The McGreal leopard cannot change its spots

This is co-written by Armaros and Medusa

From his attempts to smear the Israeli government for their alleged collaboration with South Africa on nuclear warheads to his latest egregious distortions of Pamela Geller’s motives for her opposition to the mosque near Ground Zero, the Guardian’s Chris McGreal’s animus towards Israel and Jews remains unchanged and is a direct reflection of the divorced-from-reality Guardian World View and the twisting of facts to suit its preconceived conclusions.

Let us examine these illustrations of what might charitably be described as spitefulness on McGreal’s part:

As early as 2003 McGreal and, because of their association with him, the Guardian, achieved Honest Reporting’s Dishonourable Mention in its yearly awards for dishonest reporting.   McGreal merited this dubious distinction by projecting his own twisted interpretations onto the Israeli government’s motives when the Guardian and he used the death of Col Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut, to malign the Israeli government.  McGreal wrote that the government had “used the tragedy to paint Israel as a democratic western nation standing firm with the US against the barbarians.”  From this we get the flavour of things to come.

On 6th and 7th February 2006, McGreal was responsible for a two-day special report in the Guardian, in which he attempted to delegitimise Israel’s very existence, portraying her as an apartheid and colonial state (note the buzz words here, calculated to appeal to and crank up hatreds of the lowest common denominator).  McGreal – the bit well and truly between his teeth – also accused the Israeli government of providing South Africa with the expertise and technology for it to construct its own nuclear bombs.  (McGreal seems to have an obsession with this but he subsequently dug himself into a hole.  That will be examined later in this article).

CAMERA (The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) called McGreal’s allegations defamatory, as indeed they were.  Further passages indicating an anti-Semitic bias included McGreal’s clear suggestion that South African Jews were particularly ardent supporters and beneficiaries of the apartheid regime.   CAMERA rebutted McGreal’s claims in two articles (see here and here).

(It should be noted that one of the first conspiracy theories regarding Israeli/Jewish involvement in South Africa’s acquisition of nuclear weapons surfaced when an opinion piece was published in Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church newsletter which accused Israel and South Africa of working together to develop an “ethnic bomb” to kill Blacks and Arabs”.)

CAMERA’s subsequent complaint to the Press Complaints Commission was not upheld, however, it seems, on a technicality.

The Guardian’s seeming failure to ensure the veracity (and logic) of their claims, facts, and arguments – and an appalling failure to provide appropriate political or historical context – is an oft-recurring theme.

McGreal does not confine his slipshod and dishonest reporting to the Middle Eastern conflict alone.  His sloppiness about facts and research seems to be something of a transferable skill.  He was the focus of a complaint about an article he wrote later in 2006 about the Mau Mau in Kenya in the 1950’s.  The subsequent complaint went to the external ombudsman, who reported in March 2008.  Among other things, McGreal was accused of misleading the readers about the numbers of detainees.  The complainant, David Elstein, concluded that the Guardian “recycles spurious research and justifies continuing to do so, refuses to admit fault and refuses to publish a refutation”.

The case is complex, but the following from the ombudsman’s conclusions stands out as criticism of McGreal’s approach to facts in this case and, given his showing elsewhere, in general:

“.. Although he (i.e. McGreal) chose to go with the lower figure (160,000 rather than 320,000) of the estimates by Elkins it was still double the official figures. This was not a news article but a feature. It was primarily a powerful and shocking piece of human testimony but the journalist had the time as well as the responsibility to be clear about the status and source of the numbers. David Elstein’s emails would have led the journalist to the Ofcom adjudication on the BBC documentary even if he had not been aware of that before. Even though that ruling did not ajudicate (sic) specifically on the Elkins numbers it was a signal to precede cautiously…” (Emphasis added).

“… [Siobhan] Butterworth also wrote that ‘since the number is disputed, the paper should have given the source and reported the official figure as well’ and that overall a newspaper should be transparent, ‘readers should be told where estimates come from and whether they are controversial’.

“In my view this is right and I am clear that knowing how the figures were contested Chris McGreal should have done exactly that…”(Emphasis added).

