The four day correction
Saul Singer is the gift that keeps on giving today. He alerts us to Warren Hoge's May 28 New York Times obituary on Indar Jit Rikhye. As I noted last summer in "Déjà vu, all over again," Hoge is the Times twit who served as the mouthpiece for anonymous European diplomats undermining John Bolton at the United Nations. Hoge wrote in his obituary of Rikhye on the start of the Six Day War:
He oversaw the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force in Gaza and the Sinai in June 1967, when it found itself in the path of the advancing Israel Defense Forces and had all its vehicles wrecked, its communications knocked out and three of its soldiers killed.Hoge packs errors of omission and commision into that sentence. In reality the UN had been ordered out by Nasser three weeks before, contributing to the onset of the war. Four days after Hoge's May 28 obituary of Rikhye, the Times appended the following correction to it:
An obituary on Monday about Indar Jit Rikhye, an Indian general who was a top adviser to United Nations peacekeepers, referred incompletely to the circumstances of the withdrawal overseen by General Rikhye of the United Nations Emergency Force in Gaza and the Sinai in June 1967. While he and some peacekeepers were caught in the path of Israeli forces, the Israelis were not responsible for their expulsion. Egypt had expelled the peacekeepers from Sinai and Gaza in mid-May, which Israel viewed as part of an Egyptian plan for war. General Rikhye — who was trying to appeal that expulsion — and some men remained. When Israel pre-emptively attacked Egypt in early June, starting the Six-Day War, the remaining peacekeepers were in their path.Saul comments:
The correction hardly captures the egregiousness of the error, and it is yet another example of the strange fact that almost all New York Times "errors" on Israel lean in one direction.Martin Peretz exposed Hoge's hashed history last week here. Peretz sagely prophesied: "I am sure that there will be a finicky little correction in tomorrow's New York Times parsing the gross distortion into some minor blur."
Interested readers may want to consult pages 67-75 of Michael Oren's history of the Six Day War, which includes Timesman C.L. Sulzberger describing UN General Secretary U Thant regarding Thant's order for the removal of the UN forces in May. Oren quotes Sulzberger describing Thant as having "the objectivity of a spurned lover and the dynamism of a noodle." I don't know whether the "dynamism" component of Sulzberger's critique of Thant applies to Hoge, but I think the "objectivity" component certainly does.
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