When Peace Now meets up with the New York Times, you know it won't be When Harry Met Sally. In fact, it could get ugly, for Israel, as it did last November.

Back on November 20, 2006, actually only four months ago, the Times led the day's news with a screaming headline that shamed the Jewish State. The (erroneous) information was provided to the Times by Peace Now, a group that appears troubled by the Jewish character of the Jewish State and therefore keeps tempting Israel to eat from the tree of capitulation.

So, here's the Times' headline from November: "Israeli Map Says West Bank Posts Sit on Arab Land."

In law enforcement, this is called "shoot first, ask questions later." In journalism, such r
When Peace Now talks, the Times listens.
ush to judgment against Israel is called, well, the New York Times.

Maps and figures, as part of a Peace Now report intended to blame Israel for everything under the sun, were leaked to the Times by Peace Now "activists;" and when Peace Now talks, the Times listens. This is quite a romance. These two have got to stop meeting like this.

The Times' article was written by the reliable (reliably biased) Steven Erlanger, who went on to note that members of Peace Now "wanted to expose what they consider to be wide scale violations [by Israel] of private Palestinian property by the government and settlers."

If there's any doubt that the Times and Peace Now act as a team, Erlanger reveals that "an advance copy [of the Peace Now report] was made available to the New York Times." (How cozy!) This report cites the Jewish town Maaleh Adumim as a place that sits on 86 percent of what used to be Arab territory.

Ordinarily, a story like this comes under the heading "analysis," more suitable for page 36 instead of front page, where such news might constitute incitement. Journalism 101 dictates that Page One should be reserved for "breaking stories," and this does not qualify - unless it is Israel that you are trying to break.

(Did the Times double-check the facts before rushing to print, or was this scoop simply too juicy?)

Still, all that business about Jewish land theft seemed plausible enough, coming as it did from the "paper of record." Making it even more plausible was the source. The source? A group that calls itself Peace Now. (Go argue with Peace.) Doesn't get any better than that, unless you know "the rest of the story."

Which is? Which is that, oops, slight mistake. Turns out (as reported by IsraelNationalNews.com) that "Peace Now Admits Mistaken Report." How so? "After discussions with [Israel's] Civil Administration, the group admitted that only 0.5 percent of Maaleh Adumim was built on private land."

You do the math. (Media watchdog CAMERA finds the Peace Now-New York Times figure off by 15,900 percent.)

So, now that Peace Now has retracted, though not publicly (more on that in a minute), where oh where is the correction, the retraction, the apology from the Times? Maybe it's so
CAMERA finds the Peace Now figure off by 15,900 percent.
me place, but I sure can't find it, certainly not front page, as before. So, the black eye, the near-slander, persists.

(Shades of the Muhammad Al-Dura blood libel.)

Oh, did I say that Peace Now has retracted its Big Lie? Well, not exactly.

"Peace Now activists," as reported in INN, "blame the army for the mistake, saying that military officials should have shown activists the data before the report's release."

Sure, blame Israel again and again.

As for the Times, this type of slop, duplicity, manipulation and incitement shames all of journalism.

Part 12 of The Bathsheba Deadline, Jack Engelhard's latest novel, is now available. This installment of the serialized novel, the first published by Amazon.com, may well be its grand finale. Click here to find out! Haven't started reading it yet? Click the link and scroll down - all previous installments are there and ready to be downloaded.