Robert Worth of the New York Times is getting worse by the second. He will soon deserve to earn the Hassan Fattah prize for lousy journalism. First, notice the headline: like there was no sectarian conflict before last week, and Saudi Arabia and the Hariri Inc have not been funding and propagating one of the most crude sectarian campaigns that we have seen. And he repeats a refrain from Hariri propaganda: that Islamist websites are buzzing with calls for Jihad to support...Hariri militia in Lebanon. What is the evidence for that? This is what happens when you send correspondents who don't know the language or the culture and who become slaves to the handful people who they talk to...in English of course. You really think that Salafites and Al-Qa`idah are so keen on Sa`d Hariri and his leadership? And then Worth does his best to dispel the notion of Hariri militia. He says: "Hariri’s Sunni militia had proved to be largely mythical: its fighters were quickly thrashed." So the existence of the militia is a myth because it did not fight? Does that mean that armies that don't fight, don't exist? So the Egyptian army in 1967 was a myth because it did not fight? And notice that most of the story in the article is based on the account of one person: Mr. Obeid: and only because he spoke English to your correspondent. And then Mr. Worth treats you to the inevitable theory of "Shoes in Arab Culture": "“They are coming after us, and this time with shoes, not weapons, to humiliate us even more.” And it is very clear that Worth received marching orders from the Hariri media office that handles all foreign correspondents in Lebanon--the ones who arrive to the capital clueless and not the ones who know the place and don't need "the help" of Hariri media office. Notice how he reports the massacre of SSNP CIVILIAN MEMBERS in HALBA: he reports it as if "an angry mob" heroically attacked a militia. And notice that his account of the shooting at the funeral in Tariq Jadidah is derived from the early reports of Hariri media, which later were proven to be false: the Hariri marchers threw grenades at the shopkeeper before he leaped out at them with his AK-47. And notice that he reports that they merely asked him for some respect. I also noticed that Hariri media office which fed him the story did not tell him the slogans that the marchers were chanting. And typically he reports the story (he got that one from MEMRI) about Hariri TV's Sahar Al-Khatib: but he did not report the crude and vulgar (and classist) tenor of her remarks. Today, Worth (whose reporting was less horrible before) proved that he is rising in the New York Times. And notice that New York Times reporters now treat the Hariri and Dahlan sides in the Middle East with the same way they treat the Zionist side: can you find one critical remark about the Hariri side in the article? And most importantly: do you learn in journalism school that you need to speak to one side only in a conflict? It must be the Martin Peretz school of journalism. (thanks Amer and Ussama)