Fabricating history

In a story about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu touring a naval base outside Haifa, it takes only 29 words for correspondent Dan Williams to repeat a historical reconstruction, i.e., a fabrication Reuters has been running in its stories for the last five months:

Saying "I salute you," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the headquarters on Tuesday of Israeli naval commandos who killed nine pro-Palestinian Turks aboard a Gaza-bound aid ship in May.

As we've noted several times, there was absolutely no humanitarian aid aboard the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship where the violence took place.  Thus, Williams is either misleading his audience by using the word "aid" when he actually means political support and money, or he's lying.

Williams then employs a misleading euphemism to describe the passengers aboard who participated in the violence ("activists"), parrots another euphemism to sanitize the offensive nature of that violence ("resisted"), and ignores objective evidence in the form of video footage which categorically rebuts passenger claims:

Activists from the Mavi Marmara have confirmed they resisted the Israeli boarding party but denied provoking lethal violence.

Just another day at the Reuters office for Dan Williams.