Crispian Balmer exhausts the "D" entries in his thesaurus

We would have said that the latest piece from Middle East newcomer Crispian Balmer (yes, that is actually his name) is, even by Reuters standards, egregiously biased but as we suggested in our commentary below, the media giant is now on its deathbed and clearly no longer has the will to honor its Trust Principles or enforce its Handbook of Journalism.

Thus, Balmer wants us to know that things are really, really grim in the Palestinian camp; the Palestinian Arabs are "dismayed", "disillusioned", "disappointed", "destroyed", "disgusted" -- oh, and "fed up" with years of failure in the peace process.  And that unless the United States comes down hard on the Jews to surrender their rights to live in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), the Palestinian Arabs will have to consider other options:

But Palestinians believe most countries now support their position and many argue that if these talks do indeed collapse, the time will have come to push the United Nations to recognize an independent Palestinian state, with or without Israeli consent.

What Balmer doesn't explain to his audience is that the United Nations General Assembly has already voted to grant the Palestinian Arabs a state as per UN Resolution 181, the Partition Plan, which also created a Jewish state -- Israel.  The problem for the Palestinians is that they rejected 181 when they went to war with Israel in 1947-48 and lost some of the territory on which their state would have been founded.  And they are still rejecting UN Resolution 181 by refusing to recognize a Jewish state.

Thus, in a story of 663 words, where Balmer feeds readers reams of Palestinian propaganda and violates the Reuters Handbook of Journalism by granting a mere 36 words for Israeli sources to counter the many fatuous Palestinian claims contained in his story, readers never learn that the Palestinians have had it in their power all along to achieve the Arab Muslim state they purportedly wail for -- if only they will agree to accept the Jewish state created by the same resolution.

So, click your heels together Mahmoud Abbas and repeat after me: there's no place like home... there's no place like home... there's no place like home...