Sunday, January 27, 2008

Look at the headline of Habash's obituary in the New York Times. It is weird: when I lived in Lebanon nobody cared how the Middle East is covered in the New York Times or the Washington Post. And then you live in the US, this deceptively seems important. And by the way, a quotation attributed to him in an interview with a German magazine was invented by the well-known fabricator, Oriana Fallaci, who interviewed him for Life in 1970. Shame on John Kifner, who should know better, for this lousy and inaccurate obituary. Notice that nowhere in the article does the authors mention that Habash expelled Wadi` Haddad from PFLP over disagreements about hijackings and "international operations." And some of the hijackings mentioned in the article were undertaken by the separate organization set up by Wadi` Haddad and which used its own name (Foreign Operations-PFLP). And Al-Hakim is NOT Habash's nom de guerre, as was claimed. Habash never used a nom de guerre as he was too well-known from his student days to use a cover. The name was used since he started operating among the refugees in the camps.