(UPDATED) And the Award for ‘Truly Horrible Choice of Words’ Goes to…
…Israel’s widely respected deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, for warning that “Palestinians will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
UPDATE: National Review Online’s Tom Gross says that this quote is the result of a mistranslated, and points a finger with Reuters:
In fact Vilnai said this morning in off-the-cuff remarks made on Israel Radio that: “The more the Qassam rocket fire [on Israeli civilians] intensifies and increases its range, the Palestinians are bringing upon themselves a bigger disaster because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
Vilnai used the word “shoah” (meaning disaster), which Reuters mistranslated as “Holocaust,” which is “HaShoah” in Hebrew. It is like confusing a “white house” with “The White House.”
Assuming NRO is correct, it’s interesting that Y-Net (my source), which posted the Reuters article, didn’t catch this, given that it is the English-language Web site of an Israeli newspaper, where the native language does happen to be Hebrew.