I have written above about McGreal’s obsession with Israel, and his characterization of it as an apartheid state – one which, he claims, aided and abetted South Africa (according to his fixated interpretations) in its acquisition of nuclear weapons. The “apartheid state” contention is typically Guardian and is so transparently ridiculous that it merits no further discussion here, it having been dismantled very effectively elsewhere.   However, it is clear from whatever McGreal writes on the subject that he is attempting to use the alleged Israeli assistance to apartheid South Africa to buttress (at least by implication or inference) his claims that Israeli is itself an apartheid state.

This fixation about the alleged apartheid in Israel is also fed, curiously enough, by McGreal’s fascination with discredited reports that Israel assisted South Africa to acquire nuclear weapons.

This is a rather more serious charge which was addressed and refuted on this blog here and here.

In the first article – on the alleged cooperation between Israel and South Africa – we see McGreal at his most egregiously dishonest.  He misrepresents draft minutes as final and binding documents, and is shown, in the first CiF Watch article, to have accepted the official “corrections” to the draft in some instances, rejected others and even added in some of his own contributions.  McGreal also falsely attributed statements to people who most likely did not make them, because they are crossed out in the draft minutes.

The second article offers more examples of McGreal’s dishonest reporting and the flimsiness of his “proof” are summed up in the final four points at the end.

I doubt that McGreal has heard of the saying “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” If he has then he must not take it seriously because he still works for the Guardian.  No doubt he would say that he is an anti-Zionist rather than an anti-Semite, but if that is the case (and assuming he takes sufficient care to differentiate between them) how might we account for his seeming support of Helen Thomas, the White House reporter who is on record as having said that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland and Germany?

All the above being the case, and it being evident that there is a certain pattern to McGreal’s dishonest reporting, how can we then believe a word he writes about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York (given, of course, that being a good Guardianista, any opposition to its construction must be motivated by bigotry)?

Here is McGreal on CiF, in full and bile-filled throttle against Pamela Geller, the most passionate opponent of the mosque’s proposed location.  We see McGreal descending to a new low.  His reputation must have preceded him, for Pamela Geller refused him an interview.  I cannot blame her; given his propensity to twist facts to suit his preconceived ideas, I would not have given consent without his agreement to tape record the whole process and/or have a third-party present.

McGreal must have felt overly discomfited, perhaps even emasculated by her refusal, because his response would have been more fitting in the tabloid press.  He proved once again that he is an aficionado of the “if you don’t know what happened then make it up” Guardianista school of journalism, and that he is a sexist of the first order.

He did himself no favours.   Pamela Geller’s reply to him, in Big Journalism, highlighted more nasty McGreal innuendo, and, moreover, effectively refuted the article.

CiF Watch has often argued with justification that the poisonous nature of the anti-Israel bias of CiF lies mainly in the ease with which it is often infused with outright antisemitism both above and below the line.   For his part, McGreal could not resist repeating his version of the “Zionist domination” trope which is a threadbare cover for antisemitism, nor could he let go of his obsession with associating Israeli West Bank settlers, South African apartheid and Israel’s alleged collaboration to provide them with nuclear weapons.

And, as surely as night follows day, the cheap nastiness of McGreal’s article opened the door to Jew-hatred below the line, including the following three comments, later deleted, but obviously their authors felt comfortable enough to post them:

nitpiqin

21 Aug 2010, 5:35PM

She is a Zionist pig.

(Note the “We should have let Hitler finish the job properly….”)

agedswill

21 Aug 2010, 8:01AM

Xenophobia, racism, hatred, religious intolerance, prejudice, ignorance, stupidity, stupidity, stupidity…. All over the world, millions of people, everywhere. And like a nasty boil, 90% of these things seem to erupt like a boil on the bum from good old freedom luvvin, tolerant, worldly-wise US of A (the A stands for arseholes). I note that Mzzz Growler is Jewish and writes for an Israeli rag. (Yes, that Israel, you know, the one that is so kind and loving to it’s neighbours – apologies to my Jewish friends, but I sometimes feel that we should have let Hitler finish the job properly before we dun him. Shucks! Now here’s me being xenophobic, can’t get away from the stuff).

Wow, Mzzz sweetheart Growler, you must have SOME IQ!!! You may be able to get it on prescription, but if not, let me have your postal address and I’ll send you half of mine – it might just get yours into double figures.

