The Guardian has consistently published such pro-BDS letters by British ‘artists’ over the years – missives which amplify and grant credibility to what are extremely marginal – not to mention almost always unsuccessful – anti-Israel campaigns.
Last week, we tweeted in response to a misleading caption below a Guardian video segment on Israel’s interception, over the Golan Heights, of an Iranian missile fired (by Iranian troops) from Syrian territory. […]
Our survey of photos highlighted in their ‘Photos of the Week’ series since March 31st (when the Hamas-led ‘Great March of Return’ began) included no less than 31 photos depicting scenes from the weekly Gaza border riots. In contrast, the Guardian published a mere 21 photos depicting the Syrian Civil War over the same 10 month period.
Though he’s referring to the American political debate, the accusation that supporters of Israel engage in false charges of antisemitism to silence criticism of the state is a smear used by many of Jeremy Corbyn’s most ardent supporters to deflect charges that he’s hostile to Jews.
We’ve been monitoring the Guardian and commenting on the media group’s institutional hostility to Israel for nearly 10 years, and nothing much shocks us at this point. Yet, an official editorial published yesterday reaches a new low in malice and plain out dishonesty.
A 2016 Israeli Institute for Democracy poll did show that serious tensions between Arabs and Jews persist, but that most Arab Israelis (55%) are nonetheless proud to be Israeli. The bottom line is that the Guardian writer’s contention that ‘Arab-Israelis’ reject their Israeli identity, and primarily identify as ‘Palestinians’, simply does not hold up to critical scrutiny.
It’s impossible to get into the mind of Fisk, but it strains credulity to conclude that, after more than 40 years as a journalist, the curmudgeonly anti-Israel reporter is now Semitically ‘woke’, having had some sort of moral awakening about the toxicity of such ‘dual loyalty’ canards over the course of twelve months.
In the Jan. 9th edition of the Telegraph’s new weekly newsletter, Letter from Jerusalem, their correspondent Raf Sanchez wrote that “only around 43 per cent of Israelis support a two-state solution today”. […]
If you see only an “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, then nothing that Israelis do makes sense. (That’s why Israel’s enemies prefer this framing.) In this tightly cropped frame, Israelis are stronger, more prosperous and more numerous. The fears affecting big decisions, like what to do about the military occupation in the West Bank, seem unwarranted if Israel is indeed the far more powerful party.
Though British media outlets covering the region subject nearly every Israeli moral failure to something akin to a forensic examination, Palestinians (as we’ve documented continually) are usually spared this level of scrutiny – representing a pattern of double standards that egregiously skew reports about the conflict.
We’ve seen a lot of misleading and false charges against Israel in the British media over the years, but an article on Friday at the Independent promotes what’s truly one of the more bizarre allegations we’ve come across, in accusing the state of “gastronomic theft” for simply noting that shawarma is a popular Israeli street food.
Contrary to the Financial Times claim, it was Palestinian leaders who, acting on their own free will, independent of what Netanayhu or Begin did or didn’t do, “denied Palestinians a country to call their own” – a simple historical fact that’s continually obfuscated in British media reports about the conflict.
So, when Angela Davis had the opportunity to truly ‘speak truth to power’ on behalf of actual political prisoners in a totalitarian regime, she failed to do so. Yet, decades later, she ardently champions for the release of Palestinian terrorists convicted for acts of violence against citizens of a democratic state – and is of course bestowed the moral badge of “civil rights activist” by the Guardian for doing so.
The Guardian’s insistence that one or two wealthy Jews are behind Trump’s pro-Israel policies is facile and myopic at best, and, at worst, promotes exactly the kind of antisemitic dog whistles about the ‘injurious’ influence of Jewish power that, when directed at George Soros, their editors and contributors have ardently denounced.
A Dec. 20th op-ed at the Independent by Palestinian activist Abdallah Abu Rahmah included the erroneous claim that a UN report found Israel guilty of apartheid.
According to Sky News Arabia, even Arab citizens of Israel are being “occupied”. This represents the adoption of a radical terminology associated with the positions of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which views any Jewish presence in the region as an illegal “occupation”.
Our UK Media Watch family just lost a dear friend. Garry Grolman, who succumbed to cancer earlier in the week in Tel Aviv at the age of 72, was a tireless defender of Israel and one of the founding volunteers of the group (CiF Watch) formed in 2009 that would become – along with BBC Watch – part of CAMERA’s UK brand.
Once again, we see how the Guardian seems to be institutionally incapable of holding Palestinian leadership even partly responsible for the misery in Gaza. It’s a pattern of coverage informed by an ideologically-driven propensity to deny Palestinians agency: the seeming belief that, as individuals, they lack the capacity to act independently of Israel and make choices of their own free will.
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