Guardian’s egregious double standards on display in report on Israeli Facebook post

Over the last week the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood has devoted two reports to the row over comments posted by an Israeli government official on his personal Facebook page.

August 16:

fb 1

August 22:

fb 2

Whilst the comments by Danny Seaman, Deputy Director General for Information at the Israeli Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, were clearly inappropriate and offensive, recent Facebook posts on the official account of Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, go way beyond ‘inappropriate’ and yet will almost certainly not be reported by the Guardian.

Per a report on Aug. 22 at Palestinian Media Watch:

Fatah’s official Facebook page continues to promote and glorify violence and terror for children. In one [August] post, young Palestinian boys are shown holding rifles with the text: “The children of Palestine – this is how they celebrated their holiday.”

Kids_with_rifle_FB

In another [August] post, a masked man is holding a rifle with these words beside the picture:

“Machine gun, wake up the sleeping and tell them that without blood Palestine will not return

Masked_man_with_rifle

Another [August] post on Fatah’s main Facebook page described 4 female terrorist murderers as “stars who sparkled in the sky.” Three of the women were suicide bombers, while the fourth was a bus hijacker [Dalal Mughrabi] who was responsible for the deaths of 37 civilians [during the Coastal Road Massacre]. 

[Facebook, "Fatah - The Main Page," Aug. 2, 2013

Unlike Seaman’s Facebook posts – one of which was insensitive towards victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting the Israeli government to issue an apology – do we even have to ask whether the Palestinian Authority will apologize to the Jewish victims of the Palestinian terrorists they recently honored?

Will the Guardian or the mainstream media so much as report these acts of incitement, yet alone properly contextualize the incidents as serious impediments to peace in the dramatic fashion typically employed when Israel announces the construction of new homes in Jerusalem?

Whilst the answers to such questions are obvious to anyone who understands the double standards constantly on display in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the mere ubiquity of the media’s failure to hold Palestinians morally responsible for such grotesque behavior doesn’t render it any less outrageous. 

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