Neil MacFarquhar's glossyMonday profile of Hezbollah's terrorist leader Sheikh Nasrallahincluded this description: "He always calls Israel 'the Zionist entity,' maintaining that all Jewish immigrants should return to their countries of origin and that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians."
Wednesday night on the O'Reilly Factor, Bernard Goldberg, the former CBS News reporter who confronted his network's liberal bias, bashed the gullible Times profile and pointed out that MacFarquhar's rendering, while meant to be a rare bit of criticism of Nasrallah, was actually far less sinister than what Nasrallah really has in mind for Jews once they all get back to Israel.
Goldberg reminded viewers of Nasrallah's assertionin the October 22, 2002 Lebanon Daily Star that if the Jews "all gather in Israel it will save us the trouble of going after them world wide."
Goldberg on the Factor: "And the Times just reports this as if he really means it. I don't think any serious person thinks he really believes it. So I do a little checking, and I mean a 'little' checking. And I come up with one more sentence from Sheikh Nasrallah that was in a major paper in Lebanon. And it says, 'If the Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.' The Times left that out of the story. Now, that's either sloppy reporting or willful ignorance. I don't know which it is, but neither of them is a good thing."
A Nexis search suggests that Nasrallah's dream of Jewish annihilation has appeared just once in the Times, and then only in a May 2004 book review by novelist Elena Lappin of an anti-Israeli book.
By the way, The Daily Star signed an exclusive marketing representation, printing and distribution agreement with the Times international edition, the International Herald Tribune, in 2000.