The headline “Israel’s Prisoner X driven to suicide by interrogation, lawyer suggests” conjures images of torture, water boarding and all round human rights abuses – something that The Guardian’s readers, fed on a diet of anti-Israel stories, would be keen to embrace.
Lacking a smoking gun of abuse, Peter Beaumont instead indulges in pure fiction to smear Israel:
The latest revelations come amid a growing outcry over the case in Israel, with some comparing the treatment of Zygier to that meted out in the Soviet Union or Argentina and Chile under their military dictatorships.
Just who are the “some” who have compared Israel to brutal military dictatorships? Peter Beaumont doesn’t say.
And if you are looking for criticism of Israel from a someone you can claim to be credible by virtue of his being an Israeli, who better to quote than Gideon Levy, HonestReporting’s Dishonest Reporter 2012 winner?
In one of the fiercest denunciations yet of the behaviour of the authorities and media in the Prisoner X affair, the veteran liberal Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, condemned the state’s ability to “disappear” people with the collusion of the press and courts.
A more accurate description of Levy would be an extreme or radical leftist unrepresentative of Israel at large. But then, that’s what constitutes liberalism in the warped world of The Guardian.
