A Financial Times article (Reading as resistance: the bookshops keeping free speech alive, Dec. 9) included profiles, by several contributors, of bookshops across the world – including one located in the Jaffa neighborhood of Tel Aviv. This section of the article, written by the Financial Times Jerusalem correspondent Mehul Srivastava, included the following sentences about the Yafa Book Store and Cafe:
The walls [of the bookshop] are lined with the work of authors despised by the Israeli rightwing. Noam Chomsky, the Jewish-American linguist who was barred from entering Israel in 2010, rubs shoulders with Ghassan Kanafani, the firebrand Palestinian leftist assassinated by Mossad in 1972.
However, in addition to being a “leftist” writer, Ghassan Kanafani was also a high-ranking member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Marxist-Leninist terror organisation responsible for hijackings, suicide bombings and the murder of Israel’s tourism minister in 2001.
Kanafani was the right hand man to the group’s leader George Habash and met with members of the Japanese Red Army who, in concert with the PFLP, murdered 26 people in the Lod Airport Massacre in 1972 – which is why, it’s believed, he was assassinated by the Mossad.
We’ve complained to Financial Times editors about this egregious distortion.
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