Louis Charbonneau continues to prevaricate

Last month, we caught Reuters correspondent Louis Charbonneau in a lie when he asserted that the Quartet -- the US, EU, Russia and the UN -- had characterized Israeli settlements as "illegal".  Now that the United Nations Security Council has also spoken on the matter, failing to carry a Palestinian-advanced draft resolution declaring the settlements illegal, Charbonneau resorts to Plan B: characterize the land on which Jewish settlements are built as "Palestinian":

(Reuters) - The United States on Friday vetoed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements on Palestinian land after the Palestinians refused a compromise offer from Washington.

In fact of course, the land in question is not Palestinian at all but a combination of private land legally purchased by Jews and public lands formerly illegally occupied by Jordan.  The national status of the territories remains officially unallocated.  But this is simply too much for those like Charbonneau who fancy themselves the final arbiters of international law and seek to use the bully pulpit of the largest media agency in the world to advance their personal politics.

Charbonneau then repeats the tired canard that:

U.N. diplomats say the Palestinian Authority, which has been trying to defend itself against critics who accuse it of caving in to the Americans and Israelis during peace talks, was eager to show that it can stand up to Washington.

Oh yes, one can certainly see that the Palestinians caved in to the Israelis during peace talks by utterly refusing, as they have for nearly a century, to acknowledge a nation-state for the Jewish people.