AKUS’s take on recent Guardian reports and CiF commentaries

A guest post by AKUS

I picked up a few examples of the Guardian’s warped views that hardly seem worth a full article, but made me think again about their bizarre understanding of how the world works and their incessant attempts to show the West and Israel in the worst possible light.

 1. September 24th Guinea’s president promises to turn country into stable democracy, David Smith, Guardian.

“The president’s vision is under scrutiny, however. A year ago three protesters were killed during clashes between police and demonstrators at a banned opposition rally. Amnesty International warned: “It’s deeply alarming that President Alpha Condé is resorting to exactly the same brutal methods as his predecessors.”

In July, Condé’s security forces clashed with villagers demanding jobs in the village of Zogota, where Vale and the Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz’s BSG Resources are jointly seeking to develop an iron ore mine. Local rights groups claimed five protesters were killed, while the government has launched an investigation.”

Three protestors were killed … but I do not recall the Guardian placing South Africa “under scrutiny” when 34 miners were shot down, a few weeks ago, despite the overall positive tone of support for the miners themselves. But then, criticizing the current South African racism would be the ultimate admission of the failure of the Guardians world view (GWV).

Why the mention of “Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz’s BSG Resources” but the cryptic “Vale” for  “Brazil’s Vale (Companhia Vale do Rio Doce), the corporation with the most “contempt for the environment and human rights” which was named world’s most evil company” according to The Public Eye Forum? Obviously, when an Israeli is involved, to the Guardian this implies some underhand dealing that must be outed, while the machinations of the much larger Vale need not be brought to the attention of the anti-Israel faithful

2. The endless chest beating by Guardian writers and commenters over the West’s iniquitous behavior in not realizing that an obscure anti-Islamic film clip would upset Muslims reached pretty much everyone’s boredom threshold. For example (and generally Milne is the worst example of everything wrong at the Guardian though Glenn Greenwald seems to be in a race to the bottom for the title), Seamus Milne claimed:

“But it would be absurd not to recognise that the scale of the response isn’t just about a repulsive video, or even reverence for the prophet. As is obvious from the slogans and targets, what set these protests alight is the fact that the injury to Muslims is seen once again to come from an arrogant hyperpower that has invaded, subjugated and humiliated the Arab and Muslim world for decades.”

But why no mention at the Guardian that the real culprit was an Egyptian known as Sheikh Khalid Abdullah  who has a talk show on Egypt’s Al-Nas satellite TV ? He fished this clip up out of the obscurity it richly deserved and broadcast it to viewers, knowing full well that this would lead to mass demonstrations and rioting. Ultimately he has caused dozens of deaths, not only those of Ambassador Stevens and three of his guards.  Other papers (the Telegraph and the NYT for example) found this out with no difficulty:

The Atlantic Wire further pointed out that:

 “The New York Times Lede blog has described Abdullah as a man who’s “part of a school of particularly shrill religious demagogues who turn every possible event into an attack on Islam,” quoting Egyptian-British journalist Sarah Carr.”

Why was there no discussion at the Guardian of the fact that this film was deliberately used by the Egyptian equivalent of Pastor Terry Jones  as well as Muslim politicians and clerics around the world to whip up anti-Western fervor, particularly in places where a useful scapegoat distracts the mobs from their real economic and social problems?

Have there been any articles about the Iranian desire to capture and, presumably, murder the American who made the film? Or of the $100,000 bounty offered by a Pakistani cabinet minister for anyone doing the same? Or anything more than a dryly noted recognition that the Iranians increased the bounty on Salman Rushdie ?

3.  Glenn Greenwald, now the Guardian’s loony left outrage fomenter du jour, after previously spending two articles attacking CNN, suddenly discovers CNN’s good side – as long as he can take a crack at the USA:  State department attacks CNN for doing basic journalism.

But of course, he misses the real issue – not the diary, but the suppression of the news about how Ambassador was dragged through the streets of Benghazi, after being murdered by the newly democratic Libyan militias.

Why has the Guardian been so reluctant to show what life is really like in Libya?

Because after cheerleading the NATO invasion there – and now doing the same over Syria – with endless “live reports”, maps, moving pins, videos, commentary, editorials, columns by the whole stable of ME “experts” they keep in London, they don’t want to face up to the fact that in their enthusiasm for revolution everywhere (except in the Guardian’s executive suite) they supported the replacement of Gaddafi with a group even worse.

4. Greenwald is also the consummate Monday morning quarterback when it comes to criticizing the USA and Israel. A man who clearly has never been in a firefight or actual physical danger at his NY attorney’s office knows exactly what and why things were muddled in the reporting on Bin Laden’s compound and the riots in Benghazi and why the US deliberately lied and lies about it all.

But Greenwald is the commenter who, in typical Guardian style, rushed into print claiming it was an Israeli backed by Jewish money that made the film clip “Innocence of the Muslims”, leading to a rare retraction by the Guardian and an even rarer change of the language in his hasty article.

I never imagined it would be possible to find a lower species of Israel-obsessed as-a-Jew than Seth Freedman, but I must award that dubious honor to Greenwald.

5. September 21st: an Israeli soldier is killed and the Guardian manages to crank out an AP report that says Israeli forces kill three Egyptian ‘militants’ in border skirmish. No mention that an Israeli soldier was killed and that the “skirmish” was an ambush of a soldier taking water to North African refugees.

Even if at the time they did not know an Israeli soldier was killed by these “militants”, surely at some point this might have earned an update? After all, when Israel killed two terrorists – sorry, “militants” – in Gaza few days ago, within hours the Guardian even managed to put up a video clip with the title Israeli air strike on Gaza kills two Palestinian security officials – video  of crowds around the car in which they had been traveling. Amazing how they know who killed these “security officials” (pardon my laughter) but are profoundly ignorant when an Israeli is killed.

Since they relied on a press agency (rather than their woman in Jerusalem, Harriet Sherwood, who remains obstinately silent over this murder), how did they miss the report by Agence France which rather spoils the story the Guardian wants to tell:

“DUBAI — An Islamist militant group said it launched a deadly cross-border attack on Israel from Egypt’s Sinai in protest at a US-made film mocking Islam, SITE Intelligence Group reported on Sunday.

Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem) termed the attack a “Disciplinary Invasion Against those who Dared Against the Beloved Prophet,” the US-based monitoring agency said, citing a statement posted on Islamist websites.”

Should there not have been a little outrage expressed by the Guardian that the soldier killed was ambushed while bringing water to African refugees trapped on the Egyptian side of the border, which they had reached after being smuggled through Egyptian territory? Or is that humanitarian gesture, when the person carrying it out is killed by “militants”, too far from the narrative of “justifiably-outraged-against-Israelis-Muslims” to be mentioned?

There’s nothing in these examples that is much different from the usual run of things at the Guardian – just the usual drip-drip-drip of articles attacking the US and Israel, and polishing the bright gemstone of Islamic extremism that the Guardian loves to support at their expense.

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