A few days ago, we called out the Guardian for publishing a truly grotesque op-ed accusing Israelis and Jews of ‘weaponising’ Oct. 7th commemoration – imputing ulterior motives to those doing their best to bear witness to worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust. The piece was written by Naomi Klein, who, last April at the outlet, published a piece effectively accusing most of the world’s Jews of being in thrall to a genocidal ideology.
Yesterday, the outlet managed flip the middle finger at Jews yet again.
Their review by features writer Stuart Jeffries of Channel 4’s One Day in October documentary about Hamas’s mass murder, sexual violence, torture, incineration, mutilation and hostage taking of men, women and children on Oct. 7th,
The review included the following criticism:
If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help. Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.
…
All our sympathies are with relatable Israelis. A mother texting farewell messages as she dies from gunshot wounds. A girl sending cute pictures of her playing with friends to her mum, who is cowering in a toilet cubicle, hoping the terrorists she can hear breathing outside can’t hear her. By contrast, Hamas terrorists are a generalised menace on CCTV, their motives beyond One Day in October’s remit.
Jeffries’ complaint about the documentary’s unfair, morally simplistic characterisation of the bloodthirsty pogromists who murdered, raped and pillaged their way through Israeli villages, is not, as many on X understandably alleged, a new low for the Guardian. Rather, it’s entirely consistent with their coverage in the days, weeks, and months following the barbarism on that dark Shabbat day.
As we wrote a few weeks after the massacre, when their journalists and contributors had already decided against treating Jewish victims of genocidal racism the way the would treat any other minority group targeted in such as way, “the Guardian will not allow the story to be about the Jewish victims of such unimaginable Hamas cruelty, and the fact that the worst antisemitic attack in the world since the Holocaust was perpetrated by Palestinians”.
The media institution, we argued, “had invested too much in the Palestinian cause, spent too many years opining on the righteousness of the Palestinians and their UK supporters, that the conflict’s root cause is Zionist malevolence and that Israel’s fears of the threat posed by terror groups on its borders is exaggerated to adjust their reporting, yet alone abandon their faith in Palestinianism”.
Instead, we argued, they doubled down.
