WASHINGTON – Pope Francis evoked shock when it was widely reported he called the Holocaust-denying Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas "an angel of peace."
Praise poured in from left-leaning quarters, while outrage erupted on the right. It turns out, however, the pope didn't say that.
The establishment media put those words in his mouth by widely using a misquote from the Associated Press.
In fact, what the pope actually said Saturday may have had the exact opposite meaning of what was attributed to him.
Fact-checking the fact checkers, several conservative news outlets traced the source of the misquote to the AP's Nicole Winfield, reporting from Rome.
AP reported: "Pope Francis praised Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as an 'angel of peace' during a meeting Saturday at the Vatican that underscored the Holy See's warm relations with the Palestinians as it prepares to canonize two 19th century nuns from the region.
But the account from the Vatican reporter for Italy's La Stampa had the pope telling Abbas something quite different.
"May the angel of peace destroy the evil spirit of war. I thought of you: May you be an angel of peace."
Far from calling Abbas an angel of peace, the pope asked him to be one.
The pope may have even insinuated that when he thought of "the evil spirit of war," he thought of Abbas.
And then he asked Abbas to be peaceful.
However, establishment media outlets immediately picked up on the original misquote and used it prominently.
The New York Times, BBC, Washington Post, USA Today, NBC, ABC and CBS all used the AP account.
Those outlets either reprinted the AP story verbatim or paraphrased it in their lead sentences, using variations on the key words, "Pope Francis praised Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as an 'angel of peace.'"
Many staunch supporters of Israel were understandably outraged by the pope's purported words, especially as the visit by Abbas to Rome came just days after the Vatican announced it planned to formally recognize Palestinian statehood in a treaty.
In his Monday op-ed, WND CEO and Editor Joseph Farah wrote, "If Abbas is an angel, he’s a fallen angel. He’s a Holocaust-denying terrorist who, like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, considers it his sworn duty to finish the job the Nazis started."
Illustrating that point, Farah pointed out Abbas is literally a doctor of Holocaust denial.
"As a doctoral candidate at Moscow’s Oriental College in 1982, Abbas wrote a thesis suggesting far fewer than 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust," he wrote. "But that was just the start. In his treatise, he actually accused the Jews of conspiring with Adolf Hitler to annihilate European Jewry. He accused the Jews of deliberately inflating the numbers of those killed in concentration camps to pave the way for a Jewish state. He may have been one of the first to equate Zionism with Nazism."
Farah also noted Abbas has attacked Israelis with more than just words.
"Abbas was also one of the principal planners of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack. He was the guy who wrote the checks and embraced the operatives as they headed off to one of the most sensational terrorist attacks of its time in 1972."
As for the Palestinian president's reputation in the establishment media as a moderate, Farah reminded readers Abbas has "never, not once, renounced terrorism or 'armed struggle,' as he calls it, as a legitimate means of achieving his precious Palestinian state."
Since the revelation of the misquote, several conservative outlets have blasted the AP account and the rest of the establishment media for reprinting it without checking it, to advance their own left-leaning agenda.
Ellen Carmichael of National Review lamented, "News organizations gleefully printed this claim across newspapers and news sites around the globe."
She saw a political agenda, saying the media "are determined to politicize every moment of every day, they view in a political light everything Pope Francis does."
"Of course, this reveals the eagerness of some in the media to paint His Holiness as some valiant advocate for the progressive cause, and thus, an ally of Palestine over Israel. If the Pope indeed called Abbas an angel, it would, in their eyes, be yet another example of his putting conservative Catholics, many of whom are likely to be pro-Israel, in their place; progressives have wrongly portrayed the pope as taking a progressive stance on other issues about which they care deeply," she wrote.
"To them, it’s about time that traditional Catholics get with the program, and, thankfully, Pope Francis is going to set them straight."
Carmichael said the problem was compounded by an unrepentant media.
"Finally, it’s astonishing that international news sources have continued to print false information, even after the pope’s remarks were made available in English by an Italian newspaper. The media are eager to paint Pope Francis as a progressive messiah who is ready to condemn the idiocy of conservative Catholics worldwide — and they won’t let accuracy stand in their way."
She called for a retraction and an apology from those in the media who misreported the comment.
The Weekly Standard's Tom Gross observed: "If anyone needs further evidence of why the news agencies often can’t be trusted to report accurately on Israel and the Palestinians, and why major news outlets such as the New York Times and the BBC should stop repeating agency copy without verifying it, here is an important example from this weekend."
Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media wrote: "I can tell you this: MSM reporting on the Vatican, the Church or whomever is pope at the time almost always needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The media has an obsession with Francis because they’ve convinced themselves that he’s the pope who will make the Church become a gay marriage, abortion loving free-for-all. This, even though barely six months into his tenure, Francis excommunicated a priest for supporting women priests and gay marriage.
"As with any political agenda supported by the MSM, it is willing to bend facts to shoehorn stories into the narrative."
Despite the widespread use of the misquote, the Jerusalem Post got the story right.
"Pope Francis on Saturday called on Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas to become 'an angel of peace' during a meeting in the Vatican, according to the AFP news agency and the Vatican Insider," the paper reported.