By citing just three seemingly damning words within a longer, more nuanced interview with the head of Israeli Electric about the power shortage in Gaza, the Indy journalist did what the Indy does best: taking the comments and actions of Israelis and Israeli leaders out of context to impute maximum malevolence.
BDS is not, as Ben Jamal suggests in his Guardian op-ed, a progressive movement that champions free speech. It’s a regressive political campaign which silences Jews and consigns millions to pariah status, promoting their social exclusion from the international community.
The Guardian’s failure to challenge Ismail Patel’s claim that the government was “acting on hearsay from a pro-Israeli lobby group” is classic Guardian: failing to reveal the well-documented evidence demonstrating that individuals and groups they cover – who claim to be merely ‘pro-Palestinian’ – are compromised by extremism, support for terror and antisemitism.
A Jerusalem court recently ruled in favor of a female passenger who sued El Al when she was asked by a flight attendant to move seats at the behest of an ultra-Orthodox man. She was not forced to move seats, but was merely asked – a request the court still found to be illegal. Nonetheless, reports by Times of London and the Guardian botched this crucial detail.
The fact that the article completely omitted any mention of the extreme anti-Jewish rhetoric during al-Quds Day represents yet another example of the Guardian’s broader failure to acknowledge the antisemitism that is endemic within much of the pro-Palestinian movement.
This attacker had just watched a film with multiple scenes of Israeli soldiers committing acts of violence against Palestinian children and wanted someone (preferably a Jew) to take it out on.
The Sky News Arabia report omitted any mention of the Muslim rioting at the Temple Mount which necessitated the police response and falsely claimed that “Israeli extremists stormed the mosque”.
We came we saw we conquered! While the Hezbollah Al Quds Day terror parade was allowed to take place on Sunday 18th June in the heart of London’s West End a group of 20 to 30 pro-Israel activists stepped out into the road to block the march no sooner than after it had just started.
Around the world, there are many countries who are building walls to protect their citizens. Saudi Arabia is building a 600 mile wall to keep out ISIS. India is building massive walls on its borders with Bangladesh and Pakistan. One can agree with these decisions, or disagree with them. But in the end, there is only one country who built a wall to defend its citizens from murderous attacks on its civilians that is called apartheid for doing so – and surprise, surprise the one country singled out for unfair criticism is Israel.
The London-based Jewish blogger Richard Millett was banned, by the putative free speech advocates at Amnesty International, from attending an event last night in London called “Accountability and Human Rights at 50 years of Occupation”. Organisers justified the banning of Millett by accusing him of being a “disrupter”.
As we explained in a subsequent complaint to Times editors, the Gush Etzion main communities were founded before 1948, in the 1920s and 1930s, on land legally purchased by Jews. Jews living at the original Kibbutzim were killed during the 1929 Arab riots, then re-established and destroyed again during Arab revolt of 1936-1939. Though the communities were re-established in the 1940s, they were again destroyed by Arabs fighters during the 1948 war.
The Indy journalist not only effectively ignored Judaism’s holiest site, but also managed to parrot Palestinian talking points, thus leading many readers to falsely believe that the location of the Israeli government meeting represented some sort of provocation against Palestinian Muslims.
The Guardian’s claim regarding the putative position of “Israeli” thinktanks on the Saudi-UAE isolation of Qatar not only comes completely out of nowhere, and is seemingly irrelevant, but is also erroneous. The link embedded in the claim takes you to an article in Middle East Eye, which clearly identifies the think tank as Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a thinktank based in Washington, D.C., not Israel. We contacted Guardian editors, who upheld our complaint and revised the passage accordingly.
Times of London editors upheld our complaint and revised the sentence in question to note that it was only the opinion of former UN General Secretary that Israel had committed crimes against children, not an indisputable fact.
To be fair, the Telegraph is far from the worst UK news outlet when it comes to such media double standards. However, their omission of Palestinian car rammings within the context of the London Bridge attack seems indicative of a wider phenomenon by which Israelis are placed in a different category of victims – men, women and children whose suffering often seems to occupy a space beyond the sympathetic imagination of many journalists and editors.
