Monday, August 10, 2009

British media bias

One of the key facts left out of most British news articles about the Palestinian families evicted from the houses in the Shimon HaTzaddik neighborhood is that they were very much arrears on their rent.

Like many countries, the rights of renters are safeguarded to a large extent in Israel - as long as they maintained payment of rent, eviction would not have happened. Twenty eight families continue to pay rent - the Ghawi and Hanun families, however, didn't do so.

This seems like a germane detail.

Not to the British press.


The legal battle to reclaim the property, which had been seized by the Jordanian government, took years. This, too, seems a pertinent detail.

Not to the British press.

The Guardian described the evictions as "the ugly face of ethnic cleansing".

The Guardian, of course, represents the worst of le journaille-jaune.
I suspect that if the Guardian were to write about the American revolution, they would paint the rebels as fascists repressing the legitimate rights of upstanding British citizens, and the redcoats as gentlemen fighting against the forces of barbarism and chaos.

Oh wait. That is precisely how the Brits describe the American revolution. Never mind.

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Opportunistically crossposted from my own blog here:
http://prolongedfeline.blogspot.com/2009/08/british-media-bias.html
Cross-posting is good. It benefits both sides. Yes?

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