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Guardian’s new low of journalistic abdication

The world stands on the brink of global conflict. Nuclear war is currently a serious possibility. The US launched an attack on a Russian ally state based on completely unproven claims that it had used chemical weapons on its own people. No investigation to verify these claims has yet been undertaken. Responsible journalism needs to play an urgent part in pulling the situation back from the brink. It needs to point out the lack of data and the requirement for cool heads and rational thinking. But today, of all days, this is the Guardian’s headline.

Guardian headline April 8 2017


Again.” Could there be a more complete abdication of journalistic responsibility to question and inform? Do the Guardian editorial staff who sanctioned this offence realise they are not simply advertising their own lack of moral fibre but may also be propagandising for the end of the world, themselves and their loved ones? Or does some innate hubris make them feel immortal and invulnerable? If so, by the time they realise they were wrong it will be very much too late for all of us.


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shaksvshav
shaksvshav
Apr 11, 2017 5:45 PM

Do I really have to read The Mail for a crumb of common sense: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-4394216/PETER-HITCHENS-noble-cause-Bombs-Al-Qaeda.html ?

passerby
passerby
Apr 10, 2017 7:02 AM

For months our media have shown pictures of Syrian children, covered in dust, shell shocked in an ambulance, injured or dead, saying they are victim of Russian or Syrian bomb strikes. But when a muslim terrorist attack kills a 11-year old girl in Stockholm, pictures are absent.

Kaiama
Kaiama
Apr 9, 2017 9:49 AM

No peace in Syria until Assad is ousted, says Nikki Haley.
In a departure from the administration’s previous stance, US ambassador to the UN suggests regime change is now one of its priorities.
One wonders whether regime change inIraq and Libya has brought peace,
Wankers.

John
John
Apr 8, 2017 7:44 PM

We have to remember the history of The Guardian.
Originally, it was the Manchester Guardian and it was heavily tied in with a Manchester Zionist Group (which included THE Marks and Spencer of M & S fame), including Chaim Weizmann, who was heavily involved in extracting the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and who went on to become illegal Israel’s first so-called “president”.
To be fair, The Guardian has stayed true to its historic roots, even if it has also managed to obscure them.
The people they employ as hired mouths and hands are all either zionists or zionist-sympathisers.
Realise that and you will always realise just exactly what it is that motivates them all.

Stephen leuw
Stephen leuw
Apr 10, 2017 3:52 PM
Reply to  John

Yep lets blame it on the jews,everything is a Jewish conspiracy.

John
John
Apr 10, 2017 10:49 PM
Reply to  Stephen leuw

You need to understand the distinctions between Jews and Zionists.
Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews.
There are Christian Zionists, particularly in the USA.
I mentioned Balfour – he was not a Jew.

physicsandmathsrevision
physicsandmathsrevision
Apr 11, 2017 8:01 AM
Reply to  John

We do understand the difference. However, we are allowed to say that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and that the Americans nuked Japan so we should insist on saying, for instance, that the Jews will not tolerate the existence of strong stable democracies in the region around Israel. We must say that Jewish interests trump national interests right across the western world because these things are TRUE.
We know that not all Japanese, Americans, Jews support their leadership but the sad fact is that the great majority of them do.
So.
Why should Jews be a special case?
Because, as usual, they demand that we make them a special case?
This Zionist/Jewish argument is for suicidalists. We must OPPOSE THESE PEOPLE OPENLY and call them out for every horrible, creepy manipulation they inflict on our political and financial systems.
Who doubts that the obsession with regime change in Syria, Iran and Russia is all about putting Zionist-friendly stooges in place in these countries? If the Jews don’t like it they must call out THEIR leadership on what they are doing to the world. If that happens globalism is over … because what is certain is that the globalist, Imperialist monster AT THE VERY LEAST, HIDES BEHIND THE JEWISH PEOPLE and their manufactured victimhood.

physicsandmathsrevision
physicsandmathsrevision
Apr 10, 2017 11:27 PM
Reply to  Stephen leuw

John is stating the obvious.
Zionism rules. It rules the UK. It rules the USA. It rules the West. Why else are all western powers intent on destablising or , if possible, destroying every arab state in the neighbourhood of Israel? And what good does any of this do the peoples of the US/UK/EU?
Is israel our puppet or are we theirs and what’s the difference, whatever the case?
Read Douglas Reed’s “The Controversy of Zion” and understand the history of the Sanhedrin/Gentile thuggery nexus that has dominated the last 2,500 years of human history at least. It’s the best book i’ve ever read.
it’s only competitor, for insight, is Jesus Christ Himself in the New Testament who warned the Jewish people against their leadership, calling them “Liars! Of Satan!”
Bullseye!

