These counterintuitive findings offer a rare honest glimpse into what Palestinians living under Hamas’s despotic rule in Gaza actually believe, providing a “compelling corrective” to an entrenched media echo-chamber which continues to mislead readers about the dynamics which represent the true root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For the 5th time in less than a year, UK Media Watch has prompted a correction in the British media to the false claim that there are “settler-only roads” in the West Bank. The latest such claim was in an op-ed at the Independent by Sophia Brown, a London-based academic.
Do Israeli police raid and break up dance parties in PA controlled Palestinian cities in the West Bank? That’s what an interview in the The Observer (sister site of the Guardian) with Palestinian rapper Muqata’a, focusing on Ramallah’s dance culture, initially claimed, before a tweet by UKMW pointing out that this was erroneous.
On Oct. 7th, we complained to Daily Express editors about an article that misleadingly used Tel Aviv as a synonym for Israel’s capital twice in the same article. It took nearly two weeks, but editors upheld our complaint and corrected the two sentences.
the Guardian cartoonist wasn’t content with merely going after the prime minister. Rather, he deemed it necessary to demonise Australian Jews who Morrison was presumably appealing to in suggesting the embassy be moved, labeling them ‘apartheid enthusiasts’ putatively indifferent to ‘Palestinian children who die after falling on IDF bullets’, a smear – suggesting the Israeli army targets kids – the cartoonist employed previously in a Guardian cartoon during the 2014 War.
We sent a complaint to Times of London editors arguing that whilst it’s perfectly fair to note that a significant minority of the residents of the Australian voting district are Jewish, their reference to the wealth of the Jewish residents seemed gratuitous and, though unintended, evoked toxic tropes about the influence of ‘Jewish money’ on democratic politics.
UK Media Watch prompted two corrections recently. At the Indy, we convinced editors to revise a sentence which misleadingly framed an accusation that settlers killed a Palestinian woman as if it were a fact, rather than just a claim. At the Telegraph, we prompted a correction to a sentence which claimed that the US was the only country to move its embassy to Jerusalem, neglecting to note that Guatemala also recently moved its embassy to the Israeli capital.
If Lara Alqasaem had been in a leadership position with a right-wing extremist group, instead of a pro-Palestinian extremist group, the media wouldn’t have batted an eye, and Alqasaem wouldn’t represent a political cause among ‘human rights’ activists.
The Independent was one of three British media outlets that failed to cover two recent Palestinian terror attacks that claimed the lives of three Israelis, but was quick to publish a story about a rock-throwing attack in the West Bank over the weekend that claimed the life of a Palestinian woman – an attack, relatives claim, was carried out by settlers. However, not only did the Indy jump on the story, but immediately pronounced the settlers guilty, despite the fact that the incident is still under investigation and there aren’t currently any suspects.
The myth that there are ‘Jews-only’ or ‘settler-only’ roads in the West Bank has been debunked numerous times over the years by CAMERA and its affiliates – prompting corrections at news sites such as CNN, Associated Press, Washington Post, The Economist, The Financial Times and The Telegraph.
The BBC presenter, in his final thoughts on the problem, opines that for Palestinians, living in camps in Lebanon and Jordan, their refugee status is the only thing they possess. However, a Palestinian hope based on a right (of return) they don’t have, and on a future vision of life (in Israel) that will never be brought to fruition, is not a possession. It’s a handicap, and a cynical formula for perpetuating Palestinian victimhood that continues to be amplified and legitimized by media outlets like the BBC.
The journalistic axiom ‘if it bleeds it leads’ isn’t entirely true when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where selective concern for the suffering of one side is the norm – indicative of a broader pattern of double standards which continues to compromise British media coverage of the region.
Yesterday, @GasherJew, a twitter account that’s been doing extremely important work exposing antisemitism in the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party, tweeted a long thread containing an A-Z of examples of Labour antisemitism. The list is especially useful for journalists and pro-Corbyn activists who deny that there’s a serious issue in the party with antisemitism, or suggest that the problem has been greatly exaggerated by the British Jewish community
You don’t need to be a journalist, Mid-East analyst or expert of any kind to come up with a list of practical steps ‘protesters’ participating in the Hamas organised Great March of Return can take to save Palestinian lives. Here are just a few:
1. Stop firing at soldiers on the border.
2. Stop throwing grenades and other explosive devices at soldiers on the border.
3. Stop attempting to damage the security fence and infiltrate into Israel in order to kill Jews.
The Telegraph’s promotion of the Lebanese PR event in defence of Hezbollah is another example of the media’s frequent failure to subject the accusations of Israel’s enemies to the same degree of journalistic skepticism and critical scrutiny that Israeli claims are almost always subjected to.
Whilst covering events in Jerusalem over the past year, including tensions at the city’s holy sites in the summer of 2017, Sky News Arabia has repeatedly leveled unsubstantiated and erroneous allegations against Jewish visitors and Israeli security forces when reporting on incidents at The Temple Mount – Judaism’s holiest site. Namely, all Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount are blanketly referred to as “settlers”, and are accused of “storming”, “infiltrating” and “violating” the al-Aqsa Mosque compound with the support of the Israeli police (“the police of the Occupation”).
Following communication with UK Media Watch, editors at the Daily Mail corrected an article which stated, as if it were a fact, that Israeli soldiers killed an 11 year old Palestinian boy on the Gaza border.
In over 1200 words of text in Shlaim’s column, there isn’t even once sentence so much as suggesting even the possibility that some Palestinian actions since 1993 may have been injurious to the peace process, illustrating another example of the one-sided, distorted and agenda-driven commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict that Guardian editors consistently promote.
Corbyn and his supporters – including those on the Guardian editorial board – wish to remain free to assert, in some form or another, that “Zionism is racism” and that “Israel has no right to exist” with moral impunity – a fact which explains why the overwhelming majority of British Jews will continue to see the current Labour Party (as well as the pages of the Guardian) as a “hostile environment” antithetical to their values.
In smearing Israel, Jonathan Sacks and – by association – most British Jews, Steve Bell has attempted to grant Jeremy Corbyn and his cult-like band of acolytes the ultimate political get-out-of-jail-free card the times – lifetime moral impunity for expressions of anti-Jewish racism.
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