TruthDig
"Many journalists become grudgingly used to the fact that their reporting has little to no visible effect on the course of world events. For a moment last month, Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the pro-Palestinian news and opinion site The Electronic Intifada, wasn’t one of them.
Abunimah is almost singularly responsible for The Guardian newspaper’s dismissal of former George W. Bush speechwriter Joshua Trevino from the historically liberal paper’s opinion pages. He was one of the loudest and clearest voices to speak out when the hire was announced in mid-August. One year earlier, he told readers, Trevino had encouraged the Israeli military to kill American activists aboard a flotilla that was set to defy the country’s embargo against the shipment of goods into the Gaza Strip.
“Dear IDF,” Trevino tweeted in June 2011, “If you end up shooting any Americans on the new Gaza flotilla—well, most Americans are cool with that. Including me.” Poet and author Alice Walker, Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein and Joseph Dana of The Nation magazine were among the American citizens aboard the flotilla.
“Something has gone badly wrong at The Guardian,” Abunimah wrote in his central piece criticizing the paper’s choice, published at Al-Jazeera. “In the name of ‘robust debate,’ the venerable left-leaning liberal newspaper has effectively given its stamp of approval to speech that goes beyond mere hate, speech that clearly crosses the line into incitement to murder unarmed civilians and journalists. What lies behind this worrying development, and what does it tell us about the state of media in general?”......"
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