Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Fabrications on the Left   [Michael Rubin]

As the Beauchamp scandal winds down, it's important to realize that outright fabrication for the sake of politics is not uncommon. A while ago, Mark Leon Goldberg managed to fabricate a snippet about me and also make fun of my religion in a short piece for The American Prospect. What he describes as "bounc[ing] around like a 6-year-old at Hanukkah," was actually seating a blind man, at which point, disliking crowds—as anyone who knows me knows—I watched the event from a television in a different room. When a mutual friend called Goldberg on it, he said he wrote it to be "funny" and didn't see the harm is taking such liberties, as fictional as they were. Goldberg has never apologized; his lack of integrity marks any publication for which he writes.

Likewise, Robert Dreyfuss—another American Prospect writer who was once the Middle East intelligence correspondent for Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review as his bio on his first book Hostage to Khomeini shows, wrote (on the TomPaine website) that he had cornered Gen. Sattler in the hallway after my talk at AEI to ask him about what I had said. The only problem: Sattler had left AEI a half hour before I even spoke (as the video shows). Dreyfuss made it up. I later called Dreyfuss on it, but no retraction. Perhaps for such advocacy journalism, some of the authors and editors feel the ends justify the means.

08/07 06:55 AMShare