Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Dec. 3 WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein -- with the misleading headline "Israel covered up murder by Abbas' group?" -- begins: "Did Israel deliberately hide Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' organization's responsibility for the murder of a Jew until the completion of last week's U.S.-sponsored Annapolis summit?"
Why, WorldNetDaily would never do such a henious thing as delay reporting something for political reasons, would it?
Well, actually, yes.
A Nov. 30 article describing how "the leftist British lawmaker George Galloway abruptly booted WND's Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein and radio talk-host Rusty Humphries from his London office and handed them over to Parliament police, claiming the two were Zionist operatives who had breached security by falsely presenting themselves as reporters" includes this particularly interesting nugget:
The entire fiasco, which occurred in June, was recorded on audio tape.
Klein, author of the recently released book "Schmoozing with Terrorists," said he and Humphries had refrained from releasing the tape until after the publication of "Schmoozing" for fear Klein would lose some Hamas sources.
Once Klein did go public with it, he immediately raced to Fox News to tell his story. The guy's got a book to sell, y'know. And now that it's in print, it's apparently no big deal for him to burn his sources -- which makes you wonder about the veracity of the book. After all, who's going to believe a Palestinian militant who claims that Klein libeled him in his book? Seems to us that the chatting-up-terrorists gimmick gives Klein perfect license to write whatever he wants, true or not -- who's going to make the effort to contact his terrorist buddies to fact-check it?
So, what's the difference between waiting a few days to report something so as not to jeopardize peace talks and waiting six months to report something to protect a reporter's sources, at least until said reporter's book (making him and his employer a little coin) was printed? The latter is arguably more dishonest.
But given that "Schmoozing with Terrorists" itself is based on a dubious gimmick, such dishonesty is par for the course for Klein and WND.
