Please complain to the Guardian and its otherwise excellent Jerusalem correspondent Chris McGreal for a totally one-sided article on January 25 entitled "Rising UK anti-semitism blamed on media".
While anti-Semitism is an abhorrent phenomenon which should be roundly condemned, blaming it on the media, Arabs and Muslims, as the sources in the article do, is highly spurious and controversial.
Unfortunately, however, McGreal's sources solely comprise hawkish bodies that have long been accused of being apologists for Israel and supporters of the belief that criticism of it is anti-Semitic: an Israeli government report, Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky and two of his advisors, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
No attempt seems to have been made to seek the opinion of the accused media outlets, Arab and Muslim officials, or Jewish organisations and figures who believe that Israel's brutal, illegal actions towards Arabs contribute to anti-Semitism, and reject the notion that it speaks on their behalf.
There is no mention of the thorough study by Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the Glasgow University Media Group, which found a blatant pro-Israel bias in British TV coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
No mention either of a recent report by the Crown Prosecution Service that Muslims were victims of half of all cases of religiously aggravated crime handled by prosecutors in England and Wales last year, more than four times the number of cases involving Jewish victims.
As such, the article reads more like an Israeli government press release than an attempt to portray both sides of a highly contraversial issue and allow the accused to reply to grave allegations.
McGreal's article is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1397627,00.html
Details of the Crown Prosecution Service report are at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1445226,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1393089,00.html
Write to letters@guardian.co.uk and/or chris.mcgreal@guardian.co.uk. To assess response rates, please Bcc your letters (which will remain confidential) to info@arabmediawatch.com.
If you want your letter to be considered for publication, say so and provide your full name, address and contact details (the latter two will not be published). Please remain polite, concise and factual.
A letter sent to the Guardian by Arab Media Watch advisor Christopher Leadbeater:
Dear Sir,
I was disappointed and to be frank a little shocked to read your article "Rising UK anti-semitism blamed on media" By Chris McGreal. Not by the inclusion in your usually excellent paper of claims by the Israeli government, however spurious. It is important that your readers are aware of such claims. No, my disappointment is that the obvious fallacy of the claims, which has been irrefutably demonstrated by the academic report on the subject by Professor Philo and the Glasgow Media Group has not been pointed out. Indeed, no counter-opinion of any kind is included, almost as if your paper was accepting these allegations at face value. I expected better journalism from the Guardian.
The claims by the spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews is blatantly untrue and does the Board no credit. It is sadly claims like this which lead people to identify Jews with Israel and which turns revulsion at Israeli crimes into anti-Semitism. This isn't helped, of course, by the racist claims of Israel to be the 'State of the Jews'.
Anti-Semitism is to be deplored but it is widely suspected that there is in fact little genuine anti-Semitism, that the word has become an excuse by Zionists to explain criticism of Israeli crimes. It is inevitable that as these crimes are reported honestly in the media so the revulsion felt by ordinary people increases. In few instances, such revulsion is converted into anti-Semitism, by the failure of Diaspora Jews to condemn such crimes, indeed even to indicate approval, and by the Israeli claims that the crimes are committed in the name of all the Jews. Blaming the messenger does not help. Stopping the crimes would be more effective.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Leadbeater