As we noted on these pages yesterday, The Times still hasn’t corrected the blatantly false claim in an Oct. 27 article that the deadly truck-ramming attack in Central Israel on Sunday, which killed one and injured dozens, hit the Mossad headquarters. Editors have thus far ignored our complaint clearly demonstrated that they got it wrong.
The piece in question was written by defence and political correspondent George Grylls, the same journalist who wrote another egregiously misleading article a week earlier alleging, without evidence, that Israeli settlers have been targeting Christian homes. The piece (“Settlers‘using the war’ to target Christian homes in the West Bank“, Oct. 22), centers around one Christian woman, named Alice Kisiya, an Israeli citizen who’s married to a Palestinian man.
While the article mentions that Kisiyah and her husband were forced out of her home outside Bethlehem and a restaurant they ran, it relegates to the 23rd paragraph the highly relevant fact she was evicted because a court determined that they didn’t own the property. However, even the allusion to the legal decision, close to the end of the article, is couched in language casting extreme doubt over the integrity of the ruling:
The family is now saddled with debt from the legal case. But they maintain their ownership of the land was rubber-stamped by a Jerusalem court last year.
Additionally, per the headline, the journalist promotes the unsupported narrative that Israeli residents of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) are cynically exploiting the Oct. 7th massacre, and the ensuing war against Hama,s to further ‘colonise’ Palestinian land – a sinister charge that’s been promoted Francesca Albanese, the antisemitic UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“On October 7“, the Times journalist writes, “Israelis living in border communities around Gaza were killed in a Hamas terrorist attack“, which he ties to ‘increased’ land annexation in the territory. As you can see, Gryllis, in the sentence above, omits that number of Israelis murdered on Oct. 7th, which of course was 1,200.
Another telling element of the article is found here, when the Times quotes Kisiyah’s mother:
“We are treated like second-class citizens,” says Alice [Kisiyah]. “The court is their game. They manipulate us with courts, judges and lawyers.” Her mother adds: “They believe in Jewish supremacy, they think they are the chosen ones.”
While it’s unclear how hte Times journalist felt personally abuot the tropes used by Alice’s mother about ‘Jewish supremacy’ and ‘the chosen ones’, he made no effort to explain to readers that her accusation echoes racist tropes peddled by neo-Nazis, and appears in the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to promote the lethal idea that Jews see themselves as a superior race.
However, far more problematic than Gryllis’s omission regarding the dangerous anti-Jewish history of the quote he chose to inclue is the fact that there is literally nothing in his piece to support the charge, beginning in the headline, that Christians are being specifically targeted by the Israeli government and/or settlers.
Once again, we see that what often passes for journalism in the British media as it pertains to Israel can be best described as narratives in search of evidence.