This morning, a diary reached the reclist, a diary which was in part based on a totally misattributed quotation. The quotation that formed the first part of the title, and which appeared in block form at the top of the diary, was attributed to Egyptian president Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, supposedly coming from el-Sisi's New Year's Day speech at Al-Azhar university in Cairo.
Today, the Arab World is composed of twenty-one failed states which are bereft, for the most part, of progressive leaders. We are unable to produce one single manufactured product that competes successfully on world markets.
-- Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, President of Egypt
In fact,
as Angry Marmot first pointed out, the quotation comes from
an op-ed by Mark Silverberg at israelnationalnews.com:
Today, the Arab world is constituted by a series of twenty-one failed states bereft, for the most part, of progressive leaders and unable to produce one single manufactured product that can compete on world markets.
The wording has been subtly changed from its original form to make it seem like it came from el-Sisi. I don't know if the diarist is the one who made these changes, but his/her diary is the only place online it appears that way (the diary was also reposted on a few other sites).
When alerted to the misattribution, the diarist claimed that it was due to a translation error and that critics pointing it out hadn't watched the videos. However, nothing remotely resembling this quotation appears in either video, nor in any online transcript of the January 1st speech.
The diary was also misleading in other ways - the second half of the title, "a source of danger, killing, destruction," does come from el-Sisi's speech, but reads differently in context. He doesn't say that the Arab world is a source of danger, killing and destruction, he says that it's inconceivable that militant Islamist ideology is making it that way, which to me reads as a much more nuanced and less of a total indictment of the Arab world.
I don't know why the initial quotation was misattributed or altered in that way, but it seems that since being called out, the diarist has slightly altered the original false attribution, removing "carried over live national TV" from it.
I know this will likely not be widely recced, but I think such shoddy and misleading "reportage" deserves a fully fleshed out response. It should seem immediately ridiculous to any student of Middle East politics that anyone in el-Sisi's diplomatic position would refer to the Arab world as "twenty-one failed states," but it seems like many readers here are eager to swallow any line that fits with their preconceived narrative, and that's too bad. Be skeptical!
EDIT 1: The diarist has just corrected the diary (actually, there is no correction within the actual diary, the misattributed quotation was just removed from the title and body), claiming that the original altered and misattributed quotation came to him/her "as a quote," whatever that means.