Grauniad caught in a bald faced lie about Israel…again

So it hasn’t been a good week for Comment is Free and the Guardian. First off, we had Antony Lerman misrepresenting Robin Shepherd’s newly released and highly recommended book, ‘A State Beyond the Pale’, which we exposed over the course of the week here, here and here [note to Georgina, Tony is getting to be a bit of a liability – remember the NGO Watch…oops I mean the NGO Monitor fiasco].
Things got worse when the Guardian point blank refused Robin Shepherd’s entirely reasonable request to respond to Lerman’s aspersions cast about his book by incredulously accusing Shepherd of bullying:

You can draw whatever conclusions you like, but you might reflect whether this kind of approach – which I would characterise, putting it mildly as browbeating – is more or less likely to get you the commission you seek.

Then we had the Seth Freedman boycott to give Seth a taste of his own medicine for supporting the anti-Israel boycott campaign. So worried about the impact of the boycott, the Guardian opened the Freedman thread bang on 8 in the morning to maximize traffic and even kept the thread open for an additional third day, something that is almost unprecedented. Yet despite this, comments were down approximately 25% and many of the comments, which were later deleted, focused on discussion of the boycott rather than the substance of the article, not that there was much substance to begin with anyway.
And to top off the week, we have the Guardian in a Freudian slip omitting the names of the three Israeli recipients of the Nobel peace prize from a list of “everyone who has ever won the nobel peace prize”.
So you’d think that after its experiences this week, the Guardian would learn to check its facts a little bit better especially when its mantra is “facts are  sacred”.

But not so. CiF has just published an editorial commenting on the ridiculous decision of the award of the Nobel peace prize to Obama.
Now putting aside the fact that this editorial goes out of its way to use the Obama story as a stick to beat Israel – Israel receives “special” mention no less than three separate times in a five-paragraph editorial – so caught up in its barely concealed obsession-filled hate of Israel, it stated:

Take the Middle East, where Mr Obama’s Cairo speech in June was stirring in explaining how Palestinians had “suffered in pursuit of a homeland”, but the desperate conditions in Israeli-occupied Gaza have not since improved one jot.  [emphasis added]

Catch that? The Guardian in its own editorial still believes that Israel occupies Gaza. Needless to say that it doesn’t because Israel evacuated every last inch of Gaza back in 2005 in its unilateral disengagement plan. But never let an inconvenient truth stand in the way of a good story.
Luckily, the Guardian wasn’t able to pull the wool over the eyes of BigE who spotted the “error”:

BigE

10 Oct 09, 12:18am
Yet again, the Guardian creates “facts” from thin air (this time from the editor, no less):
…but the desperate conditions in Israeli-occupied Gaza…
There hasn’t been a single Israeli in Gaza since Ariel Sharon implemented the pull-out. Furthermore the Geneva Convention defines “occupation” as performing the services of government. Yet not only does Israel not perform the functions of government, but it does not surround Gaza either – the Egyptians control the Egyptian/Gaza border and not the Israelis.
By the Editor’s definition of occupation, Britain must be occupying Spain by virtue of its presence in Gibraltar…

And as a result of being caught in a bald faced lie, the editorial was subsequently updated to replace the word “occupied” with “blockaded”.
And just in case there is any doubt as to the veracity of what the BigE said – as the Guardian failed to publish the customary notice that it made an update to the editorial and we all know that pro-Israel posters are really paid agents of the Israeli government – you can go here to view the as-published version of the article to see for yourselves.
Update
Louise has drawn our attention to a great piece by Robin Shepherd that focuses on how the Guardian Uses Obama Nobel Prize Award to Advance Anti-Israel Narrative.


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