A phalanx of the U.K.’s most influential journalists has decried as a “blood libel” the reporting of Israel’s killing of thousands of children in Gaza, writes Jonathan Cook.
Wounded Palestinians wait for treatment at the overcrowded emergency ward of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 11, 2023. (Atia Darwish, Palestinian News & Information Agency for APAimages, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
I can’t put this strongly enough. Howard Jacobson’s article in The Observer newspaper may be one the vilest pieces of journalism published in Britain in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel’s documented slaughter of many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza is a “blood libel” and anti-Semitic. It is pure genocide apologism.
But far worse is the fact that the Guardian Media Group signed off his column. This isn’t the work of one Zionist loon. A whole army of journalists brought it to print.
And note: Jacobson, odious as he is, isn’t responsible for the choice of photo. That is entirely down to The Observer newsroom.
I worked at both The Guardian and The Observer, its Sunday sister paper, for many years. The comment editor, the photo editor, the revise sub-editor, the Observer’s chief editor and all the section heads would have approved not only Jacobson’s text but that photo too.
What on Earth did they all imagine that “illustrative” photo of a blood-smeared doll suggested?
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That the many thousands of children blown to pieces by Israeli bombs are a fiction.
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That all the children decomposing under rubble are made up.
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That all the unidentified children buried in Gaza’s sands are a lie.
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That all the children dying of epidemics like polio or starving to death from Israel’s aid blockade are an invention.
That any single journalist imagined for a moment that this was an acceptable article or photo in the midst of a genocide is astounding enough.
This is a list of names of murdered Palestinians whose identities have been CONFIRMED.
It does NOT include the unidentifiable or those still under the rubble.
You have to watch for well over a minute to get to the end of the babies who were aged ZERO! pic.twitter.com/T8WRvCgY2i
— Niz (@NizMhani) October 7, 2024
But that a whole phalanx of the most influential and “liberal” journalists in the country backed it without a second thought tells us something about the depraved culture that passes for journalism in the Western establishment media.
These elite journalists are completely divorced from reality. They have no moral core, they live and work as fanatical ideologues for Western supremacism. They are as racist as their forebears who cheer-led Britain’s subjugation and colonisation of the rest of the globe.
There is no hope of ever having a healthy world as long as these war-mongers and genocide apologists are allowed to remain in charge of shaping our consciousness.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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I am not surprised!
I’m have been so disgusted by the western MSM (well really back in 1992 with the Attack on Iraq) that I have given up on it. I’m Canadian and I can’t even stand our country’s public broadcaster the CBC it’s so full of propaganda. The same with our Globe & Mail. I do however check in once in a while to keep track of the propaganda they are spewing. I check in periodically with the UK Guardian for the same reason. I have no illusion I am getting “news”.
I am grateful for having access to Consortium News, Canadian Dimension and the host of real journalists who podcast on Youtube and Rumble, and of course the writings that can be found by real journalists on Substack.
“These elite journalists are completely divorced from reality. They have no moral core, they live and work as fanatical ideologues for Western supremacism.”
No Jonathan, in the case of Israel’s sadism, illegal land-grabs, genocide, wanton murder of toddlers and infants, arrogance, and overall repulsive conduct in the Middle East, they’re living and working as fanatical ideologues for Jewish supremacism. (Not all Jews are Jewish supremacists, not by a long shot; but we must call a spade a spade.)
You certainly have a point Drew. I prefer to call them “copiers and pasters”.
Thank you Jonathan for calling out this disgusting behavior.
So I’m guessing those doctors and others who wrote Congress about atrocities they witnessed in Gaza must have just made it all up. Why would they do that?
Also I’m guessing the IDF would never throw bodies off buildings, so that video is obviously fake, just like all the rest of those fake reports – made by now dead reporters, murdered by guess who?
Ho Hum, the circus travels on.
Yes, when people “know” something is true, they feel justified in fabricating stories. They think, “This didn’t happen, but EVERYONE KNOWS something like it did.” They feel absolutely certain their lies will ultimately be vindicated and will stick by them no matter what. They honestly believe, so they consider themselves honest. What they tell themselves when they look in the mirror may or may not agree.
