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!
If the Guardian wants to encourage a fact-based, reasoned debate about the merits of Australia’s refusal to allow Tamimi into the country, the least they could do is avoid misleading readers by obfuscating the Palestinian activist’s well-documented record of intolerance and anti-Zionist extremism.
Pesach is the oldest and most transformative story of hope ever told. It tells of how an otherwise undistinguished group of slaves found their way to freedom from the greatest and longest-lived empire of their time, indeed of any time
Israelis are free go to bookshops anywhere in the country and purchase the book, Borderlife, by Dorit Rabinyan. The book made it to the Israeli best seller’s list. Israeli students can borrow the book from libraries. Israeli teachers in advanced literature classes across the country are free to assign the book to their students if they choose. Yet, the Guardian somehow claimed that the book was “censored” by Israel.
Those familiar with the Guardian’s decades-long history of institutional anti-Israel bias – which sometimes crosses the line into outright antisemitism – are understandably wary of suggestions that otherwise ideologically rigid far-left editors have changed course on matters of concern to British Jewry. But, it is our view that a modest editorial pivot concerning antisemitism is evident. Though it’s difficult to explain with any degree of certainty the reason for the slight shift, noting the radically different tones of two official Guardian editorials on the issue of antisemitism within five years of each other is instructive.
Whilst we disagree with those who suggest that hyper criticism of Israel at the Guardian reflects institutional antisemitism, these cartoons by Bell certainly indicate his own lack of seriousness about anti-Jewish racism by employing graphic depictions of Jews and Israel associated with antisemitism. It also raises serious questions about Guardian editors’ judgment in publishing cartoons clearly at odds with their anti-racist mission.
As we argued in an email to Daily Mail editors that passage about “Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians” is a classic case of blurring news with opinion, suggesting that it’s an uncontroversial fact that Israel (intentionally) attacks civilians, rather than the highly contested opinion of some.
The report (“Israel ‘blocking human rights researchers’”, March 3), by Gabriel Samuels, cited HRW’s accusation that Israel has been “preventing foreign researchers from entering the Gaza Strip to document potential abuses”, but failed to seek comment from NGO Monitor, the group most knowledgeable about the Israel related work of the group.
Whilst it won’t become clear for quite a while if the new guidelines will result in a continuation of this construction slow-down, it’s quite a commentary when far-left Haaretz frames the settlement policy of a ‘right wing’ Israeli government far more sympathetically than the Guardian.
Recent Comments