5 Pillars News corrects misleading "Israeli war crimes" claim

Though the British Muslim site 5 Pillars has a track record of defending hate preachers and peddling wild anti-Israel conspiracy theories, they fancy themselves a serious news outlet, and is a member of IMPRESS – one of the UK’s two new press regulatory bodies established in 2016.

So, as they putatively hold themselves accountable to professional journalistic standards of accuracy, we’ve been monitoring their Israel related content recently, and have prompted two recent corrections.

The latest article at the site which we flagged was published on April 13th.

Here’s the original headline:

Boris Johnson says UK opposes investigation into Israeli war crimes

Here’s the original opening sentence:

In a letter to the Conservative Friends of Israel, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has confirmed the UK’s opposition to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) announcement of an icnvestigation into war crimes by Israel.

We complained to editors, arguing that the headline’s use of the words “Israeli war crimes”, and the article’s use of “war crimes by Israel”, are extremely misleading and in breech of IMPRESS’s accuracy clause due to the fact that the “war crimes’ are of course only “alleged” at this point, and the ICC hasn’t even begun their investigation.

We noted to editors that even the Guardian has been careful to use the modifying word “alleged” in articles about the ICC’s upcoming investigation of both Israel and Hamas.

Our complaint was upheld, and the headline and opening sentence changed.

Here’s the amended headline: