"War Crimes" and Shoddy Journalism

We're all familiar with the double-standards and hypocrisy of the media. However, it's important to criticize and expose shoddy journalism for what it is. Especially when lies and hearsay has such negative implications for Israel.

The UK's popular newspaper, The Guardian, recently printed nonsense that has been thoroughly debunked as "Palestinian" advocacy rather than honest journalism:

Melanie Phillips has produced a thorough and devastating debunking of The Guardian's stories, videos, commentary and editorial. She points out:

• The allegations are presented as facts even though they are unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.

• The proven unreliability of Palestinian "eyewitnesses".

• The lack of any verifiable information or any mention of the measures taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties while Hamas actively used human shields.

Phillips takes apart the three videos, including one in which we are told as a fact that three young brothers were used by the IDF as human shields. She notes:

Most ludicrously of all, the video shows what it solemnly states is an Israeli army magazine found in one of the destroyed houses showing a picture of one of the brothers bound and blindfolded before he said he was stripped to his underpants and used as a human shield.

Rub your eyes. Operation Cast Lead lasted from December 27 to January 18. Are we supposed to believe that the Israelis managed to publish during that time a magazine with a picture of a boy they had captured during that same operation? And then left it lying around in the rubble - miraculously without so much as a tear in its pages -- for him conveniently to find it?

As further evidence that The Guardian chose activism over journalism, The Jerusalem Post reports that in a letter The Guardian sent out to blog and Web site owners, calling for them to support its work, the paper said the Gaza film clips were meant to "add weight to calls this week for a full inquiry into the events surrounding Operation Cast Lead, which was aimed at Hamas, but which left over 1,400 Palestinians dead - around 300 known to be children." Guardian Films then asked the bloggers to link to their "Gaza War Crimes" page.

The appeal, sent by Mustafa Khalili, who is one of those credited by The Guardian for the Gaza content, was inadvertently received by the ZioNation blog, which blew the whistle on The Guardian's partisan political activism.

The Guardian is carrying out a blatant and systematic campaign of demonization against Israel that goes well beyond journalistic norms. JPost blogger Edwin Bennatan even points out how the paper has apparently been selective in its willingness to publish responses from supporters of Israel criticizing what they say is The Guardian's extreme lack of balance and proportion. Bennatan publishes a very eloquent response to The Guardian that was removed from the paper's Comment is Free blog site.

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Posted in: Hamas,Honest Reporting,Islamic Terror,Israel,Palestinians