Major new study shows blatant anti-Israel agenda at the Financial Times
If you thought that the Financial Times was the kind of news outlet that remained above the fray in its coverage and commentary on Israel’s predicament in the Middle East, you’d be wrong. A new, in-depth study by the respected media monitoring group Just Journalism shows that this quintessentially establishment newspaper yields to nobody in its anti-Israeli bias and its wilful distortion of Middle Eastern realities.
At this stage in the proceedings I should offer full disclosure: I am an advisory board member of Just Journalism and key quotes from a letter sent in my name accompanying the report have been quoted in several world media outlets from the New Republic to the Jerusalem Post.
The key findings of the report, taken from the Executive Summary, are as follows:
1) The FT views Israel as primarily responsible for the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while downplaying other factors. In particular it places the role of settlement-building in the West Bank above any other single factor affecting the conflict. Settlement-building is referred to as ‘colonisation’ in nine editorials.
2) Other aggravating factors such as terrorism, disunity within Palestinian ranks and a failure to accept Israel as a Jewish state are downplayed. Neither of these last two are addressed as areas of legitimate concern for Israel; rather, both are viewed as ploys by Israel to ‘change the subject’.
3) The editorial coverage over the past year reflects a gradual shift away from the view that Iran’s nuclear intentions might be peaceful towards the conclusion at the end of 2009 that they are not.
4) The prospect of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities is referred to in five editorials; yet no Financial Times editorial in 2009 makes reference to the threatening rhetoric from Iran’s President Ahmadinejad against Israel.
5) The publication backed the Goldstone Report, which described the Israeli military operation as ‘a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’. The Financial Times described Israel’s actions in Gaza as ‘disproportionate’ in four editorials.
6) Israeli political leaders are depicted as ‘irredentist’, ‘hawkish’, and ‘ultra-nationalist’. In contrast, Palestinian leaders are portrayed as ‘moderate’ and ‘conciliatory’, if corrupt.
7) Israel’s total military and civilian withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005 is not viewed as a meaningful Israeli concession, rather it is seen as inadequate at best, and a cynical ploy at worst.
8) The Arab world is portrayed as having made a substantial effort for peace in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. The Saudi Peace Initiative of 2002 is touted in seven editorials and the newspaper expresses sympathy with the recent Arab refusal to meet Israeli concessions with Arab concessions.
9) Mixed attitudes towards the nature of Arab regimes are displayed. The newspaper attacks the West – the US in particular – for backing ‘an ossified order of … Arab strongmen’ typified by the Mubarak regime in Egypt; however, Saudi Arabia is spared harsh criticism, particularly regarding its human rights record.
To read the full report, click here:
To purchase a copy of my book, A State Beyond the Pale, on anti-Israeli hostility in Europe, click here if you are in the UK:
or here if you are in the United States:
Tags: Israel
February 5th, 2010 at 10:00 am
Great and very revealing report Robin.
“Another epithet commonly applied to Netanyahu and Likud over 2009 is ‘irredentist’, used in seven editorials.” Ir-red-dentist; Just how many communist tooth wrenchers could there be in a party like Likud?
February 5th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Anthony Julius on England’s contribution to the kind of “anti-Zionism” displayed so blatantly by the Financial Times:
England’s not so pleasant aspect
Antisemitism, that paltry and vicious hatred, has much in it of English origin
By Anthony Julius, February 4, 2010
[Extract]
“This fourth kind of antisemitism is now more European than English but has a particularly English history, stemming from the intimacy of association between England and the Zionist project from the mid-19th century through to the mid-1950s. It denies to Jews the rights that it upholds for other, comparable peoples. It adheres to the principle of national self-determination, except in the Jews’ case. It affirms international law, except in Israel’s case. It does not understand that supporting the cause of Palestinian nationhood is one thing, while denying the right of Jews to live in their own state is quite another. It is outraged by the Jewish nature of the state of Israel, but is untroubled by, say, the Islamic nature of Iran or of Saudi Arabia. It regards as racist the social inequalities between Jew and Arab in Israel, while being indifferent to the legal inequalities between Muslim and non-Muslim in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim states.
It regards Zionism as uniquely pernicious, rather than as merely another nationalism, just as earlier generations of antisemites regarded Jewish capitalists as uniquely pernicious, rather than as heterogeneous members of a much larger capitalist class.
It writes out of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the massacres of Jews in Hebron (August 1929), Jerusalem (February 1948), and Kfar Etzion (May 1948), while treating the massacre of Arabs at Deir Yasin (April 1948) as proof of fundamental Zionist iniquity. It is reluctant to take a position on the Chinese occupation of Tibet, while holding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank an indefensible evil of global consequence. It is hostile to the United States, which it believes is dominated by Jews. It plays variations on well-established antisemitic tropes and deploys some new ones of its own — principally, that Israel may suitably be compared with Nazi Germany and/or Apartheid South Africa.
It treats UN, and UN committee and council, resolutions on Israel as if passed by impartial, apolitical bodies. It denies the existence of Islamic antisemitism, save perhaps as a Western import and of no practical consequence. While it excoriates racist sentiments found among Israelis, or in the complex history of Zionism, it refuses to acknowledge the racist themes towards Jews to be found in many currents of Arab nationalism. It overstates, on every occasion, and beyond reason, any case that could be made against Israel’s actions or policies, and wildly overstates the significance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in world affairs.
Longstanding antisemites now embrace “anti-Zionism” as a cover for their Jew-hatred. This is because, in relation to Israel, the antisemite finds a protected voice. The desire to destroy Jews is reconfigured as the desire to destroy or dismantle the Jewish state. The new anti-Zionism has become a cause for some English academics and political activists; it is commonly found in the universities and in student and university teacher associations. Anti-Zionism has renewed antisemitism, and given it a future.
These, then, are England’s gifts to Jew-hatred. The antisemitism of no other country has this density of history. The antisemitism of no other country is so continuously innovative. On many occasions in the history of antisemitism, England arrives first.”
http://tinyurl.com/y8klu8h
February 6th, 2010 at 10:21 am
Thanks for the report. Here below something to explain some of the problems in understanding the situation of Israel [for those who care].
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=378&PID=0&IID=3345&TTL=A_Moral_Evaluation_of_the_Gaza_War_%E2%80%93_Operation_Cast_Lead
February 6th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
It was about time that someone called the FT to account. They are so smugly establishment. And in Britain, that means obsequeous genuflection to Arab and Muslim rulers. Gulf money has bought friends in London. I remember replying to their editorial (”Israel gets to vote”) in late Oct. 2008 which advised Israeli voters to vote for appeasement in the form of Tsipi Livni’s Kadima. My letter probably wasn’t published.
I reminded them that, whatever people think of her political predilections and skills, Tsipi Livni is still an Israeli patriot.
I thought it odd that an establishment financial newspaper would disparage Netanyahu, an MIT MBA who had been a successful free-market finance minister, claiming that he was a Bourbon who never learns. But anti-Israel bigotry trumps all.
Also, the FT incorrectly claimed that Israeli peace offers would confine the Palestinian Arabs to 12% of colonial Palestine. I reminded them that colonial Palestine also included the current territory of Hashemite Jordan, which was split off by the British Colonial Office in 1922. And that, today, Jordan is a predominantly Palestinian state ruled by a Hashemite dynasty imported by the British from the Hejaz in western Arabia. Again, the FT had to rewrite history to fit its anti-Israel agenda.
February 6th, 2010 at 11:08 pm
it’s odd, if true, because the FT used to be very sympathetic to Israel.