Register
the name of this “liberal“ zionist – Jonathan Freedland,
responsible for getting Nafeez Ahmed sacked from the Guardian
Freedland has been tipped as a contender for The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, a post that is soon to be vacant
Freedland has been tipped as a contender for The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, a post that is soon to be vacant
How
The Guardian told me to steer clear of Palestine
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian’s opinion editor, is an apologist for ethnic cleansing. (Chatham House/Flickr)
11
March, 2015
When
I started out as a journalist in the 1980s, I asked an experienced
Irish reporter for advice. “Read The
Guardian,”
he told me.
The
message that there was no better newspaper had a lasting effect. For
years, I wanted to write for The
Guardian.
Eventually, this desire was realized after I emailed the
late Georgina
Henry,
then editor of its Comment is Free section, in 2007. Henry was
immediately receptive to my idea of tackling the European
Union from
a critical, left-wing perspective.
I
very much enjoyed contributing to The
Guardian.
Having previously worked for quite a stuffy publication, it felt
liberating to be able to express opinions.
There was one issue, however, on which I felt my freedom curtailed: Palestine. Although The Guardian did publish a few of my articles denouncing Israeli atrocities, I began to encounter obstacles in 2009.
Sensitive
Early
that year, I submitted an exposé of how the pro-Israel
lobby operates
in Brussels.
While waiting to find out if the piece would be used, I phoned Matt
Seaton,
who had taken over as comment editor. We had a pleasant conversation
but Seaton stressed that he regarded the subject as sensitive.
I,
then, modified the piece to make its tone less polemical. Still, it
was not published. (Seaton has subsequently moved to The
New York Times.)
A
few months later, I paid a visit to Gaza.
From there, I contacted The
Guardian to
say that I had interviewed Sayed
Abu Musameh, a founding member of Hamas.
Abu Musameh had expressed an interest in visiting Belfast to study how the Irish peace process worked. He had already held discussions with Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin leader who had persuaded the Irish Republican Army to call a ceasefire.
Abu
Musameh, I felt, was saying something that jarred with the official
view of Hamas presented by Israel and its Western supporters. Far
from being addicted to violence, he was eager to learn about what
policy wonks call “conflict resolution.”
The
Guardian was
not keen to have me writing from Gaza. Brian
Whitaker,
a commissioning editor at the time, told me that its comment section
received more submissions about Palestine than any other subject.
Whitaker, ironically a Middle East specialist, effectively
recommended that I stick to writing about the EU. (The recommendation
was bizarre both because Palestine is a key issue for the EU and
because I am one of the few journalists to examine the Union’s
complicity in Israel’s crimes).
Frustration
I
have decided to make my frustrating encounters with The
Guardian public
after reading the diatribe it
published last week by Daniel Taub, Israel’s ambassador to the UK.
Taub uses a quote attributed to Golda
Meir,
Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974, to hit back at aid
agencies who accuse Israel of impeding Gaza’s reconstruction: “We
will only have peace when our enemies love their children more than
they hate our.”
The
inference that Palestinians hate Israelis more than they love their
children is a racist caricature brilliantly demolished by Rafeef
Ziadah in
her poem “We
teach life, Sir.” Yet, according to Taub, Meir’s words represent
a “bitter truism.”
The Comment is Free section of The Guardian, where Taub’s nasty rant appears, is now overseen by Jonathan Freedland, a liberal Zionist. I contacted Freedland to enquire if he approved Taub’s article for publication.
Freedland
referred my message to the paper’s “media enquiries” unit. A
spokesperson, who did not give his or her name, replied by email that
Comment is Free “hosts hundreds of discussions every month on a
wide range of topics across the entire political and ideological
spectrum.”
“We
receive a huge amount of submissions for articles and aim to publish
a plurality of voices from all over the world,” the spokesperson
added. “Naturally, not all of these voices reflect The
Guardian’s own
editorial position.”
Apologist for ethnic cleansing
I
am not in the least reassured by that response. Taub’s article was
the second one published by The
Guardian in
as many months from a senior Israeli political or diplomatic figure.
In February, the paper gave Yair
Lapid,
until recently Israel’s finance minister, a platform to
describe calls for a cultural
boycott of
Israel as “shallow and lacking in coherence.”
Lapid’s
view chimes with The
Guardian’s “own
editorial position,” to quote its anonymous spokesperson. While
Israel was bombing Gaza last August, it ran a leader accusing
London’s Tricycle
Theatre of
making a “bad error of judgment” in refusing to host a film
festival sponsored by Israel.
As Ben
White demonstrated
in a trenchant 2014 analysis for Middle
East Monitor,
Jonathan Freedland is an apologist for ethnic
cleansing.
Freedland has tried to justify how “400 [Palestinian]
villages” were “emptied” by Zionist forces in 1948 on the
grounds that “the creation of a Jewish state was a moral
necessity.”
If
Freedland is prepared to defend Zionist war
crimes,
I guess it is not surprising that he is reserving space for
naked Israeli propaganda in The
Guardian’s comment
section. While it is difficult to imagine that this bastion of
liberalism would welcome openly racist submissions from far-right
organizations like the British National Party or English
Defence League,
it is somehow acceptable for an Israeli diplomat to peddle bigotry
against Palestinians.
Freedland has been tipped as a contender for The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, a post that is soon to be vacant.
In
a perverse way, it might be a good thing if he gets the job. With
Freedland at the helm, it would be easier to show how a supposedly
progressive newspaper is in thrall to the toxic ideology of Zionism.
I
See also -
‘Grievous Censorship’ By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination OfNafeez Ahmed’s Blog
In
July, regular Guardian contributor Nafeez Ahmed examined claims that
Israel is seeking to create a 'political climate' conducive to the
exploitation of Gaza's considerable offshore gas reserves - 1.4
trillion cubic feet of natural gas, valued at $4 billion – which
were discovered off the Gaza coast in 2000.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.