Fudging the Palestinian Nakba at The Australian

I'm afraid the Australian's new Middle East correspondent Jamie Walker has blotted his copybook again.

In yesterday's report on the Islamic State takeover of Damascus' Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, we get a gratuitous, unattributed factoid like this:

"Assad is said to have sponsored the rise of Islamic State in Syria in a cynical double play to persuade the West that his war was with the Islamists, not his own people." (Call for blood donations echoes from camp minarets, 6/4/15)

Is said to have? How authoritative is that? So USrael, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan, and Turkey have nothing whatever to do with sponsoring the rise of IS? It's all Asad's doing? Seriously?

On the other hand, when it comes to the fact of Palestine's ethnic-cleansing by Jewish State in 1948, he manages to pull not one, but two punches:

*"Yarmouk used to be a byword for the tragedy that had overtaken Palestinians displaced by war with Israel."

*"The descendants of Palestinian refugees from Israel's 1948 war of independence..."

Applying the expression displaced by war to the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 is a fudge for the deliberate and systematic uprooting and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians by Zionist terror gangs, one of the 20th century's most heinous, but consistently denied, crimes against humanity. 

And as for referring to the nakba as Israel's war of independence (against whom exactly?), that's just deploying grandiloquent Zionist hype, an appropriation of America's war of independence. Just imagine white, settler-colonial America referring to its genocide of Native Americans as its 'war of independence' and you'll get the idea.