On Oct. 9th, two days after the Hamas massacre, Husam Zomlot, the Head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, adamently refused, when asked by Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman, to condemn the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust. Instead, he blamed the ‘occupying power’ for the slaughter, by which he meant Israel.
He even refused, when asked by Newman, to call for the release of the Israeli civilians taken hostage.
In a normal media landscape, Zomlot’s effective defence of the terror group’s murder, rape, torture, mutilation and hostage taking would have rendered him an extremist, and certainly not someone whose views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be taken seriously. But, as we’ve demonstrated over the past 11 months, Sky News’s coverage of the region since that dark Shabbat day has been anything but normal.
A few days ago, Sky News by presenter Saima Mohsin not only interviwed Zomlot to get his reaction to the West Bank killing of an American-Turkish International Solidarity Movement [ISM] activist, but failed even once to challenge any of his propagandistic talking points and outright lies. Though the IDF is currently investigating the tragic death of the woman, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, who was killed while soldiers were responding to a Palestinian rock-throwing incident in Beita, near Nablus, Zomlot of course presumed Israeli guilt and used the airtime on Sky to vilify the state.
Here are the liess, distortions and propaganda that went completely unchallenged by the Sky presenter:
- Zomlot described Eygi as “peace activist”, despite the fact that her organisation is linked to terrorism, its mission statement supports “armed struggle” and, as such, it effectively defended the Oct. 7th attacks.
- Zomlot claimed that the IDF intentionally murdered Eygi.
- Zomlot claimed that Rachel Corrie, another ISM activist, was killed in 2003 “while she was trying to protect Palestinian children”. In fact, she was accidentally killed on the Philadelphi Corridor in the Rafah area of Gaza by a military bulldozer which was “clearing and leveling…the ground and clearing it of brush in order to expose hiding places used by terrorists, who would sneak out from these areas and place explosive devices with the intent of harming IDF soldiers”.
- Zomot referred to the Israeli government, collectively, as “war criminals”.
- On the IDF’s recent anti-terrorist operation in the northern West Bank, Zomlot accused the army of “masss murder”, despite the fact that at least half of those Palestinians killed in gun battlers were claimed by terror groups as their members, and that the cites wher the army operated in, such as Jenin, are knwon hotbeds of terror.
- Zomlot also falsely claimed that the army intentionally destroyed civilian infrastructure during the Jenin operation.
- Zomlot told Mohsin that Israel has been withouholding taxes from the PA, and didn’t note that the partial withholding of tax revenue was a reaction to the PA’s policy of paying salary to terrorists and their families, including the Hamas terrorists who murdered Israelis on Oct. 7th.
So, what Sky News viewers saw was not journalism, or an interview in any real sense of that word. Rather, they saw a six minute anti-Zionist diatribe by an apologist for a proscribed terror group, facilitated by a presenter who was either uwilling, or unequipped, to challenge the Palestinian envoy’s propaganda.
