For the second time in less than a month, the Guardian benignly referred to Hezbollah as merely a Lebanese “Shia movement”, without explaining to readers that it’s a global terrorist group proscribed by the EU, US and the British government. (The UK and US proscribe both its political and military wings.)
In an email to Guardian editors last month, we complained about a Sept. 20 article (“Israel risks crossing Hezbollah ‘red line’ as it prepares to connect to disputed gas field”) by Jerusalem correspondent Bethan McKernan which included the following:
Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese Shia movement allied with Iran…
Our complaint, asking that they amend the article to note that the Iranian proxy is a recognized terrorist organisation, but received no reply.
The second such characterisation occurred in an article by McKernan last week (“Israel and Lebanon reach ‘historic’ maritime and border gas fields deal”, Oct. 11):
Talks on resolving the border dispute began in 2020 but have faced repeated setbacks , including threats towards Israel from Lebanon’s powerful Shia movement, Hezbollah,
In our complaint today addressing this latest omission, we stressed to editors that readers are grossly misled by the failure to adequately characterise the “Shia movement’s” extremist, antisemitic ideology, which fueled their history of deadly terror attacks targeting innocent Jews, including Jews outside the Middle East.
Indeed, in a 2002 speech, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah said that all the Jews gathering together in Israel saves them the trouble of targeting them around the world.
As CAMERA senior research analyst Sean Durns has written, in a piece at The National Interest, about the group’s global threat:
“Hezbollah de facto controls Lebanon and is the largest and most well-armed terrorist group in the world, operating on nearly every continent and possessing an arsenal of hundreds of thousands of missiles. The group has an active presence in the United States, has plotted attacks on Washington, DC restaurants, government buildings and major airports, and its members have even tried to infiltrate the New York Police Department and other government agencies. And three decades on, Nasrallah continues to plot death and destruction.”
We’ll update this post when we receive a reply from the Guardian’s Readers’ Editor.
*This post was amended on Oct. 19th to clarify that though the US and UK proscribe Hezbolla in its entirity, the EU only proscribes its ‘military wing’.
