The dishonesty of Soumaya Ghannoushi and her Guardian enablers

The contempt towards Israel by CiF commentator Soumaya Ghannouchi, the daughter of Islamic extremist Rachid Ghannouchi, is as palpable as it is predictable.  

In her latest offering (Obama, hands off our spring, CiF, May 26), during the course of lecturing President Obama on the need to leave the Arab world alone and let the Islamists assert their proper hegemony in the region, Ghannoushi added this:

Obama himself, who began his Middle East speech with eulogies to freedom and the equality of all men, and ended it with talk of the “Jewishness of Israel”, in effect denying the citizenship rights of 20% of its Arab inhabitants and the right of return of 6 million Palestinian refugees.

Leaving aside Ghannoushi’s desire to destroy Israel through an unlimited “right of return” – a figure, by the way, which exceeds by 1.4 million the official population as accepted by the UN (4.6 million) – I wondered when reading the line I highlighted, which makes the patently false argument that Obama’s acknowledgement of the Jewish character of Israel has the “effect” of denying citizenship rights to her Arab citizens, whether the editors at CiF exercise any journalistic oversight whatsoever over the content they publish.  

Ghannoushi’s lazy assertion about the denial of Arab citizenship rights is intellectually dishonest and factually inaccurate – in short, a lie dressed up with language vague enough (“the effect of…”) to provide cover from challenges to its empirical accuracy. 

While I don’t expect Ghannoushi to acknowledge the politically inconvenient fact that Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy freedoms and civil rights that citizens in the rest of the Arab world have been denied, I would expect the editor responsible for the truth and accuracy of CiF commentaries to challenge such patently false assertions which “have the effect” of demonizing and further delegitmizing the Jewish state. 

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