Actress Meg Ryan. Photo: Wikipedia.

The publicist of actress Meg Ryan, has flatly denied that the star has ever boycotted Israel. The formal denial comes just over two weeks after the Toronto Star published a report claiming that the 51 year old celebrity was among those who “have refused to perform in Israel in recent years as part of an effort to promote the Palestinian cause.”

“That report is untrue. Meg Ryan never participated in any boycott against Israel,” wrote Stephen Huvane of Slate PR in an email correspondence seen by The Algemeiner.

Asked about the reported cancellation of a 2010 trip to Israel to participate in the Jerusalem Film Festival. Huvane wrote, “I am her publicist and I am not aware of her committing to the Jerusalem Film Festival.  She may have been invited although I don’t have record of that but we never committed to attending.”

The denial was prompted by an inquiry from CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, an eagle eyed media watchdog group that only days earlier prompted the Star, Canada’s highest circulation newspaper as of 2011 to issue an apology for claiming that actor Bruce Willis was also among those that have boycotted the Jewish state in a May 8th article.

“Celebrities from around the world have refused to perform in Israel in recent years as part of an effort to promote the Palestinian cause, including musicians Elvis Costello and Stevie Wonder, and Hollywood actors Bruce Willis and Meg Ryan,” wrote the paper in a report about physicist Steven Hawking’s boycott of the the fifth annual Israeli Presidential Conference.

“Reporter Raveena Aulakh mistakenly included Willis among celebrities who support the pro-Palestinian boycott movement after seeing his name in a number of other online media and blog reports about the boycott,” wrote the paper’s public editor Kathy English on Friday.

“That erroneous information about Willis continues to circulate in the echo chamber of the Internet where a false claim from a biased source can easily become a ‘fact’ amplified many times over to the point that journalists no longer think to verify it, as was seemingly the case here,” English continued.

On its blog, CAMERA adds that is has identified yet another mistake in the report that it is seeking to correct.

“In addition, we informed the Star that the claim that Stevie Wonder had ‘refused to perform in Israel’ is also inaccurate. In fact, as reported for instance in New York Times and Reuters, Mr. Wonder backed out of a Friends of the Israel Defence Forces benefit concert in Los Angeles,” CAMERA analyst Tamar Sternthal writes.

The public editor of the Toronto Star could not immediately be reached by The Algemeiner for comment.