Sunday Times obsessive anti-Israel bias

In recent weeks the Sunday Times has been trying to outdo the Guardian and Observer in its obsessive anti-Israel bias. Every week now there is usually at least one anti-Israel article in the News section (today there are two) and two weeks running recently there were anti-Israel articles in the magazine. I fired off the letter below which is self-explanatory.

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Dear Sirs

The article by Marie Colvin "Girl killed as Israel tightens grip on Gaza" is not only brazenly anti-Israel but is factually incorrect. The photograph caption states "A Palestinian man carries the body of Rawan Hajaj after she was hit by an Israeli missile". The article itself actually says about the explosion: "witnesseses said was caused by Israeli tank shells". Of course the 'witnesses' were Palestinians and there is no Israeli view of what happened. In fact initial investigation by the Israel Defence Force today has revealed that the explosion could not have been caused by an Israeli tank shell (the Sunday Times made the same mistake two weeks ago by leading with the 'fact' that an Israeli tank shell killed a family on the beach in Northern Gaza, whereas subsequent investigations revealed that this was not possible).

The article then goes on to focus on examples of Palestinian women and youth under 18, all of whom the Hamas government wants released in exchange for the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Again, ignoring the fact that almost all of these prisoners have been involved in terrorist acts (including many who were caught before carrying out suicide bombings) the article chooses to give only the Palestinian family's story of two such women. We are expected, for example, to feel sympathy for Sheikh Kalil who "has written in letters home of how the mice and cockroaches terrify her". Yet no such expected sympathy (nor mention of) the Israeli who was kidnapped and slaughtered by the gang she was part of.

The article is, above all, simply shoddy journalism because it fails yet again to put into context the Israeli actions in Gaza. The attack inside Israel on 25 June by Hamas, which is after all the elected government of the Palestinian Authority, was effectively a declaration of war. This is coupled with more than 1000 missile attacks launched from Gaza into Israel since the Israelis withdrew last August (including in the last week an attack that struck a school in Ashkelon with a twin-engined Qassam missile). None of this provocation ever gets mentioned in the Sunday Times, which continues with its obsessive anti-Israel agenda week in week out.

Edgar Davidson