shuqayri although Israeli propagandists have never been able to identify a source, and Shuqayri in his (three different) memoirs denied vigorously that he ever said that (although he indeed said dumb things). Now, Reuters just fired a Lebanese photographer for doctoringg a picture. And I agree with that decision. But what should a newspaper do when a reporter (or two in this case) makes up something? This is a made up story. Will there be accountability? I mean, let us say that you forgive MacFarquhar for his "nervous Sunnis" article, but what about this one? The grotesque sentence of throwing "the Jews into the sea" was in fact invented by Israeli propagandists, and falsely attributed to Arabs. So does MacFarquhar just reproduce cliches of Israeli propaganda? In fact, if MacFarquhar is looking for such grotesque statements, I can point him to a statement by Theodor Herzl (who was not Arab) and who did say that the Palestinians "should be pushed into the desert." (Or I can direct him to the official orders issued by Israeli Air Force Commander in 1967, Motti Hod: "...Fly, soar at the enemy, destroy him and scatter him throughout the dessert"--cited in Michael Oren, Six Days of War, p. 170). That of course is rarely mentioned by US media in order to protect its readers from the grotesque racist anti-Arab statements that are regularly and widely made by Zionist leaders, from the early days of Zionism to now. MacFarquhar then said: " Gone is Saddam Hussein'’s idle vow to "“burn half of Israel." Now Saddam is a lousy tyrant who only deserves scorn and humiliation, but Saddam did not say that. Saddam actually said that IF Israel were to attack Iraq (as it did in 1980), then "half of Israel" would be burnt. There is a difference between the two, o expert on "nervous Sunnis." In fact, my mother (a "nervous" Sunni from Beirut) was just reporting to me yesterday about the French TV media. She was outraged that they all are reporting that Hasan Nasrallah threatened to bomb Tel Aviv when in fact he said that if Israel were to attack Beirut, then he would feel compelled to bomb Tel Aviv. They always do that with Arab statements--the media of the White Man has to clean up the language to make it most beneficial for Israeli propaganda, especially in times of war. And then MacFarquhar talks to Waddah Shararah. Waddah Shararah, no less. How convenient. How convenient. As is well known: Shararah was a Stalinist communist who called every body with whom he disagreed an "agent of US and Israel", and then became a fanatical right-winger who writes for publications of House of Saud, and who accuses people with whom he disagrees "agents of Iran and Syria." At least Shararah, when he writes, he is never understood---Sadiq Jalal Al-`Adhm says that Shararah's writings are an inside joke--with himself no less. So of all the people that MacFarquhar could have talked to, you need to find one of the most extremist conservatives in Lebanon. But in fairness to MacFarquhar, he also spoke to...WALID JUMBLAT. What is this with Walid Jumblat in US media these days. He was the the "Sunni" authority in the article by MacFarquhar on "nervous" Sunnis, and now he is the authority on "nervous" Shi`ites? And notice that MacFarquhar does not mention anything about Jumblat's fawning praise for Nasrallah only from a year ago, not to mention years past. Jumblat used to take his eldest son with him to Nasrallah's rallies, would take pictures of the crowd. We don't know what Jumblat later did with those pictures, I wonder. Jumblat used to say that Nasrallah is the biggest influence on his thinking--and he said that after the assassination of that Lebanese billionaire prime minister. It is also not true that Nasrallah never refers to Israel as Israel. He does, but MacFarquhar seems to read MEMRI and not the Arabic primary sources. Also, MacFarquhar says that Nasrallah believes "that all Jewish immigrants should return to their countries of origin" but I never heard him say that. Where did you get that, o expert on "nervous" Sunnis. Next from MacFarquhar: an article on nervous atheists in the Middle East. Experts will be interviewed: chiefly, Walid Jumblat--an expert on nervous atheists.