IHT Scores an 'Analytical Scoop': Massacre! Massacre!

'Scoop' Oreskes Scores Big!

When longtime New York Times bureaucrat Michael Oreskes was bundled off to Paris earlier this year to edit the International Herald Tribune, despite no overseas experience and a record of failure such as the disastrous Times TV venture, he promised "analytical scoops" -- factual ones, apparently, being beyond the capability of the IHT staff and its editor.

Well, Oreskes's IHT has a scoop! Extra! Extra! Read all about it! According to an ex-UN propagandist named Salim Lone, writing in the IHT's Op-Ed Page: "It is not lost on the region that when Israel killed over a hundred Lebanese in Qana in 1996, and when hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Nablus, Jenin and elsewhere in 2003, no UN Security Council action against Israel was taken."

The horrible, horrible Qana Massacre doesn't quite qualify as a scoop, of course, as by now it is old news how Israel wantonly slaughtered Lebanese civilians just for the joy of it -- or, as actually happened, Hezbollah used a Lebanese civilians as human shields by placing a missile launching site adjacent to their compound. (See, for example, here.)

But that pales in comparison to the Nablus-Jenin-Elsewhere Massacre of 2003! While I think Lone here may have his date off by a year, (the famous, fictional "Jeningrad" of 2002, perhaps?) I can't link to a cite refuting this one because it exists only in Lone's imagination. That figures, by the way, as Lone -- though not identified as such, natch -- is a veteran of the UN's Israel-bashing propaganda apparatus, its Department of Public Information.

A scoop! A scoop! An "analytical scoop," because it is contained in an "analysis" -- the point of which was to attack UN Security Council action against Syria -- and a "scoop" because it is an exclusive report on something that didn't happen.

From now on, the editor of this fast-fading Times offspring will forever be known by the nickname he has just earned: "Scoop" Oreskes!