A guest post by AKUS
Read the caption to the picture below, captured off the Guardian’s website.
“Passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observe a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, when the nation remembers the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust”.
Apparently in the April 20th 2012 print edition, on page 24, a fuller version of the caption also correctly termed Jerusalem the Israeli capital.
Now read the following correction made by the Guardian on Sunday 22 April 2012, which is found on the web here. As I did, you may have to read it twice to realize what it says:
• The caption on a photograph featuring passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observing a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance for the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, wrongly referred to the city as the Israeli capital. The Guardian style guide states: “Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is” (Eyewitness, 20 April, page 24).
Did you need to read it again to grasp the “wrong reference” that the Guardian is correcting? In case you missed it, here it is again: the caption, the Guardian claims, violated its style guide by noting in passing that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
This calls for a correction, since the Guardian style guide apparently decrees:
“Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is”
The Guardian has decided that even though Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since the founding of the state, its Parliament, Supreme Court and ministerial offices are there, it, the Guardian, believes that Tel Aviv is the country’s real capital. It has apparently enforced this absurdity by codifying it in its style guide.
Is there any other country in the world for which the Guardian’s style guide defines the capital as being other than the city that country has selected as its capital? If any newspaper’s “style guide” decreed that London is not the capital of England, would that not be ludicrous? Is the next step for the Guardian style guide to decide that Israel is not a country but Palestine is, even though exactly the opposite is true?
More than anything else this absurd refusal to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital demonstrates the utter perversity of the Guardian’s reporting about Israel. It shows in their own words, in print, the Guardian’s cringing acceptance of Arab propaganda that is rewriting the history of Jerusalem, the attempts to write the Jewish history out of the history of Jerusalem, and the Guardian’s attempts to delegitimize Israel and deny its right to exist.
If they had any shame, the people running the Guardian should be ashamed of their style guide and this ridiculous “correction” of a truthful statement. But they have no shame.
Related articles
- What the Guardian should have posted about Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel (cifwatch.com)
- Yom HaShoah: ‘Unto every person there is a name’. (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s duty to Jews on Yom HaShoah? Don’t publish accusations that we’re “supremacists”! (cifwatch.com)
- Follow-up post about Guardian Travel site’s curious omission of the nation known as “Israel” (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian, Raed Salah and Yom HaShoah. (cifwatch.com)
- Seth Freedman’s attack on Israel’s Jewish nature: Classically Guardian egregious absence of context (cifwatch.com)
