The International Business Times has a habit of publishing careless and sloppy content when it comes to Israel. At its worst, the IBT has been forced by HonestReporting to completely remove what was essentially “fake news.”
The IBT’s US and UK editions both published stories concerning Israeli plans to shut down Al-Jazeera’s bureau in the country.
The UK edition used the following photo:
The caption reads: “More than 100 Palestinians were injured on Thursday, 27 July after Israeli forces fired tear gas and bomb [sic] on returning to al-Aqsa mosque, known to the Jews as Temple Mount.”
HonestReporting pointed out to the IBT that Israel did not use bombs on Palestinian protesters. This as well as the fact that the al-Aqsa mosque is not known to Jews as the Temple Mount, but is a structure that sits on the Temple Mount compound, which is referred to by Muslims as Haram al Sharif.
The IBT, rather than correcting the faulty caption, instead removed the image in its entirety as a result of HR’s complaint.
In the case of the US edition, the following sentence appeared in the story in reference to recent violence in Jerusalem:
This is a particularly serious factual error that implies that it was the installation of metal detectors that triggered the violence. In fact, it was the murder of two Israeli policemen by Arab terrorists that prompted the Israeli government to install the metal detectors.
By getting the order of events wrong, the IBT effectively turned Israel into the instigator of the violence.
A complaint from HonestReporting and the IBT made a change:
It is testament to the IBT’s poor editing and proofing that Benjamin Netanyahu’s surname is still spelled incorrectly despite HR also pointing this out. This in addition to a poorly laid out and worded amendment to the text.
Nonetheless, the actual error has been corrected thanks to HR’s intervention.
