Occasionally, the various pro-Palestinian / anti-Israel websites that claim to be credible media sources catch our eye. In this case, the following attack on HonestReporting appears in a piece from The Palestine Chronicle entitled “A Close Look at the Pro-Israel Lobbies inside Britain“:
Finally, if any news stories critical of Israeli policy do surface there are hosts of media watch dog groups that monitor and pressure journalists and media outlets, and most important of which is HonestReporting. There are active pro-Israeli organizations that very effectively monitor (read harass) journalist and their editors and try to make sure that the coverage is objective, by which they mean is pro-Israel. There are even pressure groups to write campaigns and letters to editors and news outlets asking to boycott certain news agencies, demanding the stories to be changed or the reporter to be fired. This becomes so twisted, that the dearth of reporting, the absence of images, lack of analysis, the void of voices of describing the experience of Palestinians under occupation is so vast that the people has no idea that a military occupation is going on.
Written by Ershad Abubacker, a so-called “Research Analyst”, the piece is anything but researched. Instead it is simply plagiarized from the shoddy and discredited November 2009 UK Channel 4 Dispatches documentary “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby“.
Dispatches included a dramatic attack on HonestReporting along with all of the nasty insinuations and poor journalism that has been copied by Abubacker.
The Palestine Chronicle claims to be “an independent online newspaper that provides daily news, commentary, features, book reviews, photos, art, etc, on a variety of subjects. However, it’s largely focused on Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East region.”
It also claims to consist of “professional journalists and respected writers and authors who don’t speak on behalf of any political party or champion any specific political agenda.”
It’s honorary editorial board includes Hanan Ashrawi and Noam Chomsky and writers and contributors include a number of known anti-Israel activists such as Neve Gordon and the anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon.
False Facts: Moving the Green Line
Another recent contribution to The Palestine Chronicle caught the eye of an HonestReporting staff member who lives in the Israeli city of Modi’in. An article attacking the South African Zionist Federation makes the following claims:
In 2005 our research unit within the Media Review Network [MRN] had verified that the SAZF has been actively promoting the emigration of South African Jews to a settlement called Modi’in in the West Bank. Despite Modi’in being built on stolen Palestinian land, it is promoted as an Israeli city! …
A challenging question by Anna Weekes posed at the time we revealed details of SAZF’s complicity in Modi’in’s settlement activity remains as valid today: “Haven’t fellow South Africans learnt from our history of apartheid and land grabs that it is neither right nor sustainable to settle on the newly confiscated land of an indigenous people?”
Sadly for the author’s “research unit”, as the aforementioned HR staff member can testify, and as even the most basic of sources such as Wikipedia shows, Modi’in is not located in the West Bank, is not a settlement but is a large city within the Green Line and undisputed territory of Israel.
Yet another example of The Palestine Chronicle’s poorly researched propaganda trying to disguise itself as a credible media outlet.
The Palestine Telegraph – Flirting with Holocaust Denial & Anti-Semitism
The Palestine Chronicle isn’t the only dubious English-language propaganda site claiming to be a credible media outlet. The Palestine Telegraph’s Board of Patrons includes former British MP and anti-Israel extremist George Galloway, and Lauren Booth.
To recall, Booth referred to Gaza as a “concentration camp” while photographed shopping in a well-stocked Gaza supermarket. This earned her our 2008 Dishonest Reporter Award. Booth has recently announced her conversion to Islam following a visit to Iran, whose Press TV propaganda organ she draws a salary from (as does George Galloway).
A former Palestine Telegraph patron was British politician Jenny Tonge who infamously stated in 2006: “The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western World, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a certain grip on our party.”
Tonge was previously removed from her parliamentary position in 2004 after saying that if she had been a Palestinian, she might have supported a political program of murdering Jewish civilians, by herself becoming a suicide bomber: “I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider becoming one myself.”
But it was too much for Tonge after the Palestine Telegraph published a video of former KKK grand wizard David Duke, which prompted her to resign as a patron. The Palestine Telegraph continued to promote racists and anti-Semites in August 2010 when it published an extended interview with Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben before removing it and issuing a half-hearted “statement of clarification” in the face of protests.
The Palestine Telegraph has also published an article by the anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon in which he defends Helen Thomas’s call for Israeli Jews to “go home to Poland, Germany, America and elsewhere.” The Palestine Telegraph has also repeatedly published the most blatant Jewish conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic cartoons, while its editor Sameh Habeeb, has previously denied allegations of anti-Semitism relating to comments he made to a Leeds student newspaper about who runs the media.
In conclusion, the evidence above is more than enough to discredit The Palestine Telegraph and those behind it.
Both The Palestine Chronicle and Palestine Telegraph are dominated by radicals and extremists who even flirt with anti-Semitism. They are certainly not credible media outlets.
