It may be my own gallows humor, but I sometimes almost find it amusing to see how long it takes for a CiF piece that doesn’t pertain to Jews or Israel to elicit a Guardian reader comment which, with varying degrees of rhetorical dexterity, manages to bring the discussion to the former or the latter.
As such, it only took 27 minutes from the time Nick Cohen’s recent CiF piece (A chance to drag ourselves out of the gutter, July 24), which commented on the fallout from the Murdoch scandal and what the event portends for the future of the media in the UK (and wasn’t even peripherally about Israel or the Middle East) was open to comments to produce this, which quickly accumulated 29 Recommends:
I reported the comment as off-topic but so far it still remains.
Further, a commenter with the moniker “HushedSilence” objected to Pindi’s comment, contributing the following:
And, then, this mild rebuke of Pindi’s hateful diatribe is deleted by CiF moderators:
So, our persistent HushedSilence then accurately observed the following:
An interesting insight into their moderation policy, indeed.
We’ll see if HushedSilence’s observation stays or is ultimately deleted by CiF moderators, but our saga doesn’t end there.
For good measure. Pindi added the following, which, as of this post, hasn’t been deleted, arguing that Cohen beats the drums in support of military involvement in the Middle East (presumably NATO involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan) which is in league with Nazi war crimes:
I guess for a paper whose editors evidently consider the explicit anti-Semitism of James Petras and Israel Shahak to be legitimate progressive thought the suggestion, by a CiF reader, that the UK is “killing Muslims and destroying their countries…to protect Israel” and that Nick Cohen cheer leads for NATO military involvement in the Middle East which is morally equivalent to Nazi war crimes may actually seem plausible.
(UPDATE: HushedSilence’s comment critical of CiF’s moderation process was indeed removed, as was, interestingly, the off topic vitriol by Pindi.)
- Curious deletions under Greg Philo’s surreal assertion, at CiF, that UK journalists are afraid to criticize Israel (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian reader off-topic anti-Israel hate of the day (cifwatch.com)
- Israel section of the Guardian’s online bookshop includes a work by David Duke’s favorite Jew (cifwatch.com)
- Disturbing amount of anti-Semitism by Guardian readers following CiF piece about Israeli PM’s speech (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian commenter gets banned after noting racist record of HRW’s Joe Stork (cifwatch.com)
- Curious deletion by Guardian comment moderators in Demjanjuk thread (cifwatch.com)
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Telling the Truth
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5 comments
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July 24, 2011 at 10:42 am
Thank God I'm An Infidel
BDS Der Guardian.
Boycott any company that advertises in Der Guardian.
Slap Der Guaridan with hate speech violations based on its CiF policy.
July 24, 2011 at 12:29 pm
wearenotblind
You should never ask to have a comment in the Guardian deleted for being off topic or for any other reason. The Guardian is so blatantly one sided that by asking them to be fair you lend them credibility. You feed into the idea that they can and will act impartially. I am always upset when they moderate the pixielike Berchman’s as he is so ludicrous in his comments that are left to stand that his deleted ones must be so over the top that the Guardian realizes they will lose that tiny shred of credibility they have left if those comments are not taken down. If the dealer in a poker game is dealing from the bottom and continues to do so after he has been caught, you walk away from the game as opposed to continuing to object. This is Einstein’e definition of insanity.
July 24, 2011 at 4:13 pm
pretzelberg
I think it was on the recent Greenslade article (but I’m not 100% sure) where comments by me and others challenging a vicious anti-Israel post (the kind that ends with “this is not to deny the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust”) were deleted before the original post was.
July 25, 2011 at 2:44 am
JerusalemMite
Glad that this debacle was ‘caught and photographed’.
It ‘fits’ so well the opinion of the dishonesty of the Guardian and attendant CiFallists. It clearly exposes so well how the The Guardian/CiF use moderation as a weapon to prevent dissention to the Guardian World View appearing on their threads.
All under the protection of ‘Fair and Balanced’ Guardian style.
July 25, 2011 at 4:08 am
Margie in Tel Aviv
The Guardian is unashamed in its championing of the anti-Israeli cause.
That is why we have their Jerusalem reporter describing everything she encounters from a hostile point of view, often getting things quite wrong because she draws on biased sources. It is only in the cif moderation that they make any pretence of being balanced. You can either walk away from them because of the shocking discrimination they practise or you can encourage decency and make facts available to naive readers, pointing out the most extreme or the most obvious examples of bad behaviour.