In the following essay, Diana Muir writes about one collegiate newspaper columnist whose arguments against Israel are built on extremely false pretenses.

-- Tim Machesney

LIES, DAMNED LIES, and ANTI-ISRAEL ARGUMENT

by Diana Muir

The Daily Illini is the student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On Dec. 11, 2003, a Daily Illini columnist printed a well-known false quotation slandering Israel. I was particularly concerned because this is at least the third time that this particular columnist, Mariam Sobh, has printed material slandering Israel that she knows -- or ought to have known -- to be false. Ms. Sobh is a graduate student in the journalism school.

Here is the lie which Sobh published in the Illini just before winter break:

"I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child's existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian woman is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview with General Ouze Merham in 1956.

This "quotation" appears on hundreds of virulently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic Web pages, but it is an obvious hoax. The clues would be obvious to any competent journalist. None of the Web pages gives a source for the quote., beyond alleging that it was in “an interview with General Ouze Merham in 1956.” But neither I nor others have been able to find any evidence that a "General Ouze Merham" ever existed.

No sophisticated person would be likely to find the quote plausible. It refers to Arabs as "Palestinians," a term that was not yet in use in the 1950s. It talks of Palestinian women as slaves of the Jews, a kind of rhetoric never used by Israelis even in Israeli hate-literature. Moreover, nothing happene at Rafah in 1956. No "massacre." No armed incursion by Israel into what was, at the time, sovereign Egyptian territory. For these and other reasons, a writer on Independent Media, an aggressively anti-Israel news outlet, calls the quote Sobh published "a very poor fabrication."

In the same column, Sobh printed two more "quotations" that do not check out. Sobh wrote:

"What is happening to the Palestinians is wrong — plain and simple. And when people say things such as "when we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle," (Raphael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, New York Times, April 14, 1983), it proves what is happening in Palestine are atrocities ignored by the rest of the world and supported by the United States."

"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel ... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." (Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot, April 13,1983, New York Times, April 14, 1983.)

Neither of these quotations appeared in The New York Times on the date cited by Ms. Sobh. They do appear on a number of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic web sites.

This was not the only column in which such statements appeared.

In a November column she published another nasty anti-Israel canard that circulates widely on anti-Semitic Web sites. This one regards the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty.

This tragedy took place during the 1967 war. Egyptian naval vessels were shelling Israeli troops. America, which was not involved in the war, had announced that it had no vessels in the vicinity. Israeli intelligence mistook the Liberty, 14 miles off the coast, for the Egyptian vessel shelling Israeli troops, and sank it. It is the sort of tragic misidentification that happens all too frequently in wartime.

Last summer, Sobh wrote a column about Daniel Pipes, a major albeit controversial scholar of the Middle East. Sobh describes Pipes as having no credentials in the field beyond having done "some undergraduate work in it."

"He isn't even a leading scholar in the field," she wrote, "yet he's promoted himself so much that people believe him."

In fact, Pipes earned a PhD in Islamic History at Harvard, knows Arabic, French, and German, studied in Egypt for three years, has taught Middle Eastern history at Harvard, U. of Chicago, and the Naval War College, and is the author of 12 books on the Middle East.

Ms. Sobh’s problem is not so much that she dislikes Mr. Pipes’ politics. Her problem is that she apparently gets her "facts" from radical anti-American and Anti-Israel Web sites where a good deal of misinformation masquerades as fact.

Ms. Sobh is aware of how misleading the Web can be. As she recently wrote: “It's also disturbing that people would rather forward information that sounds dramatic than to verify the truth.

“Anyone can write up a malicious e-mail, and on that same token we can all refuse to forward them unless we are sure the content is accurate. After all, what's the point in spreading more inaccurate information in the world.”

The "information" cited by Sobh in her column comes under the heading of nut-case conspiracy theory.

Sobh apparently tells these lies because she wants to destroy the nation of Israel. Or, as she calls it, "Palestine, which is often referred to as Israel.” She is an officer of the Muslim Students Association, a group that frankly rejects two-state solutions in favor of destroying Israel and replacing it with a Palestinian and Islamic state.

I do not care for Ms. Sobh's opinions, but I do recognize her right to publish them. What I do not recognize is her right ot support her arguments with invented facts. Although sometimes factual errors will creep into a column, an editorial board has the responsibility to publish corrections. And when a particular columnist has twice used invented facts in columns, she ought to be required to present documentation before her column sees print. Especially so when she quote a head of state to the effect that he encourages soldiers to burn
children and rape women.

The board of the Daily Illini changed over winter break. Yet instead of printing a correction, the new board has printed a letter to the editor alleging the fabricated quote is accurate:

"As a person of Jewish faith and heritage ... I read the column in the Daily Illini ("Stop turning a blind eye," 12/11/03) and did some research to validate the author's quotes. They all checked out."

You may recall that this is not the first time that the Daily Illini has has an anti-Semitism problem. In January 2003 it printed an virulently anti-Israel letter. And the letter was not even from a student, it purportedly came from an individual in Seattle who appears not to exist.