There is literally no moral line within their pathological anti-Zionist campaign that the Guardian won't cross.
A case in point is an August 4 report at the outlet by Julian Borger ("Jerusalem's most important Muslim religious site facing ‘imminent’ threat of Israeli takeover, says Jordan") which doesn't merely legitimise the latest propaganda by Amman about the al-Aqsa Mosque being in danger. It also uses the incendiary language of extremists in the journalist's own voice.
Borger writes that the Jordanian warnings that Israel was going to "take over" the site "follow an escalating pattern of government-backed incursions by Jewish religious extremists on the compound around al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock," and then adds that, "on 23 July, more than 2,000 Israelis from the religious right… stormed the area, known to Jews as the Temple Mount."
Though the article later acknowledges that the Temple Mount is Judaism's holiest site, which an editor's note suggests came as the result of a complaint, it's remarkable – even by Guardian standards – that they used the terms "stormed" and "incursion" to describe peaceful Jewish visits to the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Such terms are typically used by Palestinian Authority-controlled and terrorist-friendly “news” sites to convey the dangerous lie that Jews are interlopers at the Temple Mount and that the mosque is in danger.
The article then reaches what we can confidently describe as a new low for the outlet in its coverage of Jerusalem, alleging that "infringement by Jewish extremists triggered riots in the British Mandate period between the world wars".
It seems almost certain that the journalist is referring to the 1929 Hebron Massacre, as, though there were other periods of violence against Jews during the period between the wars, that was the only major incident involving the alleged "infringement" by Jews on the Temple Mount.
As CAMERA has previously documented, in September 1928, a small group of Jews erected a mechitza for Yom Kippur prayers at the Western Wall. The British dismantled the divider, but Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and future Nazi collaborator, used the incident as a pretext to incite Muslims, accusing Jews of attempting to seize Muslim holy sites, including the al Aqsa Mosque.
While violence against Jews occurred in Jerusalem, and throughout Palestine, the situation in Hebron exploded on August 23, as an angry Arab mob proceeded to Hebron, where Jews had lived peacefully with their Arab neighbours for years.
The violence escalated, with Arabs going door to door screaming, “Kill the Jews,” breaking into Jewish homes and torturing, castrating, raping and murdering the inhabitants – a deadly orgy of libel-fuelled Palestinian violence that foreshadowed the antisemitic barbarism we would see, albeit on a much larger scale, on October 7, 2023.
In total, 67 Jews in Hebron were killed and 60 were wounded over a two-hour period, while dozens more Jews were murdered in Jerusalem and in other cities. The Jewish community in Hebron – where Jews had lived since biblical times – was destroyed.
While nothing much shocks us anymore about the Guardian's institutional hostility to Israel and Jews, it's important to stress that, until now, we've never previously encountered an inversion of the 1929 Palestinian pogrom that frames Jewish victims as the culprits at any other British outlet. They seem to have endorsed a conspiracy theory that resulted in the slaughter of Jewish civilians in Hebron – a libel that continues to fuel jihadist violence against Jews to this day.
Adam Levick is UK Media Research Manager at CAMERA
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.