M.
M.
Apr 8, 2017 7:02 PM

Believe it or not in Spain there is one more “independent” online newspaper that, starting as a kind of cooperative, a promising and daring news project, now translates and prints (with pride!) Guardian articles. I discovered that today reading that same trunk. Apparently the Guardian myth is ingrained in many people.
At least I can come to read offguardian and cleanse myself from such moral and political rottenness. What you do is very much appreciated.

aaronmicalowe
aaronmicalowe
Apr 8, 2017 6:14 PM

Russia are as adverse to nuclear war as America. Those that are afraid of nuclear war don’t understand how nuclear weapons work. They only work as a deterant. You train to use them, plan to even, practice scenarios but you hope never to have to. Russia knows if it fired just one nuke on a Western target there would be no more Russia and no more West and no more world. If Russia is actually stupid enough to ever use a nuke then the human race doesn’t deserve to survive anyway. That would solve the problem of all future wars because there’s be no humans left to wage them.
But if anyone thinks the West will be blackmailed into accepting chemical weapons over this danger of total annihilation then don’t expect the West to cave into blackmail. We’d rather see the whole world burn than watch children get gassed by Assad.

M.
M.
Apr 8, 2017 6:48 PM
Reply to  aaronmicalowe

Wouldn´t you “representatives of the west” that speak with such grandstanding, better stop slaughtering children elsewhere, arming and funding the people that use the same chemical weapons that you so much say to despise, have an investigation on who was the actual culprit of that only last attack that you seem to care for, and then, only then, after at least starting the pretense of having some kind of moral attitude, start considering having wars that could end blowing up the entire world?
Could you at the very least inform yourselves on the many times that the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation? Ponder if we would be safer with the two powers, one of them trigger happy, pointing at each other, before trying to lecture us on nuclear war?
Cheers, thanks!

JJA
JJA
Apr 8, 2017 7:07 PM
Reply to  aaronmicalowe

Where did you see children getting gassed by Assad?
How do you ‘know’ it wasn’t a fake video by the west funded ‘White Helmets’?
Or collateral damage caused by the ‘rebels’ having chemical weapons that got blown up in a legitimate bombing raid on them?
The rest of the world is sick to death of being bullied by the US, that swaggers round the playground picking on anyone who doesn’t hand over their pocket money or other shining valuables they may have that the US wants. The only ones who support the US are the foreign politicians that are handsomely paid to do their bidding, against the interests of the people they are supposed to represent.
One day soon, the people of the whole world will join together and fight back against the playground bully and the vassals that hang on to his coattails. That day will be a genuine glad to be alive day and bring hope for a peaceful, cooperative future for all the world.

StAug
StAug
Apr 8, 2017 9:54 PM
Reply to  JJA

“Where did you see children getting gassed by Assad?”
Why, in the mind-pictures projected very expertly into his head, of course.

Enough is enough
Enough is enough
Apr 8, 2017 10:35 PM
Reply to  JJA

Precisely JJA. ‘That day’ would be the happiest of my life… the death of the greatest greediest meanest lying bully on the face of this earth: ” YABBA-DABBA-DO!!!”

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Apr 9, 2017 3:23 AM
Reply to  aaronmicalowe

