CiFWatch Exposes Anti-Semitism in the Guardian’s Influential Blog
CiFWatch was created 4 months ago to expose the anti-Semitism in the Guardian newspaper’s popular and influential blog, “Comment is Free.” Using the the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC)’s working definition of anti-Semitism, CiFWatch describes the Guardian‘s blog as having become a venue “where anti-Semitism thrives.”
Contributors to ‘Comment is Free’ regularly engage in one-sided anti-Israel diatribes that fuel what inevitably devolves into an anti-Jewish hate-fest on the comment thread, through the invocation of antisemitic memes and tropes. Coupled with this is a post-moderation policy, relying by and large on users to flag abusive comments, that consistently fails to delete large numbers of antisemitic comments (see CiF Commenters) despite in many cases the report of abuse. To add insult to injury, in some instances the moderators delete the comments of users who attempt to refute antisemitic comments without deleting the antisemitic comment itself.
Recent CiFWatch posts have revealed not only the obvious bias of a newly appointed moderator at the Guardian‘s blog , but the fact that she is none other than the daughter of the Guardian‘s editor, Alan Rusbridger.
The latest post — a guest post by Jonathan Hoffman — reviews Channel 4’s recent Dispatches programme, “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby”—which essentially dismissed, among others, CAMERA’s critiques of a Guardian series labelling Israel an “apartheid” state (see critique 1 and critique 2) and a complaint to the BBC Trust which resulted in a ruling against Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen.
Visit CiFWatch at http://cifwatch.com!
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