In May, the Guardian published corrections to two articles following our complaints about inaccurate language used to describe the ICJ’s preliminary decision on the genocide charge against Israel. The January ruling was widely misrepresented throughout the Western media, falsely claiming that the court ruled that Israel was “plausibly” committing genocide.
That framing was fatally undermined in April when Joan O’Donoghue, the former President of the ICJ, stated clearly on a BBC interview that the court did NOT rule that the CLAIM of genocide against Israel was “plausible”, nor did it rule, in any way, on the merits of the charge. The court narrowly ruled that “there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide”
Thus, following our complaint which cited Ms. O’Donoghue’s clarification, Guardian editors corrected an article by Daniel Hurst at the outlet (“Fatima Payman accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza in significant rupture with Labor party position”, May 15) which erred by asserting that the ICJ’s interim ruling found the the claims of genocide were “plausible”.
The sentence was amended to correctly state that the ICJ ruled that “at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa” were “plausible”, and the following correction note was added:
Another Guardian op-ed, by Miqdaad Versi (“There is a way for Starmer’s Labour to fix the big rift with Muslim voters – if it has the will”, May 6), claiming that “the [ICJ] considered Israel to be plausibly committing genocide” was also corrected following our complaint. The wording was revised, and the correction note states the following:
However, in four subsequent Guardian op-eds or articles which contained the same error, the outlet failed to make the necessary corrections, or even respond to our complaints. The outlet’s most recent introduction of this lie is found in an editorial (“The Guardian view on a genocide probe call: sense in Gaza’s senseless conflict”, Nov. 18). Here’s the sentence in question:
Legal scrutiny of the conflict requires access to Gaza, which has been sealed off for 13 months in defiance of the international court of justice’s calls to permit entry to investigate a “plausible genocide”.
In our complaint, we cited, in addition to their own two previous corrections May, the fact that the BBC recently upheld our complaint on that same error:
Further, we added, the two words quoted in the Guardian editorial, “plausible genocide”, do not in fact appear together anywhere in the full ICJ ruling. So, the editorial doesn’t merely promote a wildly inaccurate interpretation of the ICJ’s ruling, but includes a fabricated quote.
As with our previous three complaints on the ‘plausibile genocide’ lie, the Guardian Readers’ Editor hasn’t responded to our email.
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