Why is the Guardian afraid to expose their readers to the truth about Global March to Jerusalem?

A guest post by AKUS

While happily watching Sarah Colborne and her few supporters getting absolutely destroyed below the line for the lies in her CiF article Jerusalem is at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, March 27, I noticed that there was one type of comment which absolutely terrified the Guardian.

I picked up at least three references to the GMJ factsheet on CiFWatch’s counter website, http://gm2j.co/factsheet/. I snipped a copy of what appeared to be the last one, from compulsive commenter SantaMoniker, who seemed to be in a frenzy of commenting BTL this morning:

This comment has been “disappeared” in true Guardian style.

The comment she referred to was probably this one, which “didn’t abide by community standards” – for example, by expressing an alternative view or a reference to http://gm2j.co/factsheet/

 

Now it so happens that the first two examples I saw are still up on the website but did not provide  clickable links, so the lazy moderators presumably missed them. I leave it to the reader to search for them.

But the question remains – why is the Guardian so scared of its readers following a link to a website that exposes the truth about the organizers of the stunt, in completely factual and researched terms? Surely it cannot be because it still believes it can maintain a walled garden, where its readers will only read the lies people like Sarah Colborne put out?

As SantaMoniker asked , If the Guardian thinks it has a case why will it not allow opposing views? Was there any disreputable language? Was there anything in the “disappeared” comment that really infringed on their sacred “community standards”?

What is the Guardian afraid of, other than the truth?

 When a paper tries to keep its readers in the dark, as if in a poorly lit restaurant, one can only wonder why they do not want visitors to the site to see what is really being dished up for their consumption.

In her article, Colborne made up a bunch of nonsense about Jerusalem, for centuries an almost forgotten and poverty-stricken backwater in the Ottoman Empire, of no importance to a non-existent Palestinian identity, illustrating again the abysmal ignorance of so many who spend their time obessessivelty attacking Israel. This picture of a Jewish funeral procession at a burial on the Mount of Olives, Circe 1900, from http://www.israeldailypicture.com/, gives pretty good idea of how desolate Jerusalem was like before WW I and the start of large-scale aliyah:

 

Regarding Colborne, there are a few more interesting background facts that make one wonder, once again, at the Guardians foolishness and agenda in trying to cover the tracks of its contributors.

Colborne was, as Adam Levick pointed out , one of those on the Mavi Marmara, ably assisting the terrorist group IHH in its attempt to breach the naval blockade of Gaza and later trying to provide PR spin about the events.

After being sent packing by Israel, she gave a fictional account of what happened recorded apparently by Guardian videographer Laurance Topham and posted by the Guardian on its “Gaza” site. The Guardian unhesitatingly labeled her as a “survivor” of the violence that her comrades in terror instigated and blamed on Israel. The video played for months if not years on the Guardian’s Gaza Section of CiF: British survivor tells of Israeli assault on Gaza aid ship

 Strangely, this clip, which I can now no longer get to play at the time of writing, was not added at the bottom of her column, which is so often the usual practice of the Guardian.

Hunting for it, I came across a remarkable article – remarkable also for being published in the Guardian – by Carmel Gould that may explain this unusual omission.  

Gould’s article, The end of the media’s Israel fixation?, references the BBC interview during which Colborne was not allowed simply to spout her version of the attack on Israeli Seals but was caught in her lies about the Mavi Marmara incident out under persistent questioning by Sarah Montague.

It carries the interesting notification that:

This article is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Sarah Colborne.

This “legal complaint”, whose outcome I do not know, was probably launched by Colborne because Gould had the audacity to remind readers that:

A stalwart of the Palestinian PR machine, Sarah Colborne of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who was on board the boat, was generally given free rein across the media to accuse Israel of inexplicable mendacity. However, it was only when subjected to a rare grilling on the BBC’s Today programme that she came unstuck. Sarah Montague’s questioning about who started the violence and the presence on board of wannabe martyrs, left her implausible tale of innocence seriously compromised.

The Montague interview (the “rare grilling) starts with Ron Prosser, then the Israeli ambassador to the UK, followed shortly by Colborne. Sarah Montague nails her to the spot and incredulously listens to and exposes the lies in her version of what happened as Colborne blathers on ineffectually with her almost tearful attempts to put across her carefully designed talking points and tries to avoid direct answers to Montague’s questions. An unusually good bit of journalism from the BBC.

It is yet another example of the total abandonment of any standards of ethics by the Guardian that it allows a proven supporter of terrorism like Colborne to publish her lies on its website, even if the hundreds of comments BTL largely took her and her supporters to the cleaners – a much needed trip that removed at least some of the dirt.

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