UPDATE
In the hours following the publication of this post, Kitty Holland deleted her tweet perhaps having realized that it threatened her fragile credibility.
Irish Times journalist Kitty Holland came to our attention in 2015 after we raised a genuine issue with her on Twitter concerning one of her stories. Her response?
“Not interacting with Zionists anymore.”
Utterly unacceptable from a professional journalist.
Unsurprisingly, Holland’s anti-Israel sentiments aren’t a one-off judging by this new tweet.
The tweet links to a story not from this week but from October 2016.
Were thousands of Israelis really taking to the streets calling for Palestinian genocide?
In a word, no.
The story was published by MintPress News, a fringe outlet listed by a Jewish News investigation as a website that fuels Israel hate.
And the story itself is full of bias, distortions and outright falsehoods. We don’t intend to systematically debunk a fringe piece from 2016 but here are a few examples:
- Claiming that a “massive anti-Palestinian rally took place in Tel Aviv where thousands called for the death of all Arabs” where “One woman was photographed holding a sign reading “Kill them all.”” In fact, as reported in the mainstream Israeli media at the time, the sign referred specifically (on its other side) to imprisoned terrorists and not Palestinians in general, and was, in any case, removed after only a few minutes.
- In addition, anti-Arab shouts and slogans were mostly silenced by the other protesters, contradicting the claim that thousands were “calling for genocide.”
- Failing to note that the wounded Palestinian shot by an Israeli soldier was a disarmed terrorist, an important piece of information irrespective of one’s views of that soldier’s actions.
Some of this was pointed out to Kitty Holland in the responses to her tweet.
One can only speculate as to why Holland would tweet a discredited item from 2016 from a discredited fringe site other than to spread anti-Israel poison.
But it’s unlikely that she cares and it’s unlikely that she’ll give us an answer. Because we already know – Kitty Holland doesn’t interact with Zionists.
