The ‘appeal to authority’ fallacy is committed when arguments are presented as true simply because an individual or group deemed to have authority supports it, rather than being backed by evidence or sound reasoning.
This fallacy, our research over the years has demonstrated, is employed continually by British media outlets to defame Israel, saving their reporters the time required to make strong arguments supported by gathering of facts and engaging in the hard work of real journalism. Instead of tracking down primary sources, obtaining evidence, crunching the numbers and making well-reasoned arguments that Israel on any given issue is at fault, they effectively outsource their work to NGOs, international bodies and so-called “experts” – regardless of their records of bias and flawed methodologies.
Worse, these articles sometimes are effectively copied and pasted from reports produced by NGOs, UN body or putative “experts”, often without any fact-checking performed by the reporter – a practice known as “churnalism“. Indeed, the BBC, as we’ve continually demonstrated, often ignores its own editorial standards when uncritically amplifying charges by self-identifying human rights NGOs without revealing the extremist views of some such groups.
So, for instance, a Hamas-affiliated NGO which calls itself EuroMed Human Rights Monitor is, due to having the words “human rights” (and “EuroMed”, evoking pleasant thoughts of cruises from, say, Haifa to Rhodes) in its name, sometimes cited by lazy or ideologically-driven reporters to support charges – no matter how crazy and incendiary – in articles defaming Israel.
Francesca Albanese is another example of an ideological extremist, with a record compromised by antisemitism and the justification of terror, who, due to her title, “UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories“, is still framed as an authority on human rights in the region, even when spewing words salads of academic jargon similar to what you’d like hear at a symposium on post-modernism.
Speaking of academia, a recent example of media outlets – including the BBC, Financial Times and Guardian – outsourcing their reporting to a scholastic organisation with an authoritative-sounding name, in order to advance an anti-Israel libel, occurred on Monday, when the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution declaring Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Focusing on the Financial Times (FT), which claims to be “recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy”, we see that their article on the resolution doesn’t include much original reporting, failing, for instance, to scrutinise the veracity of the claims made in the resolution’s text, nor examining the vote itself.
In fact, the original version of the FT article (“Israel committing genocide in Gaza, say scholars“, Sept. 3), written by their Middle East editor Andrew England, didn’t even note that the only about a quarter of the association’s 500 or so members voted on the resolution, with 88% of that number voting in favor. The article was amended at some point to note this.
The FT also failed to inform readers that there were evidently no qualifications for membership in the association, beyond, of course, having a valid credit card to pay the $30 annual fee. Asked about qualifications for joining and how many members were accredited scholars, a spokesperson for the IAGS told The Times of Israel that “Our organization has always been open to academics as well as civil society practitioners, policymakers, and all sorts of other people who are invested in the research and understanding and the prevention of genocide.”
As longtime member of the association, Sara Brown, said, the association initially was made up of mainly scholars, but eventually opened its membership to non-experts, including pro-Palestinian activists. For instance, Nidal Jboor, one of the IAGS members who voted in favor of the resolution, said, at an anti-Israel conference in Detroit last weekend, that the anti-Israel movement needed to “take out” and “neutralise” its “child murderer” opponents, and hailed the “freedom fighters” of Gaza as “heroes.”
Brown also said that the organisation prevented members from filing comments criticizing the resolution before the vote. “We were promised a town hall, which is a common practice for controversial resolutions,” she wrote, “but the president of the association reversed that. The association has also refused to disclose who were the authors of the resolution.”
The association’s open membership, which clearly requires no vetting, raises questions about the qualifications of the 129 members who voted for the resolution, as was evident yesterday when, on X, various pro-Israel voices showed proof of their new membership – including one activist who signed up as “Adolf Hitler” and joined the association’s women’s caucus and indigenous caucus.
The FT also fails to examine the decidedly unscholarly and propagandistic nature of the resolution itself, which, in the opening paragraph, claims “the total number of adults and children killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, as 59,000“, without making any differentiation between combatants and non-combatants. The resolution also promotes the unevidenced claim that thousands of additional dead Palestinians are “buried under the rubble“.
In fact, the resolution itself, which was praised by Hamas, is an exercise in ‘appeals to authority’, using, as its sources for the genocide charge, highly politicised reports by UN bodies, discredited NGOs, such as Forensic Architecture and DAWN, and ‘experts’ who are clearly not authorities or experts on the conflict, such as the the aforementioned Francesca Albanese.
Another NGO source in the resolution, Amnesty International, you may recall, infamously changed the accepted definition of genocide to support its accusation of that crime against Israel.
Further, as we noted yesterday on X, the resolution includes a lie that was refuted over a year ago, claiming that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the claims of genocide against Israel were “plausible”. Even the Guardian twice corrected that false claim in response to our complaints about articles in 2024, as the former ICJ president Joan O’Donoghue made clear during an interview on BBC’s Hardtalk that the court did NOT rule that the CLAIM of genocide is “plausible”.
The ICJ narrowly ruled that the Palestinians had a “plausible” right to be protected from genocide, and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in court. It didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was “plausible”, or make any determination on the merits of the case.
Tellingly, no original research by IAGS ‘scholars’ was cited in their resolution, mirroring the dearth of any real journalism by the FT in their article about the association’s ‘genocide’ accusation – more evidence not only regarding the continued ‘appeal to authority’ methods employed by media outlets covering the Hamas war, but also on the watering down to the point of irrelevance what constitutes authority on any given accusation against the Jewish state.
THe FT is biased as hell – just look at the editor Roula Khalaf – her views on Israel in general have always been negative in all her positions at the FT – but what can one expect from one of a Lebanese extract.
Time the FT owner Nikkei of Japan kicked her out and replaced with a non partial editor!