Tag Archives: The Guardian

The Guardian’s Vilification of Jews on the Temple Mount

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Thousands of Jews visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem this week during normal visiting hours on Tisha B’Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Jewish Temples that once stood on that very site.

That is the basic fact. Everything that follows depends on how news organizations chose to describe it.

OutletWho?PlaceAction
The Guardian“Jewish extremists“; “far-right” ministers“Al-Aqsa mosque compound”“Storm”
Reuters“Israel’s Ben Gvir”; “National Security Minister”“Al-Aqsa Mosque compound” (also notes Jews call it the Temple Mount in article)“Visits”
Haaretz“Far right Israeli acitivists““Al-Aqsa/Temple Mount Compound”“Visit”
Arab & Palestinian media“Settlers,” “far-right” or “extremists““Al-Aqsa Mosque““Raid” / “Storm“

The pattern is clear. The same event is transformed through language in the Muslim and Arab world: Temple Mount becomes Al-Aqsa; Jewish worshippers become “settlers” or “extremists”; a regulated religious visit during visiting hours becomes a “raid” or “storming.” And the results are laid out as “very dangerous” and “the global community has a shared responsibility to prevent Netanyahu’s ‘provocative acts.'”

This has a long ugly history and is expected in the radical Muslim press.

What is becoming more commonplace is for Europe to join this antisemitic framing. The United Kingdom’s The Guardian reported on the visit with the shrill tone and narrative of the Islamic world in a news article, not an opinion piece.

The visitors did not storm the site. They entered through Israeli security during established visiting hours. The Jews never entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque itself. They visited the Temple Mount – the holiest place in Judaism and site of the First and Second Jewish Temples – on a Jewish holiday about that specific location.

Calling thousands of Jewish worshippers “extremists” because they ascended Judaism’s holiest site on Tisha B’Av is itself an extraordinary editorial choice. The remarkable inversion is that the descendants of the people whose temples stood there are portrayed as intruders, while their religious observance is framed as an act of aggression.

Newspapers do not report that Muslims “stormed Mecca” during the Hajj or that Christians “stormed” the Vatican during Easter. Yet when Jews gather at Judaism’s holiest site, peaceful pilgrimage suddenly becomes an extremist assault.

This is especially troubling in Britain, where antisemitism has surged since October 7. British officials have repeatedly warned that the demonization of Israel spills into the demonization of British Jews, while chants of “jihad” and “intifada” have echoed through the country’s streets. The concern is no longer theoretical. Britain’s deadliest recent synagogue attack was carried out by an Islamic State adherent whose communications revealed deeply antisemitic views. More than half of Britain’s recorded antisemitic incidents in 2025 referenced Israel, “Palestine,” Hamas or the Gaza war.

The Guardian is not simply another British newspaper. It is one of the world’s most influential English-language news organizations, with most of its readership now outside Britain, including Ireland and Australia. Its reporting helps shape how millions understand events in Israel. Media watchdogs including CAMERA and HonestReporting have repeatedly criticized its language and framing on Israel and Jerusalem. Yet despite years of such criticism—and against the backdrop of rising antisemitism and repeated attacks on Jews in Britain—the newspaper chose to describe Jews observing one of Judaism’s most solemn days at their holiest site as fanatical Jews coming for Islamic holy sites. That framing does not remain confined to Britain. It travels with The Guardian‘s global audience.

Journalism’s first obligation is to help readers understand reality before interpreting it. When The Guardian abandons that duty in favor of inflammatory framing, it bears responsibility for contributing to the climate of hostility that encourages anti-Jewish hatred and violence.

ACTION ITEM

Contact The Guardian either through guardian.letters@theguardian.com or guardian.readers@theguardian.com and voicemail +44 (0)20 3353 4736 and opinion@theguardian.com

Related articles:

Storming Words, Not Mosques (April 2026)

The Dangerous ‘Settlers Storming Al Aqsa’ Fiction (October 2023)

Bondi Attack: Can Jews Be Victims in the Media?

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There are moments when a headline tells you everything by what it refuses to say.

A mass shooting took place at a Hanukkah party in Sydney, Australia. A Jewish holiday. A Jewish gathering.

Yet when major global outlets reported the story, something curious happened.

The New York Times headline did not mention Jews. Only the sub-header caught the significance of the attack, but did not say Jews were targeted.

More disturbing, follow-up articles did not focus on the horrific spike in antisemitism in Australia these past two years. Instead, the Times posted an article about… Bondi Beach, and how beautiful and popular it is.

The BBC followed a similar path. So did The Guardian. So did others like CNN. The event was flattened into abstraction: a “shooting,” a “disturbance,” a “tragedy,” untethered from identity.

By contrast, The Telegraph named Jews. The Jerusalem Post did as well. The New York Post and CNBC, too. Al Jazeera did not. Actually, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera attempted to whitewash the entire incident that there was “no information.”

This divide is not accidental. It reflects something deeper and more uncomfortable.

Because at the same moment that major Western media hesitated to name Jewish victimhood, the global Jewish community had no such confusion. WhatsApp groups lit up within minutes. Videos circulated—not to sensationalize, but to bear witness. The injured were named, not as statistics but as people. Hebrew names were shared so strangers across continents could pray for them.

No one asked whether Jews had been targeted. They knew.

