Topic: WorldNetDaily
In a March 12 WorldNetDaily article headlined "Israeli media whitewashing 'peace partner'?" Aaron Klein writes:
The Israeli media today portrayed the assassinated planner of last week's Jerusalem shooting massacre as a member of the Islamic Jihad terror group even though he is a well-known activist from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization, WND has learned.
The U.S. considers Fatah to be moderate. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government has been holding regular negotiations with Abbas' officials in line with last November's U.S.-backed Annapolis Summit, which seeks to create a Fatah-led Palestinian state by the end of the year.
How, exactly, is that "whitewashing"? After all, Islamic Jihad sounds much more sinister than Fatah.
Real whitewashing is, say, obscuring the fact that one's sources are violent right-wing extremists.
There's another issue with Klein's article, as well as a March 7 article in which he first claimed that the alleged planner of the attack, Muhammad Shehadi, as belonging to Fatah: He doesn't quote anyone on the record saying it.
The March 7 article cites only anonymous "senior Israeli and Palestinian security officials" as making the claim, adding that "According to Palestinian security officials familiar with Shehadi, after losing the 2006 election as a Fatah leader, Jihadi worked for about six months for the Islamic Jihad terror group but then switched back to Fatah." Klein's March 12 article repeats a claim that "Shehadi is a well-known Fatah activist who ran unsuccessfully in the 2006 Palestinian elections as a local Fatah legislator from Bethlehem," but he offers no attribution for the claim.
