On September 23, the Globe and Mail published (in print and online) an oped by Michael Bell who erroneously claimed the following:
“The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is powerless. Some 1,000 new Israeli settlements are slated for the West Bank and the security barrier is to be expanded. There is nothing the PA, Fatah, or Hamas can do, although Palestinian radicals have the ability to disrupt the lives of Israeli citizens, as they continue to do in the so-called “intifada of the knives.”
Contrary to this statement, Israel has not built a new settlement in many many years, nor is it planning on building 1,000+ new settlements in the near future. Instead, Israel may be building several hundred homes within existing settlements. There are no new settlements slated for the west bank.
While Mr. Bell is entitled to his own opinions, he’s not entitled to his own facts. Accordingly, HonestReporting Canada told senior editors at the Globe and Mail that a correction should be issued to set the record straight.
Commendably, the Globe agreed that an error had been made, thanked HRC for bringing it to their attention, and commissioned the following correction which appeared in the September 24 edition of the Globe:
While it’s regrettable that the Globe failed to explicitly refer to the new housing starts as taking place within existing settlements in their correction, at the very least, Mr. Bell’s error is no longer featured on the Globe’s website.
