The Guardian’s Chris McGreal gets it wrong on Israel…again.

UK Media Watch readers are likely familiar with The Guardian’s (error prone) Chris McGreal, arguably the most viscerally hostile anti-Israel voice within a very crowded field of delegitimizers.  

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In addition to outright errors by McGreal (in which the Guardian was forced to publish corrections), McGreal stands out as one of the few British journalists singled out by the Community Security Trust (CST) in one of its annual reports on antisemitic discourse in the UK.

His latest false claim appears in an article published in the Guardian about the history of the United Nations (70 years and half a trillion dollars later: what has the UN achieved?, Sept. 7th). McGreal, who used to be the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent, manages to get his dig in on the relationship between the US and the Jewish state – a relationship he once described as “slavish” before the term was removed by the Guardian’s readers’ editor after complaints of antisemitism – in the following passage:

The five permanent members, the victors over Germany and Japan, hold the whip hand through vetoes. For all the noise from the US, Britain and France in particular about modernising the UN, they show no willingness to give up the power they wield sometimes in ways governed entirely by political interest. The US has exercised its security council veto to protect Israel from criticism more times than the total number of vetoes cast by the other permanent members combined. More recently, Russia and China have used their vetoes to block UN intervention in Syria.

McGreal is wrong.  As a review of a UN page listing all Security Council vetoes clearly demonstrates, the US has exercised its veto on Israel related resolutions 42 times, while the total number of vetoes by other permanent members is 157.  (See this additional source for a complete list of the 42 vetoes.)

We’ve contacted Guardian editors to facilitate a correction to McGreal’s inaccurate claim.

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