Several months ago, I published an essay in Azure, the quarterly journal of Israel's Shalem Center, about South Africa's troubling foreign policies. You can read it here. On Monday, a South African blogger with whom I regularly correspond informed me that an article published September 6 on The Huffington Post read almost exactly like my piece, only shorter. You can read that article, by a Norwegian journalist and former United Nations employee named Henning Andrè Søgaard, here. While my original essay was more than four thousand words and Søgaard's was op-ed length, nearly every sentence in "his" article was directly lifted from mine. Noah Pollak, an editor of Azure, shows just two of many examples. If for whatever reason you remain unconvinced, read the concluding paragraphs of both pieces. I informed the Huffington Post of this news on Monday, but it was not until Wednesday afternoon (after Pollak disclosed the incident on The Corner) that the piece was removed from their website. In it's place reads a fatuous message:

Editor's note: We have chosen to take down Henning Andrè Søgaard's piece because of editorial similarities to a previously published work. We are awaiting a response from Mr. Søgaard who wishes to defend the piece.

"Editorial similarities" is a wonderfully creative euphemism for "plagiarism," almost as vacuous a literary construction as "Fake but accurate." There is no worse offense in the journalistic profession than stealing someone else's work and those who do should be named, shamed, and driven out of the profession altogether, never to write again. Either way, it's long past time that the Huffington Post, at the very least, publicly admit that Mr. Søgaard is a journalistic thief. Update: Søgaard caves. --James Kirchick