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Saturday, January 17, 2015

The Guardian's Freudian slip

Yesterday, The Guardian wrote a story with this headline:


I tweeted:



Within an hour of my tweet, the headline changed:


This change was not necessarily a result of my tweet, as Guardian readers had already tweeted the newspaper about this issue with their usual disregard for facts::


And some Guardian followers of course proudly tweeted their antisemitism:


One of the fundamental differences between the Jewish and Palestinian Arab narratives in the Middle East is that while the Western world (and even the Koran) admits that the Jews are a people, the Palestinian Arab political leadership reject that idea because, as the PLO says in a memo, "recognition of the Jewish people and their right of self-determination may lend credence to the Jewish people’s claim to all of Historic Palestine.
"

A person cannot return to a place that he or she had never lived in, but a member of a people or of a nation can. The Guardian was implicitly admitting that the Jews do have a historic right to live in their historic lands - and of course that is not a message that The Guardian wants to tell the world.

It took much less time for the Guardian to respond to this issue than it usually takes for the newspaper to correct its usual anti-Israel mistakes. That in itself is noteworthy.