Johann Hari: Back With a Vengeance

Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
15 March '10

The Independent's columnist returns with another biased op-ed full of distortions and historical revisionism.

The Independent's Johann Hari will always be remembered as the columnist who compared Israel to excrement. Rather than answering the various libels and misinformation contained in his articles, Hari accused HonestReporting and others of attempting to curtail his freedom of speech when he was quite correctly and legitimately held to account.

So Hari shouldn't be surprised if his latest offering in The Independent (and reproduced on The Huffington Post) is enough to trigger yet more outrage.

Historical Revisionism

Perhaps Hari should start by consulting a credible history book as demonstrated by his faulty description of events in the region:

Their [the Palestinians'] story is so rarely explained without disinformation that it still seems startling when it is stated plainly. Until 1948, the Palestinians were living in their own homes, on their own land – until they were suddenly driven out in a war to make way for a new state for people fleeing a monstrous European genocide. They lived huddled and dazed in the 20 per cent of their land they were allowed to keep. They hardly fought back: they wept and dreamed of return. Then in the 1967 war, even these small strips were conquered with tanks and platoons.

In fact, the Palestinians were not living on their own land until 1948 - the land was part of the British Mandate and before that, the Ottoman Empire. There had never been a Palestinian state. The modern-day State of Israel was legitimately created by a vote in the United Nations and rejected by the Arab states who attacked it from all sides. The Palestinian refugees were created as a direct result of a war of aggression carried out by those Arab states and the Palestinian residents themselves. In addition, the 1967 war was also one of self-defense on the part of Israel, which indeed conquered more territories as a result of Arab aggression.

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