The Jerusalem Post Lies

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I went to the Jerusalem Post looking for the story that said that Al Jazeera said that it was the USAF that bombed Syria September 6th. I got sidetracked by this article:

Preventing World War III

In it columnist Caroline Glick claims that in 2005 elBaradei said that Iran could produce a nuclear bomb in "a few months." I was struck by that claim and decided to follow it up. I have quoted the relevant part of her article below.

Take for example the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency Muhammad elBaradei's recent remarks on the subject. Speaking to ,i>Le Monde on Monday, elBaradei asserted that it will take Iran between three to eight years to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Consequently, he argued, there is no reason to consider conducting a military strike against Teheran's program. There is still plenty of time for diplomacy, or sanctions or even incentives for the ayatollahs, he said.

ElBaradei's statement is only interesting when it is compared to a statement he made in December 2005 to the Independent. Back then Baradei's view was that Iran was just "a few months" away from producing atomic bombs. But then too he saw no reason to attack. As he put it when he warned that Iran was on the precipice of nuclear weapons, using force would just "open Pandora's box." "There would be efforts to isolate Iran; Iran would retaliate, and at the end of the day, you have to go back to the negotiation table to find the solution," elBaradei warned.

The Jerusalem Post 25 October 2007

No doubt this is an excerpt from The Independent article to which she refers:

But he warned that if Iran carries out a threat to reopen its mothballed Natanz underground enrichment plant, a dangerous escalation will ensue, and raise fresh questions about Iran's insistence that its nuclear intentions are peaceful. "If they start enriching this is a major issue and a serious concern for the international community," he said.

Although IAEA officials have said it would take at least two years for Natanz to become fully operational, Mr ElBaradei believes that once the facility is up and running, the Iranians could be "a few months" away from a nuclear weapon. "That's why there is the concern of the international community about Iran," he said, "because lots of people feel it could be a dual purpose programme".

The Independent, 05 December 2005


So what elBaradei really said was that if the Iranians opened a closed enrichment plant, and ran it for at least two years, they would be "a few months" away from a nuclear weapon. In other words, in December 2005 elBaradei said that the Iranian were at least two years and a few months away from a bomb on a clock that hadn't even started running yet and this the Jerusalem Post represents as him saying that the Iranian were, two years ago, only a few months from the bomb on a clock that was already running.

This is a complete misrepresentation of what elBaradei told The Independent, in short it is a lie. A falsehood like this shows a complete lack of journalist ethics on the part of the the Jerusalem Post. That would be true and bad enough if done on any subject, but this lie is much, much worst because it is being done to promote a war and the mass murder of Iranians.

If we can't trust the Jerusalem Post to accurately represent easily checked [by English readers] articles from The Independent, how much creditability can we give to their presentation of something from an Arabic only website?