So my good friend Mike Duffy is at it again....

TORONTO STAR
Dec. 13, 2002. 02:00 PM

Curious silence greets discredited Hezbollah tale

ANTONIA ZERBISIAS

Checking facts, verifying quotes and sourcing stories ? these are the basics in the journalist's toolbox.

...

Consider how, two Thursdays ago, both the National Post and The Globe and Mail ran front-page pieces based on a report the previous day by one Paul Martin. No, not that Paul Martin but the Paul Martin who, sometimes under the pseudonym Sayed Anwar, writes dispatches about the Mideast ? from his desk in London, England. He sells these stories to The Washington Times, the paper controlled by the Unification Church, more commonly known as the Moonies.

On Dec. 4, Martin reported in The Times that Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah (The Party of God), had made televised speeches in which he urged "a global suicide campaign." He quoted Nasrallah as saying: "Martyrdom operations ? suicide bombings ? should be exported outside Palestine. I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide. Don't be shy about it."

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Not according to an investigation by CBC's Middle East correspondent Neil Macdonald, who spent three days in Lebanon trying to track down Nasrallah's inflammatory remarks. But he could not make the facts fit with Martin's account of them. Not only did Nasrallah not make the speeches when and where Martin had reported, there was no evidence the Hezbollah leader had ever incited suicide bombers to go global.

"I watched the videos. I watched the speeches. I have done more research than maybe the Canadian government has done, certainly more than Paul Martin has done," Macdonald told me on the phone from Jordan last night. "He came up with three quotes, one of which, to be charitable, was a gross mistranslation, and the other two were never even uttered."

When CBC confronted Martin for Wednesday's edition of The National , he "got very upset and jumped up and said this interview is over." Eventually, he fingered Walid Phares, a Florida Atlantic University associate professor, as his source.