Control Issues
IAP had offered a more odious version of Sharon’s boast. Claiming as its source a broadcast on the Israeli radio network Kol Yisrael, it had Sharon snapping to Shimon Peres, his foreign minister, “Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.” The difference in language suggested that Geyer had tidied up Sharon’s boast so it wouldn’t be red meat for anti-Semites.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
CAMERA wanted Universal Press to “make it clear that Sharon never uttered the words.” But hadn’t he? Geyer can’t prove it, but she says she still thinks that maybe he did. Her original sources sound a little sketchy. “I had that whole story on several different E-mails and faxes,” she tells me, and there was something either out of Ha’aretz or at least quoting the liberal Israeli daily. A source she’s sure of is the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. She was writing literally on the fly–she finished the column in an airplane May 8 on her way to Europe–and when she got back June 2, her column under siege, she couldn’t nail down the quote.
“I spent at least two full days checking it out,” she says. “I found a number of Israeli diplomats–foreign diplomats in Israel–who said they’d read it in Ha’aretz. But the fact is, I could not pin down the event. I can’t get the original sources. I don’t have the right kind of inner-sanctum contacts in the cabinet. So that’s why we decided to run the clarification.”
This is the sort of vicious stuff that explains why CAMERA fears letting a single falsehood pass.
Says Abunimah, “If the top paid spokesman for Israel says, ‘We’re not getting a bad deal from the American media,’ that’s pretty authoritative. These groups cannot tolerate any image which reflects negatively on Israel. So they take mistakes like this one–a mislabeled photograph, a quote that can’t be verified–and try to blow that up into a federal case.”
A case can be made that after last week’s column I’ve made one trip too many to a certain well. The idea that the funky tabloid that markets itself as an “independent newspaper” for Chicago’s real people is under the sway of a member of Britain’s House of Lords continues to fill me with merriment, but as a point of press criticism it might be tapped out. Conrad Black has invested a good bit of his money here but little of his concern. He reserves that for London, where he rules the Telegraph; for New York, where he’s an important backer of the new daily, the Sun; and for Washington, the seat of international power where to his regret he owns nothing. Sun-Times publisher David Radler runs the show for Hollinger International in Chicago, and if the Black-Radler alliance were ever to collapse, Radler would probably go on running it. He likes our city. And he’s untitled.
