The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)? has finally posted the Alan Parsons? story. Their story has an indirect link to Israellycool? but only via the tweet from Alan Parsons when he landed in Israel. There is no direct mention of Israellycool. Once again a humble blog has scooped the lavishly funded news agencies and the dependent organs like the Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel who reprint their work.
This is how JTA reported the tweet:
“Very happy to be in Tel Aviv!” Parsons tweeted Sunday.
The Times of Israel even embeds the tweet like this:
Embedding the tweet highlights JTA’s failure even more. Alan Parsons didn’t just say “Very happy to be in Tel Aviv!”: he linked to a blog post about the story on the leading blog that covers Roger Waters’ repugnant views on Israel.
Aussie Dave has written more on Roger Waters at Israellycool than pretty much any other source in the world. So the action of Alan Parsons directly linking to Aussie Dave’s blog post was a much more important part of the story than the six words JTA actually quoted!
It’s rather remarkable that JTA, and those news sites who mindlessly re-ran the story, managed to so completely misquote a tweet limited to 140 characters!
Israellycool IS part of the story because Alan Parsons first act on landing in Israel was to link to Dave’s blog post.
At the point he sent the tweet (and a corresponding Facebook post) it was Alan Parsons only public comment because he had specifically requested Roger Waters keep the whole thing private. That was the undercurrent which Aussie Dave correctly picked up on before the rest of the media jumped on it.
Arutz 7 managed to work this out and they correctly quoted from the Israellycool blog post (a link would have been nice guys thanks for the link Arutz 7!). This was the analysis missing from the left leaning JTA. From JTA the story jumped first to the Jerusalem Post and then, eventually, the Times of Israel. One wonders why JTA, and those who slavishly run their pieces, couldn’t bare to link or quote directly from Israellycool even while Alan Parsons can.
I don’t need to tell all of you, our loyal blog readers, why you follow blogs like ours for your news. You like to be ahead of the herd with this kind of story. So thank you for following us, we do it for you.
Update: An honourable mention also to The Blaze for this:
The pro-Israel blog Israellycool on Sunday noted that Waters presented some erroneous facts in his correspondence with Parsons, specifically the number of Palestinian civilians killed in last summer’s hostilities between Israel and Hamas, many of whom it was later discovered were Hamas fighters.
The blog also said Waters appeared to be “giving Hamas and company a free pass” when he accused Israel of using “human shields” as Hamas stored and fired multiple rockets from schools, hospitals and mosques.
