Before Pallywood, They Made Do With Fake Quotes

In Today's Palestinian Arab lie (#54,213), Elder of Ziyon fisks a citation by some Arab journalist of a quote by someone close to Barak, twisting it into:

When Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, compared Palestinians in a Jerusalem Post interview (August 2000) to “crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more,” he was hardly diverting from a consistent Zionist tradition that equated Palestinians with animals and vermin.

Other than who said this and what they actually said--the Arab journalist is exactly right.
Stuff like this is a leftover from the old days--before Pallywood.

From 2004, check out CAMERA's: Exposing False Zionist Quotes (Quote Busters), which reviews some of the favorite quotes of 'Zionists' that were either never said or are quoted out of context.

Take for example, the following quote (found on anti-Israel Web sites) alleged to have been said by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the Israeli parliament in October 2001 and reported on Kol Yisrael radio:

Don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.

The statement also appears as "I control America."

As it turns out, it is a hoax. Sharon never made either statement. Nor did Kol Yisrael ever report that he did.

Yet syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer wrote in her May 10, 2002 opinion column, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune, San Diego Tribune, and other newspapers:

In fact, it [American support for Israel''s actions] led Prime Minister Sharon to tell his Cabinet recently, "I control America."

...When confronted, Geyer told one editor that she relied on two anonymous Israeli sources for the quotation. She told a second editor the quote came from an alleged Ha'aretz article which she never produced and could not be found. A subsequent editor's note by Geyer's United Press Syndicate claimed the quote was widely reported in the Palestinian press (i.e. the IAP, which cited the bogus Kol Yisrael source) but could not be confirmed by independent sources.

Here is another example:

President Moshe Katsav

There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies – not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.

Source given: Israeli president Moshe Katsav, Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

Investigation: While nothing was found in the source given, there was an account in the following day's edition of the Jerusalem Post. When examined in context, it no longer sounds racist. Katsav was specifically talking about the brutal murders by Palestinian terrorists of two young schoolboys. The remains of Kobi Mandel and Yossi Ish-Ran, who had played hooky from school to explore a cave, were found on May 9, 2001.

CAMERA has other articles on quote distortions:

In Exposing False Zionist Quotes II (Quote Busters II), CAMERA examines some of the misquotes presented by groups such as Hanan Ashrawi's MIFTAH and Robert Fisk.

Under Urban Myths and Misquotes, CAMERA has an assortment of articles--the latest entry is from February: The Fraudulent Scholarship of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, which has a section on falsified quotations used in the book version of their paper.

Even with Pallywood, when push comes to shove the enemies of Israel fall back on the tried and true.

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