Surprise? The Guardian fails to challenge the lies of HRW’s Omar Shakir - by Adam Levick

As is often the case when reporting on anti-Israel NGOs, the Guardian article reads more like a HRW press release than anything resembling professional journalism.

Adam Levick..
UK Media Watch..
05 November '19..

The Guardian is adept at amplifying, and failing to critically scrutinise, the unsubstantiated claims and accusations of anti-Israel NGOs, and today’s article about the Israeli Supreme Court decision on Human Right Watch’s regional director Omar Shakir – a long time BDS activist – follows this pattern.

First, as we predicted in a tweet before the article by Oliver Holmes (“Israel can deport Human Rights Watch official, court rules”, Nov. 5th) was published, the piece uncritically cites Shakir’s simply unhinged response to the court’s decision:

Shakir wrote on Twitter that if he was kicked out, Israel would join the ranks of Iran, North Korea and Egypt in blocking access to Human Rights Watch staff. “We won’t stop. And we won’t be the last,” he said.

The truth is that democracies all over the world reserve the right to deny entry to those seen as intent on harming the state. Moreover, there are in excess of 350 NGOs (such as HRW) operating freely in Israel, even those who continually deligitimise the state, support BDS and even reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

The denial of a work visa to one employee of one of these NGOs – after careful consideration by the country’s internationally respected supreme court – wouldn’t even minimally change the democratic nature of Israel. The human rights organisation Freedom House continually ranks Israel as the only truly free and democratic country in the region, and the suggestion that this status will change due merely to the supreme court’s decision on Shakir’s work visa is risible.

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Confronting The Guardian ideology

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
21 February '11

“It’s the economy, stupid” is a phrase in American politics made famous during the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election campaign. Bill Clinton’s campaign manager had a sign with this phrase at their headquarters to stress to the candidate that, regardless of the issue being discussed, success in the election depended on making the conversation about the economy – which was in bad shape at the time, and represented former President Bush’s greatest political liability.

I sometimes wonder if Guardian editorial offices has something akin to Clinton’s campaign mantra – a note, not based on political calculations but, rather, maintaining an ideological edifice, reminding them where any conversation about the Middle East must preferably lead: “It’s about Israel, stupid.”

While such a scenario is, of course, meant in jest, I am at a loss to account for how, in the course of a new Guardian editorial (“The Middle East: People, Power, Politics“) on Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal and deadly crackdown against Libyan protesters, and the broader political upheavals in the region, they somehow managed to throw in this line:

“the Libyan leader may still be considered too valuable to lose, as US influence in the region decreases. Nowhere is that truer than in the cockpit of the crisis, Palestine.

“Israel Derangement Syndrome” may adequately, albeit cheekily, describe the dynamic whereby otherwise reasonable people can attribute the cause of nearly any political crisis in the world to the behavior of the Jewish state, but doesn’t seem nearly strong enough of a term to characterize the Guardian’s obsession with Israel.

(Read full "Confronting The Guardian ideology")

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The Guardian’s Israel obsession in one image

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
02 January '10

We just came across this little nugget of information from a site called Views of the World.

To understand how British people perceive the events on the globe, one can look at how frequently a country has been mentioned in major news stories. The following maps do exactly this by visualising the number of news items on the website of the British Newspaper The Guardian (data derived from their Data store).

(Read full "The Guardian’s Israel obsession in one image")

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Viewpoint: When ideology discounts reality

Carmel Gould
Just Journalism
25 July '10

Scathing critiques of Israeli policy are the bread and butter of Guardian writer, Rachel Shabi. However, in her latest contribution, ‘Israel turns upon its own,’ published in print and online, she goes much further than the facts will carry her.

Depicting an alleged descent by Israel into ‘long-incubated racism, both institutional and incidental – a casual, acceptable prejudice’ she blames not Judaism but ‘the Eurocentric cornerstones of the country: the belief, expressed by Israel's founding fathers and still current, that the nation should be a bastion of the "enlightened" west in the heart of the supposedly savage Middle East.’

However, her attempt to illustrate Israelis’ apparent rejection of all things Arab – and presumably Muslim – only serves to highlight the gap between anti-Israel fantasy and a slightly more mundane reality.

Shabi claims that Israel is ‘the sniffy neighbour of the Middle East,’ explaining why ‘The ban on travel to most Arab countries is of no consequence to the majority of Israelis, who could not be less interested in the region.’ True, Israelis are banned by Israel from travelling to countries such as Lebanon and Syria, but Shabi omits to mention that they are also banned by the countries themselves. Even if a non-Israeli has so much as an Israeli stamp on their passport, they will be denied entry to Lebanon.

But what about Arab countries from which Israelis are not banned? Every year, tens of thousands of Israelis travel for tourism purposes to Egypt and Jordan - both countries with peace treaties with Israel - indicating that where they are welcome in the Arab world, Israelis will travel.

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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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A reply to Linda Grant (What HaAretz would not publish)

WellofSense
CiF Watch
16 June '10

Dear Linda,

I was deeply moved by your article so kindly printed in The Guardian’s sister newspaper, HaAretz in Israel. I subscribe to HaAretz with great reluctance because I feel that the newspaper has become more and more manipulative in the last few years perhaps taking its lead from its sister, The Guardian.

I no longer trust HaAretz’s news items. I no longer trust its polls. I suspect them all of being politically contrived to make me dissatisfied with the present Israeli government. This is a complete waste of time as it is preaching to the converted. What really annoys me is the unrepentant misrepresentation and omission that I find so common in your newspaper, The Guardian, being duplicated in HaAretz. I call The Guardian a newspaper out of habit but, in truth, it is no longer a newspaper. It is just the propaganda organ of a dedicated group of extreme “progressives” riding on the back of a once proud newspaper which proposed an alternative left agenda.

How they ever got control is beyond me.

Unfortunately, in Israel, the choice of newspapers is very limited Linda. If there were a good center left newspaper I would with great joy cancel my subscription to HaAretz.

As to your article:

‘Israel has failed to convince the public in Europe that those on board included terrorists smuggling arms to Hamas, and that they attacked the Israeli commandos first.’

This is plainly untrue Linda. Israel has never claimed that the flotilla was carrying arms for delivery to Hamas. It has said that if the flotilla succeeds in its stated aims of breaking the blockade, the ships that follow will have Iranian, Syrian and North Korean armaments which will be used to strike at Israel’s population.

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