Guardian Australia Edition fails to cover vicious antisemitic attack in Sydney (Update)

In May, the Guardian launched the media group’s third international digital edition, Guardian Australia, a venture – edited by Katharine Viner, co-creator of ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie‘ – which their editors characterized as an “endeavour to engage [readers] with up-to-the-moment reporting, investigations, commentary, blogging, in-depth analysis…chutzpah and fun.”

The Australian edition was further celebrated by the Guardian upon its launch as an effort to “cater [to] the 1.1million Australians who regularly read the Guardian’s global website”.

However, it seems difficult to reconcile their mission, to cater to all Australians, with their failure thus far to devote any coverage to the otherwise widely reported racist incident two days ago in Sydney in which five Jews were viciously beaten – an attack characterized as “the worst incident of anti-Semitic violence” in the city in many years.

In addition to reports of the incident in the mainstream media abroad, major Australian dailies have also given prominent coverage to the attack, which occurred after a mob of eight teens taunted the group of kippah-wearing Jews with racist abuse as they were walking home from Shabbat dinner. Four of the victims were reportedly hospitalized, with injuries that included a concussion and a fractured cheekbone. 

Two 17-year-olds and a 23-year-old were arrested at the scene, but the rest of the alleged attackers managed to escape.

Interestingly, the Guardian Australia has, however, managed to devote space to other pressing stories out of Sydney since Friday:

Of course, such selective reporting isn’t anything new at the Guardian. As we reported at the time, in 2012 the Guardian bent over backwards to avoid characterizing the murder, by a French-Algerian Islamist, of four Jews (including three children) at a school in Toulouse as antisemitic in nature, and even managed to publish two editorials on the attack without mentioning that the victims were Jewish.

As we’ve argued previously, the stories the Guardian seriously downplays or even, as in the antisemitic attack in Sydney, avoids covering altogether, speaks volumes about their skewed, far-left ideology.

(Update: On Monday morning, Oct. 28, the Guardian finally covered the antisemitic attack in Sydney, here and here.)

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