Whom does The Guardian guard? And why?

Arnold/Frimet Roth
This Ongoing War: A Blog
23 July '10

Occasionally, the active role taken by reporters, editors and newspapers in soft-pedaling the terrorism that afflicts so many lives in this area (and specifically the lives of my wife and children and me) is so outrageous that you need to take a slow breath and start thinking about what to do about it. The British newspaper The Guardian provides a case in point today.

Though she's said to be based in Jerusalem where we live, we don't claim to know Harriet Sherwood. Hers is the name on this scandalous piece of agenda-pushing. She may be a nice and balanced individual with a commitment to objective reporting. Or she might be someone with strong political views that animate the reporting she writes in the pages of this influential paper. Let's look.

Start with the headline, which a Guardian sub-editor presumably contributed. Notice the word militant, which is British journalistic code for terrorist, is in quotation marks. Why? We already know many politically-motivated news channels malevolently propagate the notion that the Israelis kill innocents and cover this up by claiming they were terrorists. Is that what happened here? No, it's not. The terrorist group called Islamic Jihad claimed this dead man as one of theirs. A Maan Palestinian newsagency report today (it's here) reports that Islamic Jihad said he died while performing a "Jihadist mission". We should believe them.

The only doubt about whether the dead man was a terrorist is in the minds of The Guardian's people. That is not how news should be reported.

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