An article at the Metro by Anugraha Sundaravelu reports on outrage over the fact that Apple’s voice assistant Siri doesn’t recognise ‘Palestine’ as a state. The piece (“TikToker’s video shows Siri doesn’t recognise Palestine’s existence”, Dec. 1) primarily focuses on the complaints by one pro-Palestinian TikToker named Mayanoraa, but later attempts to provide historical context:
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a 100-year-old issue, with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip reaching 54 years of conflict.
Israel of course ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, and evacuated all of its soldiers and civilians.
The piece also includes the following:
In May, Apple employees circulated an internal letter signed by nearly 1000 employees, calling on Tim Cook to put out a statement supporting the Palestinian people.
This came after Israel’s deadly bombing campaign in Gaza which killed roughly 227 people, including at least 63 children.
Here, the journalist is employing – in what’s putatively a straight news story – the language of anti-Israel activists by describing a war between Israel and internationally proscribed terrorist groups in Gaza, which was initiated by Hamas’s firing of rockets on Jerusalem, as “Israel’s deadly bombing campaign”. Hamas is completely absent from the article.
Further, it omits the 13 Israelis killed in the war – all but one of whom were civilians – and the fact that, nearly half of those Palestinians killed were terrorists. An additional 21 Palestinians, of the total they cited, were killed as the result of Gaza rockets that fell short.
We complained to editors, asking that they address the claim about Gaza’s ‘occupation’, as well as the journalist’s erasure of the antisemitic extremist groups from her description of the May war. However, they maintained that Gaza is indeed still occupied, and denied that the passage about the war we highlighted was misleading – thus, refusing to correct it.
We’re considering filing a complaint with IPSO.