And finally note the sickening mixture of blatantly sexualised insult and mouth-frothing antisemitism in the following, no doubt from one of the die-hard CiF supporters in the US.  There can be little doubt that McGreal is responsible for facilitating the expression of this filth by choosing to write the article as he did.  Unfortunately the full measure of its nastiness cannot be conveyed without my reproducing it in full:

Caudate

20 Aug 2010, 11:42PM

Poor Geller, with a busted face (which she tries to hide with sunglasses), her last resort to influence the world was to get her jugs out.

Classic Mossad-trained trannie, as usual she’s using sex to sucker gullible Gentile men. Alas, a relatively poor ‘honey-pot’ to ensnare unsuspecting goyim though… she just looks like Ricki Lake after a successful attempt at dieting.

So remember kids, when you want to spread lies and propaganda and when reality doesn’t agree with Zionism, get your t*ts out and give the world your version in your blog. They will read it but not understand what you’re actually saying because they are busy focusing on the lifebuoys keeping you afloat in the sea which happen to be growing out of your chest.

Funnily, as usual all these folk spreading hatred of Islam and Muslims in Blighty, across the Atlantic and on the European mainland and talking about a so-called attempt at ‘Islamic world domination’ (to deflect attention from the fact that there is actual Jewish world domination at present) are Jewish:

1. The above Geller is clearly of the thirteenth tribe
2. Geert Wilders is of the thirteenth tribe (his father is Jewish)
3. Michael Rose is of the thirteenth tribe (he of Jyllands Posten and the Danish cartoon fame)
3. Sarah Palin is of the thirteenth tribe (her mother is Lithuanian Jewish)
4. The woman closely involved in the so-called ‘English Defence League’ is a Jewess from Brazil called Roberta Moore. Ironically, she is speaking for the ‘English’ and telling Muslims that ‘we’ don’t want you in ‘our’ land. I guess God promised England to the tribe too! That is why they get to decide who can stay and who can go. Gilad Atzmon does a great expose of the ‘Jewish Division’ of the so-called ‘English Defence League’. However, if the latter has a ‘Jewish division’, then it’s not a league of indigenous ethnic Anglo-Saxons and thus not English. That is why you see Israeli flags in the ‘English Defence League’ processions. This Roberta Moore also supports white supremacists in South Africa against the indigenous, black majority. Of course, Israel and its global lobby was tight with Apartheid South Africa from the very beginning and even offered them Atomic weapons. Hence, it’s not the first time the Jewish Zionist Lobby is in cahoots with fascist and racist, right-wing groups. Even Nick Griffin is said to have some tribal ancestry. Bernard Manning that fat bloat was also of the tribe. Heck, Adolf Hitler’s grandpa was also said to be Solomon Mayer of the tribe, so there’s quite a deep historical relationship here.

The reason the above and their brethren, are stirring up hatred against Islam and Muslim yet again in the western hemisphere in late August (before another 9/11 anniversary – ostensibly about a mosque downtown from the WTC site) is because they want thinking Americans and others to forget the fact that it was NOT Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks, but was an INSIDE job in which Mossad was the key player.

It is therefore in the interests of the above to be always banging the old Islam/Muslim-hating drum to hide the fact that they have world domination and they want to keep it that way. That is why they want more war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Iran. That is why they want to cause ethnic and religious strife in America, here and on the Continent. In this they have help from other tribal members like Sarkozy, Bernard Kucner and Bernard-Henry Levin. However, many people have woken up from this brainwashing and no longer believe the myths that they’re propagating.

This represents more evidence of the urgent necessity of Cif Watch to continue guarding the Guardian.  And, it suggests the continuing need to address the conspiratorial bigotry which the Guardian consistently countenances by publishing articles (such as McGreal’s piece about Geller) – hyperbole and vitriol which, in turn, consistently elicits antisemitic vitriol among the comments below it.

The Guardian and CiF incubate the very antisemitism they deny exists by providing writers, like McGreal, a platform to voice such thinly veiled bigotry.  And reporters like McGreal are willing to allege the wildest of slanders but refuse to do even the minimum of research required, much less write articles to reveal and explore the terrorist and reactionary movements which represent the real enemies of the progressive ideals embodied by America, Israel, and the West.