WALTER DURANTY, CALL YOUR OFFICE: The New York Times stands by its error.

Max Fisher of the New York Times has taken to Twitter to defend his claim that David Ben-Gurion “emerged from retirement in July 1967 to warn Israelis they had sown the seeds of self-destruction.”

Fisher sourced this story to a recollection by the late Arthur Hertzberg, a noted Conservative rabbi. Hertzberg, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1987, claimed to have heard the grim prophecy during an encounter between Ben-Gurion and American Conservative rabbis at Beit Berl (near Kfar Saba) in July 1967.

As it happened, a few months ago I’d grown suspicious of this story, and so I tracked down the transcript of Ben-Gurion’s remarks in his archives. I found no evidence of his having said anything of the sort. I published my findings back in April, so imagine my surprise when Fisher ran with a lede repeating a fable I’d just debunked. My blog doesn’t have quite the circulation of the New York Times, but it’s where I pointed to the problem, and that brought it to the attention of Fisher and his newspaper.

Fisher now tweets to me that “we’ve looked into this very carefully and, after speaking with the Ben-Gurion Archives and reviewing the historical record, stand by the story.” I’m pleased that Fisher took my challenge seriously, and didn’t just blow it off. But I’m afraid he’s fallen well short of meeting it.

It’s weird how these errors almost always go in one direction, but it isn’t at all strange for the New York Times to stand by its writers providing cover for mass murderers.