Last week, we posted about a Financial Times article that referred to Ghassan Kanafani merely as a “firebrand leftist”, whilst omitting that he was a terrorist with Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the terror group that coordinated the Lod Airport Massacre in 1972, as well as scores of other deadly attacks.
Here’s the original wording in the Dec. 9th article by Jerusalem correspondent Mehul Srivastava, titled “Reading as resistance: the bookshops keeping free speech alive”:
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 the Mossad in 1972.
We complained to Financial Times editors, arguing that the omission regarding Kanafani’s terror affiliation erroneously suggests that he was assassinated by the Mossad merely for being a “leftist” political activist.
They upheld our complaint, and revised the sentence accordingly:
The walls 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, when he was a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Typical watered down correction, claiming he was merely a spokesman for the terrorist organization