Oriana Fallaci & George Habash: A Correction 2

Further to yesterday's post on Fallaci and Habash, after sending As'ad Abukhalil a link, he has responded to my post on his website as follows:

"Oh no, I am not confused. Her profile in Life magazine was NOT an honest piece of reportage, and it was in that profile that she fabricated a quotation by Habash." (23/8/12)

Just to get to the bottom of the matter, here's Abukhalil's post of 4 February 2008, written in response to my original post on the subject, Fabricating Dr George Habash (2/2/08) (NB: The quotation comes from Fabricating Dr George Habash.):

The lies of Fallaci: "There's only one problem - Habash said nothing of the kind, and the text of Fallaci's 1970 Life interview with him gives her lunacy the lie. To begin with, the interview took place in 1970, not 1972, the Palestinian resistance having been purged from Jordan by July 1971. Then there's the nonsense about the gun. In the introduction to the interview, she wrote, 'We met at night in the suburbs of Amman, in a building attached to a refugee camp. The room contained one desk and a few chairs; outside the closed doors, armed fedayeen stood guard. Inside there were only 4 of us: Habash, myself, a photographer and the man who had driven us there'." (thanks Merc)

Now in my 2008 post, Fabricating Dr George Habash, I compared Fallaci's 1970 Life interview with Habash to the reworking of that interview in her 2004 book The Force of Reason, exposing the latter as an obvious forgery.

It may well be that Fallaci's original Life interview contained a fabricated quotation. I don't know. If that is the case, as Abukhalil contends, then what we're dealing with here amounts to a fabrication (Fallaci: 2004) of a fabrication (Fallaci: 1970). (I note, for example, that AbuKhalil, in his 18/3/12 comments on Daniel Byman's book A High Price: The Triumph & Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, mentions that Byman cites "an invented quotation attributed falsely by the fanatical Zionist journalist Oriana Fallaci to George Habash." It would be interesting to know what that quotation is.)

I again refer those who are interested in the matter to my original 2/2/08 post Fabricating Dr George Habash.