Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The New York Times' correction of the Hasan Nasrallah quotation: it still NEEDS A CORRECTION

Finally, the New York Times printed a correction.  The day the story appeared, I told my readers that this quotation is fabricated by Zionists (and repeated by Zionists), and that it was never uttered by Nasrallah.  I communicated with someone in the Times and I was told that they did extensive research and could not find any source for the quotation.  Today, the Times printed this:  "An article on Aug. 16 about Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite political organization that is considered a terrorist group by the United States and Israel, quoted incorrectly from a statement by Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s secretary general, about the adverse effect that a similar blacklisting by European countries would have on Hezbollah. Mr. Nasrallah said, according to a BBC Monitoring Service transcript, that it “would dry up the sources of finance, end moral, political and material support, stifle voices, whether they are the voices of the resistance or the voices which support the resistance, pressure states which protect the resistance in one way and another, and pressure the Lebanese state, Iran and Iraq, but especially the Lebanese state, in order to classify it as a state which supports terrorism.” Mr. Nasrallah did not say a European blacklisting “would destroy Hezbollah. The sources of our funding will dry up and the sources of moral political and material support will be destroyed.” (That incorrect quotation, which has been widely attributed to Mr. Nasrallah and has been repeatedly cited in congressional testimony and elsewhere, is based on a paraphrase of the actual quote."  Let me add now this: the quotation that is included in the BBC report cited, is entirely distorted from the original speech and he never meant what is being said in this phrasing cited.  I will find the original passage to show it to you. 

PS I asked a source of the New York Times about the BBC report on the speech.  I was provided a copy of the BBC Monitoring Service report of the speech.  It does not--as I suspected--match the Arabic text from the speech from 19 February, 2005.