US/UK = Asses of Evil…plain and simple. No wonder they get along so well.
“I can’t put this strongly enough. Howard Jacobson’s article in The Observer newspaper may be one the vilest pieces of journalism published in Britain in living memory…”
Yes, and there is some pretty stiff competition!
The Observer also supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has strongly promoted war with Russia.
Just as an aside, in case it has not been reported in the USA, Boris Johnson recently admitted in an interview on ITV television in the UK that his friend Donald Trump did not win the 2020 presidential election.
But have you read this Tony:
Xxxx://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/07/boris-johnson-unleashed-memoir-digested-read-john-crace
Crace just cracks me up with his political satire. And he’s absolutely spot on with every detail.
Media report:
Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza over the past year published an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris on Thursday that detailed the horrors they witnessed and called for an end to US military support for Israel.
The healthcare workers said they believe the true death toll in Gaza is much higher than what Gaza’s Health Ministry is reporting, estimating it to be over 118,908.
“This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States,” the letter reads. “It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.”
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They said that almost every child under five they encountered “had both a cough and watery diarrhea.” Each signatory to the letter saw wounds in children that showed they were being purposefully targeted by the Israeli military.
“Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis,” the letter reads. “It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”
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The healthcare workers said newborn babies were dying due to the conditions caused by the Israeli siege and attacks on hospitals. Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner, said, “Every day, I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved.”
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Israel claims Hamas has used hospitals as “command centers,” but the letter said that none of its signatories saw any sign of militant activity. “The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” the letter reads.
The letter concludes with a plea for Biden and Harris to end US support for the genocidal war: “Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you: end this madness now!”
What is most remarkable about such a loathsome, sycophantic tongue bath of the Zionist state and it’s genocide enablers is the apparent presumption that many still buy this crap. The ‘antisemitism’ trope, intended to shut down criticism of Israel’s oppression, torture, and heretofore slow motion genocide of Palestinians, is older than water. Trotting out this revenant, to cancel out a ghastly reality available on computer screens worldwide, is just a tacit admission of slavish fealty to Western hegemony, the Israel Lobby, and the impossibility of defending the indefensible without lying. Anyone who cares to inform themselves knows masses of innocent people (70% women and children) have been mangled and blown to pieces. Tortured and starved. By an abomination that cynically exploits the Holocaust®, whilst replicating the atrocities of the monsters that perpetrated it. Yet, incomprehensible as it is for the non-stuporous, some people still imbibe this bilge and consider themselves well-versed in world events. Perhaps many. For this reason, the Israel cover is not merely contemptibly disingenuous, but morally reprehensible. For such bloviating of mainstream media helps enable the ugliest of crimes imaginable. Eventually, masses of books, academic papers, and documentaries will examine this horrific period – and likely downfall of the Zionist state. Entire works may focus exclusively on Western media’s complicity in the wanton, frenzied mass murder, torture and ethnic cleansing campaign. For what The Observer and other Goebbelsesque corporate ‘news’ outlets grotesquely print amounts to PR for the Devil.
Geez, how could a reputedly ‘reputable’ publication like the Observer publish something as outrageously and obviously false?? First of all when you drop 1000# and 2000# bombs in densely populated cities (and especially tent encampments) it’s physically impossible to not have a major amount of deaths due to the HUGE percussive force. Since these munitions obviously destroy everything in the immediate area, it’s going to destroy vital infrastructure leading to a lot of indirect deaths and suffering. Also, a number of 3rd party organizations report a lot of the horrors, so are they in on the conspiracy also? This sounds like people vying for the Alex Jones Sandy Hook journalism award. With Britain’s more stringent libel laws, one would expect a lawsuit, but that’s unlikely to happen…
Well, when you learn a bit about adrenochrome or the tunnels under a synagogue in Brooklyn, you also begin to wonder. Blood libel, indeed!
The power of ideological indoctrination cannot be over estimated. Coupled with a fat paycheck human empathy ceases to function.
The Observer is the type of publication that screamed about fake news since c. 2016.
Ugly, sickening projection.