I guess we should resign ourselves to a seeing a variation of this lie after every single Al Qaeda attack. Post-Jordan bombing, a friend alerts me to a dispatch from Haaretz, of all places:
Israelis evacuated from Amman hotel hours before bombings
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent
A number of Israelis staying on Wednesday at the Radisson hotel were evacuated before the bombing by Jordanian security forces, apparently due to a specific security alert. They were escorted back to Israel by security personnel.
Note: No attribution, no quotes, just the reporter’s assertion. The remaining two short paragraphs reveal nothing about where this claim came from.
Fast forward to the next day. The headline and first paragraph of the same story:
No truth to report of Israeli evacuations before Amman bombs
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent
There is no truth to reports that Israelis staying at the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman on Wednesday were evacuated by Jordanian security forces before the bombing that took place there.
Where the previous day’s information came from, it does not say.
The bogus claim appeared also in this LA Times dispatch:
Amos N. Guiora, a former senior Israeli counter-terrorism official, said in a phone interview with The Times that sources in Israel had also told him about the pre-attack evacuations.
“It means there was excellent intelligence that this thing was going to happen,” said Guiora, a former leader of the Israel Defense Forces who now heads the Institute for Global Security Law and Policy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “The question that needs to be answered is why weren’t the Jordanians working at the hotel similarly removed?”
Guiora, in all likelihood, said this before Haaretz retracted. My friend has a query into him about whether he wants to retract as well.
Before the retraction, Juan Cole speculated:
The Jordanian secret police are very good about penetrating these Islamist cells, and the logical conclusion is that they got wind of an attack specifically on Israelis, not realizing that the operatives intended to hit the hotels in general.
Logical? When has Al Qaeda ever refrained from indiscriminate killing? Were gunmen going to calmly ferret out the Israeli passports and then discreetly spray the Israelis with gunfire?
No, the logical conclusion is that these stories are deliberately planted to inflame Arab, Muslim and world opinion against Israelis and Jews.
**Update: My friend chalks up the LA Times report to sloppiness:
“The way LAT worded it they made it sound like this guy got his info from ‘sources in israel’. it’s possible he just meant people who’d seen the haaretz report; who knows.”
Agreed. The LAT citation of Guiora is meaningless.
**Update 11/11/05: The latest damage control from Yoav Stern in Haaretz.
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