Under the headline "Postmidnight 'Homecoming' for Arafat," the New York Times today reports on a brief visit by Yasser Arafat to Jerusalem. The Times reports, "There is no record that Mr. Arafat has been in Jerusalem, where, his official biography says, he was born, since Israel seized the Old City and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war."
No matter what Mr. Arafat's "official biography" claims, it's been pretty widely established by independent biographers that he was born and educated at Cairo, Egypt. But the Times, it seems, has no interest in letting the facts stand in the way of its mission of disseminating on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization the "official" propaganda line. The fact that the Times goes to the trouble of attributing the Jerusalem birth myth to Mr. Arafat's official biography would seem to indicate that the newspaper is aware that the matter is in dispute. Why give only the official Palestinian Arab version of the tale?
'Rashidi Khalidi': A front page "news analysis" in today's New York Times quotes "Rashidi Khalidi, professor of Middle East history at the University of Chicago." It's amazing how the Times is so bad at spelling names that the newspaper can even manage to misspell on December 29 the name of a professor who contributed an op-ed piece that the Times itself published on December 27. That op-ed piece was bylined "Rashid I. Khalidi." The news story mangles that into "Rashidi Khalidi."
Kurt Gdel: An obituary of the philosopher W.V. Quine in today's New York Times makes reference to the philosopher "Kurt Gdel." The more common rendering of the name in English, and one the Times has itself used in the past, is Godel.