The Guardian: the gaffe that keeps on gaffing

A guest post by Joe Geary.

The Guardian is so full of gaffes that its nickname is “the Grauniad”: the paper that can’t get anything right, not even its own name.

Latest in this illustrious series is “PainGate” in which one of the newspaper’s top writers accused David Cameron of suffering only “privileged pain” over the prolonged death of his handicapped son. Tories don’t feel pain. Only complex, sensitive, profound Guardian readers feel real suffering – the pain of gendered pronouns or the sheer angst of being mansplained. Editor-in-chief Kath Viner, apologised for “falling short of our standards”; not the sort of thing the Guardian should write. Think, yes, just not put down in ink.

Or instead of “gaffe” should that be “gap”? This last weekend alone some 70 protesters have been killed by Iraqi security forces, with the threat of future explosion of sectarian violence. Luckily not one was shot by an Israeli so it all gets relegated to the “who cares?” pages.

And what to make of the Guardian’s adulation of Sadiq Khan; ardent anti-Trumpian, keen to protest Trump’s visit to London and to allow the puerile Trump baby blimp? Keen too – in stark contrast – to host, well, a veritable host of top Chinese officials including the mayors of Shenzhen (twice), Guandong, and Shanghai, the Communist Party secretaries of Beijing and Guandong (see Private Eye #1506) – all top members of the Chinese Communist Party and complicit in heinous human rights abuses. Trump might have tried to ban a few people from flying to the US, but he hasn’t put a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps and allegedly harvested their organs, as the Chinese regime does. Does any of this temper the Guardian’s worship of the Great Khan? Not one bit. It’s latest love letter to him is here.

And what of that other paragon of human rights, the Iranian regime? The Guardian will dutifully report on the seizure of a dual-national Brit, but who is to blame? Not the murderous apocalyptic mullahs or the Mafiosi of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, just nameless “international relations”. But there is far worse. The Guardian will follow its favourite fetish and issue report after report on the arrest of a Palestinian teenager by Israeli police  for repeated violent conduct (just like any other police force in the world). But how would the average Guardian reader ever know just how many children are executed every year in Iran?  Seven last year alone, according to UN experts, and 90 more children are on Iran’s death row.

We may well ask Ms Viner what are the Guardian’s standards. Double standards for sure.

 

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