Buried in Guardian coverage of Iran nuke chief’s death: Tehran’s calls for Israel’s destruction

The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh , a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, last week was characterised in an official Guardian editorial yesterday as “a reckless and provocative act”, “a potential breach of international law”, and a blow to “diplomacy” that will undermine Iran’s “moderates” and was likely designed to shore up Netanyahu’s “electoral prospects”.

An earlier editorial at The Observer (a Guardian sister publication) warned that the alleged “Israeli assassination” represents a “declaration of war” against the Islamic Republic, and dismissed those who characterise Iran as an “evil” regime and “existential threat” as reciting a simplistic “rightwing narrative”.

Indeed, readers who happened upon the Guardian and Observer editorials – and almost all of their coverage of Fakhrizadeh‘s killing – could easily believe that those emphasizing Iran’s threat to Israel’s existence are engaging in cynical propaganda, because absent from both pieces is any acknowledgement that Iranian military and political leaders have repeatedly threatened to annihilate the Jewish state.

You’d believe, rather, if Israel was behind the attack, that the operation was launched for no legitimate national security reason whatsoever.

Our review of 11 Guardian pieces (here, here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here and here) on the assassination – including editorials, op-eds and straight news articles – totaling over 7700 words of content found only one fleeting reference to Iran’s malevolent designs, nine words in a Nov. 27th article by Oliver Holmes.

How can readers possibly understand Jerusalem’s motivations for putatively participating in the attack on Iran’s top military nuclear scientist without understanding that most Israeli Jews consider a nuclear armed Iran to be an existential threat – due to their genocidal antisemitic designs.

It’s telling that whilst the Guardian’s coverage has included characterisations of the targeted killing of Fakhrizadeh as contrary to international law, they’ve ignored the fact that Iran’s incitement to genocide is prohibited under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was largely a response to the Holocaust.

The Guardian’s near total failure to mention Iran’s eliminationist antisemitism in the context of their coverage of the Nov. 27th attack is, in addition to representing an egregious journalistic failure, yet another example of the media group’s inability to take anti-Jewish racism seriously – particularly when to do so would necessarily undermine their desired far-left narrative.

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1 Comment

  1. says: Grimey

    Fortunately, the anti-Semites controlling The Grauniad and The Blinkered have only a small audience of Lefties and Libby-Luvvies to which to spread their vile racism – but these noisy minorities do have undue influence in their arrogance.

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