Silverstein Hoodwinks The Media Again

Aussie Dave | Aug 15, 2012

Anti-Israel blogger Richard Silverstein has published “Bibi’s secret war plan” against Iran, which he claims to have received from a high-level Israeli source who received it from an IDF officer.

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/08/15/bibis-secret-war-plan/
Silverstein goes into detail regarding the supposed plan, albeit with the assistance of a translator who makes up for his lack of knowledge in Hebrew.

Reading his post, it is clear Silverstein’s main purpose is to undermine Israel’s security, although satisfying his lust for the limelight is also a clear motivation.

After much effort to try and bring his so-called scoop to the attention of all and sundry (judging by his Twitter feed).


..Silverstein’s post does attract the attention of some media outlets, including the BBC, Ynet, and Maariv.
There’s just one problem. The so-called attack plan was posted on an online forum days before Silverstein’s so-called scoop! And the forum post states explicitly that the info presented is based only on foreign and open sources.
Of course, when pointed out to Silverstein, he can’t accept the reality.

Israelis are posting a claim that the document I published is identical to a post published by Fresh a few days ago.  It is not.  My original IDF source may have leaked the post to someone at Fresh.  But whoever published it there embellished it with much material that is not in the original document.  I can’t ascribe motives to whoever published it at Fresh, but much of it appears fanciful and isn’t in the original document.

Silverstein also chooses to ignore the forum’s statement about the post being based only on foreign and open sources (or perhaps it is his inability to understand Hebrew)
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/08/15/bibis-secret-war-plan/#comment-297223

Portions of the document I published are contained in the Fresh posting of 2002. Of course the IDF uses portions of its briefing memos for presentations and updates them as they develop new weapons systems. That’s what all militaries do. In 2002, they produced a document which was leaked to Fresh. The document I published contains other information that is not in the Fresh posting and the Fresh posting contains highly fictionalized scenarios which are not in the document I posted.

Notice how he even gets the year of the forum post wrong!
I thought that after I exposed Silverstein’s lack of fact-checking and proclivity to fabricate time and again, the media would start to ignore him. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Hopefully, after this latest embarassing episode, they will finally learn their lesson.