The Observer versus the Facts. posted by Richard Seymour

Just a minor issue, but here is an extract from a William Pfaff article in the Observer today:

"The intellectual godfather of modern Islamist radicalism is generally taken to have been the 19th-century Egyptian intellectual named Sayyid Qutb. A review of the literature on Islamic radicalism during the past 25 years (cited by John Zimmerman in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence ) shows Qutb routinely mentioned as one of the two most important intellectual influences on these movements and, in particular, as being the main (if indirect) inspiration for Osama bin Laden."

Pfaff is an extremely knowledgable and perceptive critic, so I doubt the error is his - but, if you know about Sayyid Qutb , you know he was an intellectual who gained his reputation as a writer mainly in the 1960s - generally understood to be a decade from the 20th Century.

I expect this could fall into the same category as The Guardian's recent altering of the text of Charles Arthur's article on Haiti which managed to make Aristide out to be a General (as well as chopping away lots of relevant text on what Haitians thought about how their country's disaster could be solved).

Suffice to say, I have written a letter of complaint. Disgusted of Lenin's Tomb.