Phoebe Greenwood manages to vilify Israel in story about tragic auto accident

Confirmation Bias: The habit of favoring information that confirms what you believe, whether it’s true or not, and ignoring the rest.

One of the most consistent habits of Guardian reporters is their ability to vilify Israel in response to almost any story about the country.

A case in point is the tragic accident yesterday, which killed ten and injured 40 others, when a bus carrying Palestinian children (from a kindergarten in the Palestinian territories) and a truck collided in Adam Square in northern Jerusalem.  Israeli Magen David Adom and Palestinian Red Crescent teams were working together on the rescue operation, and Israeli and Palestinian police are similarly collaborating on the subsequent investigation.

An initial investigation indicated that the truck or the bus had veered from the oncoming lane, probably due to inclement weather, Army Radio reported.

Yet, Phoebe Greenwood, the Guardian stringer based in Israel for the past eight months (who has yeoman’s work delegitimizing the Jewish state while filling in for Harriet Sherwood) was able to frame even this tragic auto accident in a manner consistent with a broader anti-Israel narrative.

Her story on the accident for The Telegraph, Palestinians mourn death of ten children in bus crash, Feb. 16, included this passage in the penultimate paragraph:

Ahe gleeful reaction of several Israelis on Twitter has provoked disgust and outrage on social media sites.

One tweet posted by Ajali Cali read, “Great, less terrorists” while another tweeter named Itai Viltzig said: “Thank God [these are] Palestinians. I hope every day there is a bus like this [that crashes].” [emphasis added]

First, it turns out that the offensive comments weren’t Tweets, but rather a couple of comments within one Facebook thread beneath a link to a story about the accident from the site of Walla.

More broadly, there are 3.4 million Facebook users in Israel, and it seems relevant to ask how precisely a couple of stray hateful comments (in one FB thread) is news worthy, yet alone represents a dynamic that is in any way relevant to properly contextualizing the story?

But, the most outrageous facet of Greenwood’s gratuitous focus on a few Israeli FB comments is the deafening silence, by both Greenwood and Sherwood, in face of a Palestinian culture saturated with antisemitic incitement not only “beneath the line” at social media sites, but by the official state controlled media, as well as political and religious leaders.  

The Palestinian culture of hate towards Jews – and not merely Israelis – is well-documented and impossible not to acknowledge except for those willfully blind to the phenomenon.  

To cite just one of countless examples of the consequences of such incitement – a culture which routinely honors terrorists – nearly one-third of Palestinians polled expressed SUPPORT for the terror attack last year in Itamar, in which two Palestinians broke into a Jewish home and butchered five members of the Fogel family, including three children, ages 10, 4, and 3 months.

Interestingly, Greenwood not only doesn’t find such disturbing realities about Palestinian culture to be newsworthy (based on her reports), but evidently is skeptical that such incitement even occurs. Here’s a Tweet by Greenwood in December about statements by Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon that Palestinian textbooks promote terror.

As I posted at the time, all Greenwood would had to have done is go to the site of Palestinian Media Watch to read a comprehensive report on the incontrovertible evidence regarding the glorification of violence against Israelis in PA textbooks.

But, as with so many of her colleagues, Greenwood’s liberal racism, which compromises any claim to objective journalism, necessitates that Palestinians are never held accountable for such an endemic antisemitic culture – a vital political dynamic, in accurately understanding the politics of the region, that the Guardian will never report.  

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