Whack-A-Mole

With nearly 3,000 staffers worldwide, there are always those at Reuters who appear not to get the memo that the company has been caught out publishing false and fabricated information, employing overt propaganda, and spinning the news, maliciously, to harm national, religious and ethnic groups the agency's journalists hold in contempt.

These writers and editors continue to prepare stories incorporating false and malicious material long ago exposed as such on this website and elsewhere.

In a story appearing yesterday on the Reuters website and syndicated to perhaps hundreds of newspapers worldwide, Reuters correspondents Sebastian Moffett and Daren Butler report on the Turkish government blocking Israel from participating in an upcoming NATO summit:

(Reuters) - Turkey has refused to allow Israel to take part in a NATO summit next month because the Jewish state has not apologized for the 2010 killing of Turkish activists in a raid on a ship taking aid to Palestinians, a Turkish official said on Monday.
Relations between the regional powers deteriorated sharply after Israeli commandos raided the Mavi Marmara aid vessel in May 2010 to enforce a naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and killed nine Turks in clashes with activists.
Last September, Turkey expelled Israel's envoy and froze military cooperation after a U.N. report on the raid failed to prompt an apology from Israel.

Independent reports, including that of the United Nations cited by Reuters, concluded that the Mavi Marmara carried no humanitarian aid whatsoever and that passengers on board the ship, many of whom were members of the terror-linked Islamist group İnsani Yardım Vakfı (IHH), planned and actively sought violent confrontation with Israeli forces:

There were humanitarian supplies and construction materials on board three of the vessels in the flotilla (the Defne Y, Sofia and the Gazze I). No humanitarian supplies were found on the remaining vessels. Weapons and combat equipment were found on board the Mavi Marmara, including flares, rods, axes, knives, tear gas, gas masks, protective vests and night-vision goggles.

It is thus false and willfully misleading for Moffett and Butler to characterize the Mavi Marmara as an "aid vessel", to assert that the ship was "taking aid to Palestinians" and to describe the passengers who attempted to kill Israeli marines boarding the ship with the anodyne term "activists".

To date, Reuters has published some variation of the Mavi Marmara aid ship canard in some three hundred stories. 

UPDATE APRIL 25TH, 2012: Reuters correspondents Edmund Blair and Tom Perry repeat the lie in this story, about Egypt's increasing hostility toward Israel.

He suggested Egypt could follow Turkey's example where once-close ties with Israel had worsened sharply after Israeli naval commandos killed nine Turks in May 2010 in a raid on a ship carrying aid to the Gaza Strip.

Is Perry still employed at Reuters?