Posted on 01/22/2009 9:54:12 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
To their lasting disgrace, the British media covered the war in Gaza through the prism of Hamas propaganda, repeating Hamas claims about casualty figures as if they were proven facts, failing to report the ways in which Hamas was victimising the people of Gaza by using them as human shields and failing to challenge activists and apologists for Hamas when they promoted its cause. But there appears to have been one newspaper that went even further than that. It did not just report uncritically activists’ claims. It seems to have actually used an activist as a supposedly dispassionate member of its reporting team.
At the end of last month, the Telegraph carried this story on its foreign news pages by Ewa Jasiewicz, reporting from Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. It was exclusively about the suffering of civilians and children under bombardment by Israeli air strikes. It made no reference to any Hamas terrorists in the camp. Readers were given no indication that Ewa Jasiewicz was anything other than an objective reporter.
Yet the very next day, she appeared again in the Telegraph’s foreign news pages -- but this time being interviewed by Tim Butcher as an ‘activist originally from Kingston, Surrey’ and the principal source of his story about two children being killed by a bomb from an Israeli warplane, an event which she claimed to have witnessed.
Indeed, Ms Jasiewicz is not a regular reporter at all. She is a highly partisan, deeply committed, experienced anti-Israeli International Solidarity Movement activist. She is an active player on the side of the Palestinians who are committing acts of terror against the Israelis -- which she would describe as legitimate and justified ‘resistance’. Nor was this something she had hidden. Indeed, the web is heaving with examples of her hatred of Israel. Here she is in the Guardian spraying around claims that Israel was racist, that its democracy was a myth and that it deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians and activists for slaughter. Here is the statement she made after she was detained at Ben Gurion airport on 31 August 2004 by the Israeli authorities and told that she could not speak to the media, in which she justified Palestinian terrorism as
a liberation struggle – and a struggle of an occupied people that is thus justified under international law. The BBC reported on August 25 2004: An Israeli court has ordered the expulsion of a UK journalist who has been held in Tel Aviv since challenging Israel's refusal to grant her entry. The Israelis say Ewa Jasiewicz, 26, is a political activist whose journalism is biased. They denied her entry at Ben Gurion Airport on 11 August. The court said she could be exploited by militant groups as a result of her ‘naivety and convictions’. Ms Jasiewicz has denounced the ruling as ‘an insult to my professionalism’. Israeli authorities say Ms Jasiewicz is an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian led organisation which stages protests against the Israeli occupation. Tel Aviv District Court judge Drora Pilpel said Ms Jasiewicz did not pose a direct threat to Israeli security but Palestinians could manipulate her ‘naiveté’. The court said: ‘Although the International Solidarity Movement was established for a humanitarian cause, it has been exploited, whether consciously or unconsciously, for different and dangerous goals.’ Here is an interview with her, one day before her ‘news story’ from Jabaliya appeared in the Telegraph, in which she describes herself as a ‘co-ordinator’ of the ‘Free Gaza’ movement. What in heaven’s name has the Daily Telegraph come to that it passes off such a person as an objective reporter writing a news story on its foreign news pages about a conflict in which she is deeply involved as an active player – and furthermore on the side of those who are perpetrating acts of terror?
might as well run Hamas press releases as actual news articles... oh they basically were.
I wish the Spectator would add facebook as a sharing tool.
Agreed.
Good for Melanie: she is in the select club of those who unabashedly fight for all our futures.
The Telegraph appears to be at war within itself - despite this awful lapse, it’s still the most consistently conservative paper in the UK. The post-Steyn Spectator became spotted with cringing leftyism and I ended my subscription.
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