Regret the Error

In a Perspective piece by Gary Fields, professor of communications at the University of California, San Diego, that ran in Feb. 22, 2004, editions of the Chicago Tribune, an unverified quote was used and attributed to the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon. The op-ed quoted Yaalon as saying that “the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.” While cited frequently over the years, this quote does not appear in the Israeli newspaper article to which it has been attributed, and the writer of that article said Yaalon did not say this. Fields could not confirm the origin of the quote. A spokesman for Yaalon said Thursday that Yaalon was misquoted and did not say the sentence attributed to him. Since the exact origin of the quotation has not been found and verified, it should not have been used in the Tribune. Link