We can only hope that Economist will one day engage in self-reflection on their coverage of the region, and begin to critically scrutinize Palestinians with a rigor that’s currently almost entirely reserved for Israelis.
In fact, the suggestion that the country is moving to the far right couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite a few bills of questionable merit which many on the left here disagree with, and which have little actual impact, fundamentally Israel remains – as the respected human rights group Freedom House reports each year – a bastion of liberal, democratic values.
The trope in the Guardian/Observer editorial concerning Israeli puppeteers controlling the foreign policy of a US president is based on toxic historical calumnies about the Jewish people, and in fact is characterised as antisemitic by the Working Definition on Antisemitism recently adopted by the UK government.
The claim, that there’s been 750,000 Palestinian prisoners since 1967, stated as fact by McKernan, is at minimum highly disputed. As blogger Elder of Ziyon has persuasively demonstrated, it’s almost impossible for these numbers (cited frequently despite the fact that it originated from a radical NGO with ties to a terror group) to add up
The lead story in the May 22nd afternoon edition of the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Newshour’ was the visit of the US president to Israel which, at the time of broadcast, had commenced just a few hours earlier. The programme included the false ‘Israel Apartheid’ claim by guest Mustafa Barghouti, a smear that wasn’t challenged by the BBC presenter.
The Economist is currently promoting a seven-part “special report” titled “Six days of war, 50 years of occupation”. The online version of the unattributed sixth installment goes under the title “The half-life on an occupied Palestine”. The article, quite predictably, solely blames Israel for the occupation and suggests that Palestinians have no responsibility for the ongoing conflict
On May 18th listeners to BBC Radio 4 heard the fourth part in Jeremy Bowen’s series of programmes ‘Our Man in the Middle East’. Titled ‘Jerusalem’, the programme is both rambling and predictable, with Bowen’s portrayal of the city focusing on blood, violence, religion, power and nationalism at the expense of any mention of its diversity and eclectic coexistence.
I do understand Sarah Helm’s desire to paint Hamas in a positive light in her May 19 article at the Guardian. I too wish that their intentions were as positive as she seems determined to present them as being; peace between Israel and the Palestinians – the magical goal that every politician yearns for – would be so much more easily attainable.
Love is in the air at the Guardian. With summer approaching in the UK, down at Guardian towers (soon to be moving out of London to try to cut their dreadful financial losses) they continue wooing one of the most anti-Jewish outfits since the Nazis: Hamas.
For some time I have sensed a gradual shift from articles that were in large part composed of or promoted outright lies on the former “Comment is Free” (CiF) pages to a somewhat more muted but nevertheless constantly critical view of Israel.
A filmed report titled “Israeli news presenter gets tearful reporting own show’s cancellation” appeared on BBC News website’s page on May 10th.
Following communication with Telegraph editors, the erroneous claim was removed.
Fifty years ago today, the build-up of events that led to the Six Day War had already begun. After fourteen Palestinian terror attacks had been carried out with Syrian support since April 7th, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol warned Syria of retaliation on May 13th 1967. In this post, we investigate how those events portrayed to BBC’s audiences.
How many mistakes. How many bad choices. Event after event, year after year. Choosing to focus on fighting Israel. Over a century of Palestinian mistakes and still they seem unable to stop fighting and to start focusing on building something positive for themselves. Still choosing to drown in a swamp of hate. This is the true catastrophe
In addition to the false suggestion that there’s a concrete wall surrounding Gaza, the claim that “with few exceptions, no one has been allowed in or out since…2007” is absurd, as data from UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory (OCHA oPt) demonstrates.
It’s actually quite astonishing that a leading news outlet like Financial Times is willing to parrot propaganda on Hamas’s putative move to the centre so clearly at odds with the truth that not even the group’s top officials are sticking to the talking points.
When you look past the verbal acrobatics – within a document designed merely to improve their public relations – you can’t escape the fact that when you support “armed resistance” whilst rejecting “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” you are, by definition, calling for the complete destruction of the Jewish state.
