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Fairfax's editorial policy?

By Jonathan J. Ariel - posted Wednesday, 13 August 2014


Independent of Context. Always.

On Saturday, News Limited served up a stellar editorialin its flagship publication, The Australian, where it alerted all those with eyes that can see and minds that can question, to Australian passport-holding Islamic warriors parading the severed heads of fellow Muslims butchered in Syria and Iraq.

Such are the spoils of Jihad.

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The newspaper advocated that such villains need to be dealt with in the harshest manner possible. The paper added that it is shameful that so-called "leaders" of the Australian Muslim community are yet to condemn such barbarism.

The editorial continued:

this weekend 40,000 Iraqis from minority groups, including Christians, are cowering on a mountain in the north of their country besieged by the barbarous jihadists of the Islamic State.

The United Nations estimates another 200,000 people have fled the region" in the face of the jihadist caravan of slaughter. "But the focus for most of the world's attention – including Fairfax Media - for the past week has been not on their plight, or even that of the 170,000 people killed so far in Syria in what is one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the post-WWII era.

No Ma'am. The media's focus has been on Israel's allegedly "disproportionate" response to its citizens being bombarded with missiles from an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. For those who missed the news, the terror groupcalled HAMAS that rules the nascent Emirate of Gaza and fires missiles at Israeli civilians enjoys electorate-wide support for its heinous war crimes. Furthermore, it has more legitimacy representing its voters than does the Palestinian Authority's Fairfax-described " moderate President" Mahmoud Abbas. The fact is there is nothing "moderate" about a person who wrote a PhD thesis denying the Holocaust. It's worth mentioning – because Fairfax Media sure will not - that the so-called "President" is unelected.

While Fairfax stirs its readers to anger against the Jewish state in its one-sided reporting on the Gaza conflict, scant mention is made of the 1,600 people killed in Iraq in July alone, 1,800 people killed in Syria in the space of a few days, and 3,000 victims in attacks by Boko Haram jihadists in Nigeria.

The same day as News Corp's editorial hit the newsstands, Fairfax ratcheted up its misinformation campaign. It veered away, at lightning speed, from former columnist Mike Carlton's crude attacks on Israel and its supporters, and instead downplayed a dangerous development unfolding by the hour: the challenge to the security of the Middle East, to Christians in general and to Jews in particular.

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Fairfaxoffered a profile of then Turkish Prime Minister but as of Monday, now President Recep Tayipp Erdogan.

Fairfax's scribe, Paul McGeough told a story of a leader who "visits brute force - police, political or profit-driven - on a people quietly going about their lives, and especially on those Turks who dare to insist on their rights".

McGeough is of course best known for nailing his colours to the Arab (or as some prefer to say, "Palestinian") mast when in May 2010 he hitched a ride on the so-called "Gaza Flotilla", an attempt to provide support to Gazans whose government, HAMAS, spends its foreign aid treasure on missiles and missile launchers rather than on education and infrastructure.

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About the Author

Jonathan J. Ariel is an economist and financial analyst. He holds a MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management. He can be contacted at jonathan@chinamail.com.

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