It’s impossible to miss the blatant bias in The Independent‘s coverage of the Israeli announcement of new home building in Jewish settlements.
The green line was laid out in 1949 armistice agreements between the armies of Israel and its neighbours after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Israel has since breached these lines and it is now currently illegally occupying parts of the Palestinian territories.
How exactly has Israel “breached these lines?” The journalist conveniently omits a whole chunk of history which includes the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel came to control territories in a war of self-defense. And as for “illegally occupying” territory, a description that journalist Jon Stone scatters liberally throughout the article, the correct terminology would be “disputed.”
He continues:
The Israeli government says it needs to occupy Palestine for security reasons, despite repeated resolutions from the United Nations calling for it to withdraw.
Of course, no Israel government has ever said this and one wonders where Stone is getting his flawed information. Firstly, there is technically no “Palestine” to “occupy” irrespective of whether one favors the creation of such a state. This use of terminology certainly is not appropriate for a newspaper claiming to be dealing with accurate information.
In addition, while security is an aspect of Israeli control over disputed territory, of much more importance is the fact that this territory contains thousands of years of Jewish history as part of the Land of Israel, which is the cornerstone of Jewish claims to sovereignty in the region.
That Stone clearly believes that Jews are somehow not indigenous to the area is made clear in a later statement which refers to the “existing inhabitants” of the land:
Israeli settlers have also been accused of violence against the existing inhabitants of the land they build on.
Further proof of Stone’s anti-Israel credentials and overtly biased sources can be found in this paragraph:
Last year Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories accused the Israeli government of “ethnic cleansing” by trying to replace Arab Palestinian populations in its territory with Jewish Israelis.
Richard Falk, who is no longer a UN special rapporteur (another factual error on the part of Stone), has been repeatedly called out for his anti-Semitism and extreme anti-Israel comments.
“Highlights” of Falk’s tenure included blaming the Boston Marathon bombing on “American global domination” and “Tel Aviv,” trying to ban a pro-Israel human rights watchdog group UN Watch from attending UNHRC sessions, and publishing anti-Semitic cartoons and articles on his blog. U.S. officials routinely and repeatedly called for Falk to resign.
Falk’s charge of “ethnic cleansing,” treated by The Independent as credible is so grotesque that it doesn’t deserve a response.
What does deserve a response is The Independent’s continuing reliance on online journalists such as Stone, who write not from the location of the story but from the comfort of their computer in the UK. The one-sided and anti-Israel nature of the reports also raises the possibility that these online journalists are simply recycling stories that they have found on anti-Israel websites or fed by anti-Israel organizations.
Ultimately, this article by Jon Stone is so flawed on a journalistic level that it is shocking that this ever made it past the eyes of an editor.
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