The only uncertainty discussed privately was not if the attack was antisemitic, but which strain of antisemitism it represented. Neo-Nazis? Radical Islamists? A lone actor steeped in online hate? Jews have learned, painfully, to recognize the pattern even before the authorities finish their press conference.

So why the hesitation in public framing?

Why is Jewish identity often erased precisely when Jews are attacked?

Part of the answer lies in a narrative trap the modern media has built for itself. Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are increasingly cast in a single role: power holders, enforcers, aggressors. In that framework, Jews are permitted to be actors—but not victims. Agents—but not targets. Perpetrators—but not innocents.

Victimhood, in today’s moral economy, is rationed. And Jews often find themselves disqualified from it in favor of victims of preference.

Naming Jews as victims complicates the preferred storyline. It disrupts the binary of oppressor and oppressed. It forces an uncomfortable reckoning: that a people portrayed relentlessly as powerful are still being hunted in synagogues, homes, and holiday celebrations—from Pittsburgh to Poway, from Paris to Copenhagen, from Jerusalem to Sydney.

And so the language softens. The identity disappears. The motive is delayed, blurred, or left unexplored. The story becomes about the setting, not the target. About the neighborhood, not the people. About ambience, not intent.

The question is not whether Jews are under attack. That is beyond dispute.

The question is whether the world’s most influential media institutions are willing to say so plainly—or whether Jews may only appear in headlines when they are accused, never when they are wounded.

Part of the answer to the disgraceful shrug to the barbaric October 7 massacre in Israel is the systemic brainwashing that has been going on, that Jews cannot be viewed as innocent victims. Even when they plainly are, half a world away.


The British and Arab Press Assail “Settlers” While the Israeli Media calls out “Right-Wing”

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Roman Abramovich is a Russian billionaire who owns the Chelsea premier league soccer team. His dealings often make it onto the UK papers which love to gossip about the ultra-wealthy, especially those entangled with their favorite sport.

The British media went after Abramovich this week as he completed the trifecta of British obsession: his support of the Jewish State.

The BBC posted a video on September 21, 2020 called “FinCEN Files: The Israeli settlers Chelsea boss Arbramovich helped fund.” The inverted English title was a pretty good indication of the inversion of facts presented in the ten minute video including never stating that it was Yemenite Jews who founded the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan in the 19th century (not Arabs the way BBC presented) and that the archaeological findings in the City of David are historical treasures for the entire world, not booty for the Jewish people.

Roman Abramovich featured in BBC

The Guardian loved the story and published a piece “Leaks show Chelsea owner Abramovich funded Israeli settler group.” The article wrote that

“four companies he [Abramovich] either owns or controls in the British Virgin Islands have contributed more than $100m (£74m) to Elad, a group that supports settlements in the Palestinian neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem called Silwan, BBC News Arabic reported.”

This “Palestinian neighborhood” was never contemplated to be part of a Palestinian state, and the Oslo Accords which the Palestinian Authority signed in 1995 acknowledge that Israel rules Jerusalem.

The article continued:

“The group, which also receives backing from the Israeli government, has sought to strengthen the Jewish presence in the neighbourhood of Silwan at the expense of its Arab residents.

Elad runs an archaeological site in Silwan called the City of David that has become a huge tourist attraction. The dig has been criticised by European Union diplomats as seeking to ignore the ancient city’s diverse history in favour of “an exclusively Jewish narrative, while detaching the place from its Palestinian surroundings”.”

The statement is ridiculous on many fronts. Arabs dwarf the number of Jews in the neighborhood today. Before the Yemenite Jews settled this area outside the Old City of Jerusalem’s walls in the 1880’s, no one lived in that land for centuries; the Arab history on the site is only 100 years old.

Outside of the British press, the biased story was repeated almost verbatim by Arab media outlets:

The left-wing Israeli press ran their own stories:

The TOI piece included this doozy:

“Elad also purchases homes in the surrounding Arab village of Silwan — sometimes via Muslim middlemen — and rents them to Jews, a move that has led to charges that it is fueling tensions in the city.”

The use of “Muslim middlemen” to procure property stems from the fact that the Palestinian Authority considers selling land to Jews a capital crime. Rather than denounce the sick anti-Semitic Palestinian law which kills Arabs for a natural human right of selling property to another person in the spirit of coexistence and commerce, the article inverted the charge against the group, Elad, claiming that it caused the tensions.

It is a sad commentary on the world today that a non-profit group which helps uncover the beauty of Jewish history and facilitates Jews buying homes in their holiest city in an area founded by Jews is controversial. That the British and Arab press held common cause in vilifying support for such “settler group” while the Israeli news called out the “right-wing group” says quite a bit about the racial and nationalistic lens shared by the UK and Arab world, as well as the partisan political orientation in Israel today.

Related First One Through articles:

The New York Times All Out Assault on Jewish Jerusalem

Real and Imagined Laws of Living in Silwan

The Subtle Discoloration of History: Shuafat

Obama’s Select Religious Compassion

Obama supports Anti-Semitic Palestinian Agenda of Jew-Free State

“Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”

Ending Apartheid in Jerusalem

The New York Times Inverts the History of Jerusalem

The Nerve of ‘Judaizing’ Neighborhoods

BBC Welcomes Release of British Muslim Accused of Beheading Daniel Pearl

Al Jazeera’s Lies Call for Jihad Against the Jewish State

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