The following picture accompanied the piece, as if to whitewash from memory all the photos of real dead and maimed children among piles of rubble and wrapped in white sheets we have been seeing daily for a year on our screens.
© Adam Vaughan/EPAA protester holds a mock dead baby during a march in London last month.
Read the entire piece at your own risk. You will recognize the words as you read them, but morally or logically they don't make sense.
The author of the article is basically arguing that it's "anti-semitic" for news outlets to continuously show the murder of Palestinian children by Israel, because it somehow plays into a false narrative that the Jews have a propensity for infanticide. He manages to shoot himself - and thus the Israel he defends - in the foot all the way through, especially in his last paragraph:
"If you are one of those who believe there is no smoke without fire - Roald Dahl, remember, said there had to be some reason no one liked the Jews - these pictures from Gaza will confirm your conviction that Jews are the devil's confederates. The litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood."Award-winning journalist and author Jonathan Cook did read it in its entirety and promptly posted his reply on X:
Why is the 'liberal' media peddling the vilest genocide apologism?The only way to stop the damage that is being done to Israel's reputation is to prevent the evidence from spreading. That, or stopping the massacring of people, which seems to have been entirely discounted as an option because most Israelis seem to enjoy it.
I can't put this strongly enough. Howard Jacobson's article in today's Observer newspaper may be one the vilest pieces of journalism published in Britain in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel's documented slaughter of many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza is a "blood libel" and antisemitic. It is pure genocide apologism.
But far worse is the fact that the Guardian Media Group signed off his column. This isn't the work of one Zionist loon. A whole army of journalists brought it to print.
And note: Jacobson, odious as he is, isn't responsible for the choice of photo. That is entirely down to the Observer newsroom.
I worked at both the Guardian and the Observer, its Sunday sister paper, for many years. The comment editor, the photo editor, the revise sub-editor, the Observer's chief editor and all the section heads would have approved not only Jacobson's text but that photo too.
What on earth did they all imagine that "illustrative" photo of a blood-smeared doll suggested?
* That the many thousands of children blown to pieces by Israeli bombs are a fiction.
* That all the children decomposing under rubble are made up.
* That all the unidentified children buried in Gaza's sands are a lie.
* That all the children dying of epidemics like polio or starving to death from Israel's aid blockade are an invention.
That any single journalist imagined for a moment that this was an acceptable article or photo in the midst of a genocide is astounding enough.
But that a whole phalanx of the most influential and "liberal" journalists in the country backed it without a second thought tells us something about the depraved culture that passes for journalism in the western establishment media.
These elite journalists are completely divorced from reality. They have no moral core, they live and work as fanatical ideologues for western supremacism. They are as racist as their forebears who cheerled Britain's subjugation and colonisation of the rest of the globe.
There is no hope of ever having a healthy world as long as these war-mongers and genocide apologists are allowed to remain in charge of shaping our consciousness.
An interesting point raised by historian Darryl Cooper in his podcast series on the Israeli-Palestine conflict: One of the oldest accusations against Jews, referred to as 'blood libels', was that they poisoned water supplies. Zionist terrorists, he pointed out, must have known about these popular superstitions when they literally did that to Palestinian wells. They even used, in some cases, biological contaminants like Tetanus strains.
It's part of a pattern of deliberate Zionist actions that makes the larger Jewish community less safe. It furthers their cause. They literally have to create anti-Semitism when it isn't naturally present.
They are also beginning to see that the images of dead children, the children they murder almost daily, and have been doing now for over half a century, are turning global public opinion against them. It's a new era, so despite the Israeli Defense Force having specifically targeted and killed most of the Palestinian journalists, people carry cell phones and post what they experience on platforms like X.
How dare they show Israel's crimes to the entire world! How dare those dead mutilated children ruin Israel's image as the "most moral army" and the "beacon of civilization and democracy" in the Middle East! Unleash Hasbara propaganda, amplify it through mainstream media, censor "anti-semitism" on social media and make phone calls to leaders of other countries to remind them of the consequences for their political careers if they don't crack down on their citizens' 'noticing' of genocide.
Even those of us who have been noticing and documenting Israeli crimes against Palestinians for decades have been shocked anew by the EVIL (such an inadequate word) committed this past year, and their inevitable attempts to whitewash their horrific crimes. In a way, they also 'killed' a part of us, the helpless spectators, utterly heart-broken and unable to do anything of consequence to stop it or to aid the victims. Our last shreds of innocence and belief in global justice or values also died under the rubble in Gaza.
What writers like Jacobson don't understand is that genocide apologism will not have the effects he hopes it will on the majority of his readers. We have seen these tactics before. A similar text was written in The Times of Israel in 2014 by Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, and it illustrates how genocide apologists think and operate. Some selected "gems":
I accuse the world media of arming Hamas with the weapon of the image that makes even intelligent people who rationally understand and defend Israel's right to exist, talk in the next breath about disproportionality [...].At the end truth is spoken.
I accuse the world media of choosing -because let's be clear here there is always a choice- to act in an outright dangerous and irresponsible way by being Hamas's willing accomplices in using these images against Israel, and in so doing perpetuating the death and destruction Hamas is inflicting on their own people. If the media's obsession with these images was not so intense, then pictures of dead children would not be an effective strategy for Hamas and there simply would have been fewer of these self-inflicted casualties. [...]
I accuse the world media of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism in Europe with their one-sided coverage and those oh so powerful images that make people take to the streets and hate anything and everything Jewish. I accuse the world media of making every Jew in Europe vulnerable and scared to levels that we have not seen since before the Second World War.
And finally, I accuse the Israeli government past and present of not seeing the weapon of the image as a strategic threat, the way tunnels and rockets are, causing people to question the legitimacy of our existence. I accuse the Israeli government of not taking the best "generals" of hasbara for this mammoth yet not insurmountable task and instead using convenient political appointees and well-meaning nonprofits to do the job. I accuse them of a lack of vision for not laying the infrastructure of our own hasbara offensive strategy and for seeing it as a lost cause.
As a people we have the power, talent and resources to craft our own compelling narrative and deliver it to the world with pride and conviction. What are we waiting for?
The rest is punctuated by so many paramoralisms, which bring to mind another, attributed to one of Israel's first PMs, Golda Meir: "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."
What they fear the most is happening: most people are beginning to notice that there's something seriously wrong with Israel.
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