Clear Disparity

Peter Oborne writes:

Last month, Metropolitan Police raided the home of Asa Winstanley, a well-known pro-Palestinian journalist with the Electronic Intifada, and seized his devices under the provisions of the UK Terrorism Act 2006.

This followed the detention at Heathrow Airport of Richard Medhurst and the arrest of Sarah Wilkinson in August; both journalists have reported on the Gaza war.

This is part of a pattern of harassment of pro-Palestine activists in Britain. Police told Winstanley that the raid on his house was part of something called “Operation Incessantness”.

Not a single national news outlet in the UK, with the exception of the Morning Star and the National in Scotland, has reported on the policing of British pro-Palestinian journalists, or on the threat this poses to media freedom.

Let’s now compare the media coverage of pro-Palestinian journalists with that of Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who was visited by police on the morning of 10 November. According to her original account, which has since changed, police told her she was accused of a “non-crime hate incident” for a post on X (formerly Twitter) a year ago.

She also said that police did not tell her what post was being investigated. Unlike pro-Palestinian journalists, her technical equipment was not seized.

The Pearson incident has sparked a national uproar. Questions have been asked in the House of Commons. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, has stated that police were “absolutely wrong” to visit Pearson’s home. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, declared: “This needs to stop.”

Two former prime ministers have also expressed their outrage, with Boris Johnson using his Daily Mail column to instruct the country’s current leader, Keir Starmer, to “police the streets, not the tweets.”

Clear disparity

The Telegraph splashed on the story for days on end. The Independent, Times, Mail, Express, and Sun have all highlighted the story. So has The Guardian, which in common with all the other outlets, has not mentioned the recent police targeting of pro-Palestinian journalists.

There has been plenty of coverage on Sky News, GB News and the BBC - including a long, sympathetic exploration of the Pearson case on the Radio Four PM programme.

This disparity between the British media obsession with Pearson and the omerta surrounding the case of Winstanley and other pro-Palestinian reporters is symptomatic of British media coverage of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

As a report by the Centre for Media Monitoring has driven home, British journalists view Palestinians differently. Israeli victims are humanised and given names. Palestinians tend to be treated - as Frantz Fanon wrote during the Algerian war of independence - as “faces bereft of all humanity”. 

Palestinians mysteriously die from unspecified causes, while the destruction of mosques, schools and hospitals are presented as natural disasters caused by an unknown agency.

The same applies to Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Their bravery is beyond belief. They have continued to report in circumstances of indescribable horror, despite injuries, regular killings and - to quote the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) - “arbitrary detention at the hands of Israeli forces, none of whom have been held accountable”.

I have seen surprisingly little solidarity from British mainstream journalists with their Palestinian colleagues, let alone an acknowledgement of their astonishing bravery and heroic self-sacrifice in continuing to tell the appalling truths about Gaza.

To be fair, the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian and Independent have done some reporting on the subject. As for the Daily Telegraph, the most recent coverage focused on Palestinian journalists that I could find was a report from June 2024, headlined: “BBC accused of not disclosing that killed Palestinian journalists were Hamas supporters.” Based on the work of pro-Israel media advocacy group Camera, the article implies that dozens of journalists who have been killed were Hamas supporters or otherwise associated with terrorism.

Drama continues

Meanwhile, Pearson’s story is starting to unravel. Essex police rejected her claim that she was accused of a “non-crime hate incident”. They said she was under investigation for “inciting racial hatred”, an offence under the Public Order Act. Police have complained to the UK’s media regulator of factual inaccuracies, saying that body-cam footage shows an officer telling Pearson: “It’s gone down as an incident or offence of potentially inciting racial hatred online.”

The investigation into Pearson appears to relate to a post directed at the Metropolitan Police on 16 November 2023. She wrote: “How dare they. @metpoliceuk Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”

Attached to her tweet was a photo of what Pearson thought showed police officers posing alongside Gaza marchers. In fact, her post on X appears to have been a response to a picture of Manchester police with a group of people holding the flag of the Pakistan's Tehreek-e-Insaf political party.

Pearson deleted the post after her error was pointed out, but the incident led to a complaint to police. The complainant told the Guardian that her post was “racist and inflammatory” and “had nothing to do with Palestine or the London protests”.

The drama of Pearson’s post continues. On Wednesday, the Telegraph awarded her three pages. “The eye of the storm is a really scary place to be; dark thoughts crowd in … I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” Pearson confided to Telegraph readers. “I cling to that knowledge like a shipwrecked person clings to a raft, your fingers getting colder and colder and gradually losing their grip. Why not stop struggling and let yourself go under? I understand why people under this kind of pressure take their own life. Make it go away, please just make it go away.”

Following this huge media uproar, Essex Police decided on Thursday to take no further action against her. In a statement, they said there will be an independent review of the force’s handling of the matter.

I hope that at some point Pearson - and the Telegraph editor who chose to publish this drivel - might find a moment to reflect that, according to the CPJ, Israeli forces have so far killed 129 of her Palestinian colleagues as they sought to bring the truth about Israeli atrocities to the outside world.