Economist is Latest to Falsely Claim 3 Kidnapped Teens are ‘Settlers’
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by Adam Levick
Yaalon meets with parents of kidnapped teens (courtesy Israel Ministry of Defense)
An article in the print edition of the Economist on June 21 titled ‘Stirring Bad Blood‘ included false claims in the opening and final sentences.
Here’s the first sentence of the anonymous report:
The abduction of three young Jewish settlers on June 12th near the city of Hebron, in the south of the West Bank, has stirred Israeli emotions as viscerally as the kidnapping of a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, by militants of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, eight years ago.
However, as we noted in a post on June 16th (and noted elsewhere), two of the three teens are not settlers, a fact which, when pointed out to Guardian editors, resulted in a correction to their own false claim about the location of the Israeli teens’ homes. (The Indy, at our prompting, also corrected their false claim that all three teens were settlers.)
Additionally, the Economist article includes this claim in the final sentence:
A Facebook page posted by an Israeli calling for the execution of one Palestinian prisoner every hour until the young hostages were freed quickly attracted 17,000 likes.
However, as an accurate translation of the Hebrew on the Facebook page clearly indicates, the words “Palestinian” or “prisoner” are not present – a fact that prompted Guardian editors to improve their original faulty translation of the page in an article by Orlando Crowcroft on June 17th.
Here’s the correct translation of the Facebook page:
Until the teens are returned, every hour we shoot a terrorist.
We’ve been in touch with Economist editors over these errors and will update you when we receive a response.
Adam Levick is the managing editor of CiF Watch, an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
