UK media outlets continue to mischaracterise the The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on charges of ‘genocide’ against Israel, while ignoring a clarification by ICJ’s former president on the issue that, contrary to what many MSM outlets reported, the court did NOT rule that there was a “plausible” case for genocide.
Here’s the interview in question, on the BBC’s Hardtalk, with Joan O’Donoghue:
Here’s the relevant comment in the interview:
[The court] “didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible. It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there is a plausible case of genocide isn’t what the court decided.”
Due to the interview, we were able to get the Guardian to correct two pieces over a ten day period which initially repeated the false claim about the court ruling that genocide charge was “plausible”.
However, as our colleague noted in a post this morning, the BBC hasn’t received the memo. During a May 13 edition of BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Mornings with Kaye Adams’, the presenter failed to challenge a claim by Nick Nappier, head of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, that “the International Court of Justice has said we’re dealing plausibly with a case of genocide“.
Yet another BBC radio programme promotes disinformation about January's ICJ ruling, with an antisemitic trope thrown in. https://t.co/YWMbMmukKs @kayeadams @BBCRadioScot
— CAMERA UK (@CAMERAorgUK) May 21, 2024
CAMERA UK has submitted a complaint to the BBC over Adams’ failure to challenge this misinformation.
Similarly, we complained today about a May 19th op-ed in the National (of Scotland) which included this false claim.
We complained to @ScotNational about an op-ed with an erroneous claim (below) about the ICJ ruling.
As even @guardian acknowledged in upholding two of our complaints on the same issue, the ICJ did NOT find that allegations of genocide were "plausible"
1/2 pic.twitter.com/aSobC0ZAJl
— CAMERA UK (@CAMERAorgUK) May 21, 2024
See this post by our colleague David Litman which provides more examples of Western media outlets which got the story wrong.
