Hundreds of Jewish visitors ascended the Temple Mount to celebrate Jerusalem Day on Sunday, June 2. The Times of Israel reports how clashes broke out between Palestinian rioters and Israeli police.
The Daily Mail’s Mail Online included a selection of photos in its story of events. A disturbing number of the captions, however, are astonishing in their bias and inaccuracy.
So, according to Mail Online, “fanatic Jews… raid Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
Since when are Jews exercising their legal rights to visit Judaism’s holiest site “fanatics?” While it is admittedly unusual for Jews to visit the site during the final days of Ramadan, which happened to coincide with this year’s Jerusalem Day, the status quo agreement allows for non-Muslim visitors at set visiting times.
Related reading: Jewish Ties to the Temple Mount – What’s the Story?
Jews are also prohibited from praying on the Temple Mount and will be detained by the Israeli police if they are caught doing so and, as the Times of Israel video showed, are accompanied by the police on a set route.
How is this described as a “raid” on the Al-Aqsa compound?
The mosque itself is of no interest to the Jewish visitors and non-Muslims are prohibited from entering. So why would “Jews storm the building?”
Putting aside the abysmal copy editing, how is it that Palestinians initiate a riot yet Jews, according to the caption, are the ones who caused the clashes?
This is effectively an inversion of reality.
Much like the rest of the captions, which read as if they have been written by a Hamas media outlet.
We contacted Mail Online requesting changes to the photo captions. To its credit, Mail Online responded positively and the captions were swiftly amended.
- The adjective “fanatic” used to describe Jewish visitors has been removed.
- It has been clarified that the Jews’ visit was to the compound containing the Mosque, not the Mosque itself.
- Jews are no longer ‘storming the building’ and are instead, entering the compound.
- Nor are they ‘raiding’ the compound but are now ‘visiting.’
- Their entrance no longer “caused” the clashes but “led to” them, a more subtle use of language.
How did this happen?
While the photos appear to be taken from the mainstream Getty Images photo service, further investigation reveals that the real credit lies with Anadolu Agency, an international news agency headquartered in Ankara, Turkey. The agency is state-run.
The series of photos on the Getty Images website is even titled: “Fanatic Jews’ raid Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound.”
The photos with the appalling captions that appeared on the Mail Online site can be found here, here, here, and here.
And the photographer? Faiz Abu Rmeleh, in addition to his work for Anadolu Agency, is also involved with the Activestills organization, which makes no secret of its particular political bias:
Activestills collective was established in 2005 by a group of documentary photographers out of a strong conviction that photography is a vehicle for social and political change. The collective views itself as part of the international and local struggle against all forms of oppression, racism and discrimination. It is composed of Israeli, Palestinian and international photographers, operating locally in Palestine/Israel and abroad.
Activestills approaches the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as one, working to expose the most blatant attack on human rights and freedom within these borders: the Zionist settler-colonial project led by Israel against the Palestinian population. One of our main topics of documentation is the various forms of resistance against the colonial project, on both sides of the Green Line.
So we have a blatantly politicized photographer whose mission is to promote Palestinian “resistance” against Israel, presumably including portraying violent Palestinian riots on the Temple Mount as the result of “fanatic Jews.”
Related reading: Photojournalist Stages News for Profit and Ideology
While we do not know if Faiz Abu Rmeleh came up with the captions, his photos were distributed by the Anadolu Agency. That a Turkish state-run organization would produce anti-Israel propaganda is hardly surprising.
What is disturbing is how Getty Images accepted these captions on their own website while Mail Online’s editors failed to check the veracity of those captions when posting the photos in their own story.
All in all, a perfect storm of anti-Israel hate allied to a lack of vigilance on the part of Mail Online.
Featured image: CC BY-NC Patrick McKay;
