False Moshe Ya'Alon Quotation

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In 2002 through 2009 a "notorious" remark was falsely attributed to Israeli General Moshe Ya'alon. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, "It's the kind of quote that makes readers sit up and pay attention." But, "Yaalon never uttered those words." The quote, "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people," was first attributed to Ya'alon in 2002, but "Yaalon did not say what he is supposed to have said." The Toronto Star concluded that that Ya'alon "certainly," did not utter these words during the 2002 interview with Ari Shavit, a Haaretz reporter, although this interview is widely cited as the original source of the remark. The paper cites the incident as "a case study in a seldom-examined aspect of popular culture in the electronic age - the self-replicating propagation of erroneous information."