Here’s the latest installment in our ongoing series documenting BDS fails and exposing the spectacularly misleading media narrative on the alleged successes of the campaign to economically and socially isolate the Jewish state.
On May 8th the BBC News website’s Middle East page published an article – titled “Palestinian hunger strike leader Barghouti ‘filmed eating’. The article gives generous amplification to statements from interested parties and even before they clicked on the link, BBC audiences were informed that ‘Marwan Barghouti’s wife says the surveillance footage released by Israel’s prison service is “fake”‘.
In contrast to other media reports on the Trump-Abbas meeting, this BBC article fails to inform readers of Mahmoud Abbas’ egregious claim that “we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace”.
The Guardian’s Tareq Baconi wishes us “to talk to Hamas” urging that now is the time due to Hamas’ new Document of General Principles which, he writes, “supports the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders”. As we argued, this document is a sham meant to trick the gullible and aid those desperate to push the Palestinian cause.
Reports that appeared on the BBC News website on May 2nd clarified to audiences that Hamas itself had said that their new document launched in Qatar does not replace the terror group’s 1988 Charter. Nevertheless, the BBC World Service radio programme includes the inaccurate heading “Hamas Presents New Charter”.
it is certainly obvious that BBC Arabic (which is of course part funded by British taxpayers through FCO grants) has yet to satisfactorily address the issue of the use of inaccurate and politically partisan language by its Arabic-speaking employees.
The Guardian’s Tareq Baconi wishes us “to talk to Hamas” urging that now is the time due to Hamas’ new Document of General Principles which, he writes, “supports the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders”. As we argued, this document is a sham meant to trick the gullible and aid those desperate to push the Palestinian cause.
Wishing a very happy holiday to all our readers celebrating Israel’s 69th Independence Day! Take a look at our ‘how well do you know Israel?’ Independence Day quiz over at BBC Watch!
In Beaumont’s universe, sympathy is evoked for Palestinian terrorists and their families; Israelis who express outrage about such crimes are dismissed as hyperbolic “right-wingers”; Israeli terror victims themselves are invisible, whilst the ongoing suffering of bereaved family members is ignored.
“I was then politely asked to leave the room by police and then asked to give my personal details. At one stage I was surrounded by seven heavily armed police. Then my friends Jonathan, Sharon and Mandy were all similarly led out.”
Careful research by CAMERA demonstrated that the alleged quote – suggesting that Ben-Gurion favoured the ethnic cleansing of Arabs – represents the opposite of the truth.
The bottom line is that, despite efforts by media groups such as the Guardian to amplify and legitimise the hateful rhetoric of a small number of artists, in 2017, 2018 and years to come, it seems certain that big name performers will continue to rock the Jewish state.
Editors at The Independent upheld our complaint that the headline accompanying a February 5th article falsely suggested that there’s an Israeli “wall” which completely surrounds Gaza.
Once again, we see how the media’s default narrative, regardless of the particulars, is to hold Israel responsible for every conceivable social and political ill within Palestinian society, while downplaying or ignoring the role its leaders plays in perpetuating their suffering.
Though the editorial is also notable in all but ignoring the role of radical Islam in the flight of Mid-East Christians, whilst absurdly blaming the West and Christians themselves, its obfuscation of Israel’s achievement in creating a ‘safe space’ for religious minorities represents another example of the media’s inability to re-evaluate their own narrative framing the state entirely through the prism of the Palestinian conflict.
The Times of London headline – suggesting the existence of heretofore unseen Hamas peaceniks – is absurd. There are no “hawks and doves” within the movement, but only extremists who differ slightly in their willingness to tailor their message for Western audiences.
We finally received a response from the Guardian Readers’ Editor, informing us that the correction was made. Editors removed the sentence suggesting the existence of a wall surrounding the Israeli city of Haifa, and added an addendum noting the change.
This morning we noticed that the article was restored by editors. And, whilst the highly inflated PA unemployment stats were removed entirely and “summary killings” were changed to “killings”, they failed to correct the most bizarre claim, that a 8 metre high concrete wall surrounds Haifa!
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