Shlaim claimed that the “intrusion of a foreign entity in the shape of the Zionist movement showed a total disregard (by the British) for the indigenous population”.
Guardian columnist Zoe Williams actually compares Israel’s defenders – whom she characterises as defenders of “killing children” – and climate change deniers. This bizarre analogy is indicative of a view of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, held by many in the media, which sees it as a binary tale of ignorance vs truth, good vs evil.
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.
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