“We’d rather see the whole world burn than watch children get gassed by Assad.”
Clearly, the culture speaking through you is insane. While you try to delude yourself into believing that Assad is the embodiment of an evil of which you supposedly cannot bear the sight, not a shred of evidence exists that Assad et al. have ever used chemical weapons of any kind against anyone.
On the other hand, the culture which you venerate and for which you speak, is “in fact” responsible for murder and torture on a scale unmatched by any other so-called ‘nation’ in history.
Only the United States of America has ever dropped nuclear bombs on civilians — you know, that category of people who are non-combatants but is typically comprised by a great many “children and infants and babies” — not out of military necessity, but to telegraph its “military superiority” to the world and to cynically create conditions to study the effects of its new dread engines.
Napalm and phosphorous and biological agents and depleted uranium, as part of the munition stocks that have been used by the American military, also did not discriminate between combatants and non-combatants when they were deliberately used against civilians — you know, that category of people who are non-combatants but is typically comprised by a great many “children and infants and babies.”
But when you really stop to think about it, you realize that “chemical weapons” are truly but the prop of a “propaganda ploy” — a psy-ops, really — intended to normalize what in fact are far more lethal, and therefore by implication, more heinous weapons of destructions. To your way of thinking, it is far more acceptable to maim and murder children and infants with bullets and bombs and shrapnel and sanctions than with ‘chemical weapons.’ But this attitude is actually misguided because in “fact” the former category of weapons comprises devices far more certain to injure children than “CWs” when used under identical “battle field” conditions.
And then how twisted is it that a distinction can even be made between one means of exterminating people and another, as though one could be less reprehensible than the other, when the end results are identical: interminable emotional if sometimes also physical trauma for the survivors of military assaults by whatever means, and unbearable agony unto death for the victims who ultimately perish.
All means of indiscriminate murder and maiming are equally repugnant and reprehensible, whether bullets or bombs or incendiaries or nerve agents or nuclear explosions. They are all one and the same thing: murderous instruments of conquest.
So why would you burn the whole world rather than watch children get gassed by Assad, or by anyone else, for that matter?
Let me tell you why:
It’s not so much that you can’t bear to watch children getting gassed; it is rather more that you can’t bear the world knowing that your beloved America, the ‘civilization’ you have been raised to venerate above all else, is in fact most guilty of the crimes most abhorrent to a common sense of decency, namely, the wanton murder of innocent people, and especially of children, whether by conventional or chemical weapons.
In short, what you really wish for is to lighten the burden of neurotic historical guilt implicit in American culture, and you would do this by eliminating all of humanity, for having borne witness to the crimes of your nation and for constantly reminding you of them.
Why not instead face up to what your nation and your beloved American culture is about, at least in its most ugly details, and then change the script that is in your head?
You owe more allegiance to yourself and humanity than to anything that “American the beautiful” could possibly represent.

John
John
Apr 9, 2017 8:43 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Additionally, US-supplied weapons killed more than 500 children using terrifying weapons’ systems in Gaza.
I have seen pictures of the effect fleschette bombs and phosphorous bombs had on young children’s bodies.
See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israel-using-flechette-shells-in-gaza for details.
Will Trump order a missile strike against Israel next time they use such barbaric weapons on innocent Gaza civilians?
UK- and US- supplied weapons systems have also “allowed” the Saudi gangsters to murder Yemeni civilians too.
Will Trump order missile strikes against the Saudi air bases involved?
Clearly, he – and the entire US administration – are guilty of mass hypocrisy on this issue.

Nogginthenog
Nogginthenog
Apr 10, 2017 10:05 AM
Reply to  John

Not just supplying weapons in Yemen. Both we in the UK and the US have men on the ground as military advisers, directing the Saudi attacks.
Attacks that are deliberately targeting civilians and infrastructure in an effort to basically starve an entire country. Not word from the guardian or its tame rent a quote politicians like Farron the ‘christian’ about those atrocities.
It is also barely a week since the US killed around 200 civilians sheltering in a single building, not much of an international outcry over that either in comparison to this one.

sroussina
sroussina
Apr 9, 2017 12:24 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Bravo. The sheer idiocy of the moral fuckwit that wrote that comment left me gasping…

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Apr 9, 2017 1:09 PM
Reply to  sroussina

Yes. Indeed. A breathtaking comment . . .

Yonatan
Yonatan
Apr 9, 2017 2:00 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

The nuclear weapons were dropped for many reasons. The targets chosen were deliberately not bombed previously even though they contained military targets such as torpedo plants. As a result, the citizens of the cities did not head to air raid shelters as the nuclear bombers passed overhead. They were used to bombers passing by. They stood in the open looking at the nuclear bombers as they delivered their weapons. This was because the US scientists wanted to test the effects of blast on undamaged cities and the effects of radiation on unprepared civilians. So Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also giant ‘scientific’ experiments. Mengele would be jealous of their audacity.

Yonatan
Yonatan
Apr 9, 2017 1:54 PM
Reply to  aaronmicalowe

The children were gassed by White Helmets / associates largely funded by the UK government – the terrorists have released videos of them prectising on caged rabbits. The associated ‘doctor’ has been disbarred from the UK medical register for associations with terrorist groups. The WH specialize in staging propaganda events. Here is a photo of them in action with one of their many actors. On the left he survives a bombing in Idlib. On the right he survives a sarin attack. Absolutely remarkable – he is either the luckiest man on the planet or the unluckiest – I can’t work out which.comment image
Another guy is a bit playercomment image:large
And so on, ad nauseum. If there is any regime directly behind the provocation, it is the UK regime.

Jim Scott
Jim Scott
Jun 15, 2017 6:36 AM
Reply to  aaronmicalowe

Here is a post I had censored by the Guardian. It may help you understand that I all you read on the MSM is not true and is in fact propaganda. I have noted that the Guardian will allow comments on insignificant issues and on advertorials presented as news. It actively prevents comments that show up the untrue statements by its foreign editor on the Syrian invasion and the destruction of Libya. My deleted comment –
“Oh dear more free advertising for Apple and back to not allowing comment on really important issues like the cholera and starvation in Yemen caused by British bombs.
Back to Patrick Wintour printing GCHQ and CIA propaganda and not allowing comment about the provable lies in his articles which largely are based on dredged up disproved propaganda like the Syrian boy saved by the White helmeted terrorists.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-father-of-omran-the-iconic-aleppo-boy-says-media-lied-about-his-son/5594205
And the claims of Assad using chemical weapons.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/assessment-of-white-house-intelligence-report-about-nerve-agent-attack-in-khan-shaykhun-syria/5584867
Guardian your assisting the destruction of Syria and Libya is directly creating conditions for terrorism in the UK. Stop now.

mariannewildart
mariannewildart
Apr 8, 2017 6:08 PM

Reblogged this on Radiation Free Lakeland.

michaelk
michaelk
Apr 8, 2017 5:05 PM

For me it’s rather sad, as i grew up reading the Guardian. Now it’s the Gargoyle for me I’m afraid. How times have changed. Now virtually all dissenting voices have been removed and one reads better analysis in the Mail and the Spectator. There’s more public criticism from the political right than the left these days. Seemingly because the liberal left have accepted the idea that our imperialism isn’t really old-fashioned imperialism anymore, but, instead, a noble crusade for freedom, democracy and human rights! This is an amazing and profound change I still can’t get my head around.
It’s worth remembering that the European elite didn’t enter WW1 knowing or imagining that it would mean the virtual destruction of Europe and the end of several powerful empires bringing revolutions chaos and ultimately the even larger carnage and madness of WW2 in its wake. Now we stand once more on the edge of the precipice of world war and nothing much has really changed as we blindly step over the edge once more, one, final, time.

mohandeer
mohandeer
Apr 8, 2017 3:52 PM

Reblogged this on wgrovedotnet and commented:
Using the words “responsible journalism” in relation to “The Guardian” is rather like using a double negative in one’s syntax or an oxymoron with the emphasis on absurdness and dishonesty.

Seraskier
Seraskier
Apr 8, 2017 5:54 PM
Reply to  mohandeer

True, indeed, Mohandeer. Alhough criticising journalistic standards at the Grauniad is rather like shooting fish in a barrel 🙁

Seraskier
Seraskier
Apr 8, 2017 3:40 PM

The poor wee Graunies are now left in yet another moral dilemma!!!
To support the evil Tory tosser Bozo Johnson in his boycott of Moscow…
…. or to support the hated Putin in his face-off with T-Rex Tillerson and Bozo???
Today’s the Sabbath, so we’ll only get the real Graun hardliners out tomorrow in The Observer!! :-))))) Stand by for a broadside of piffle from Nicko Cohen, Jonathan Friedland, and the Usual Suspects!

Brutally Remastered
Brutally Remastered
Apr 8, 2017 5:45 PM
Reply to  Seraskier

Yes, quite right. Freedland and Cohen, those two duplicitous, tribal, clever-clogs. Nauseating.

Yonatan
Yonatan
Apr 9, 2017 2:02 PM

Clever-clogs? Only in the extensive imaginations of their own egos.

Brutally Remastered
Brutally Remastered
Jun 28, 2017 8:34 AM
Reply to  Yonatan

Yes, well it was meant as old-school contempt.

windjammer
windjammer
Apr 10, 2017 3:14 AM
Reply to  Seraskier

So many bozos in high places now!

physicsandmathsrevision
physicsandmathsrevision
Apr 8, 2017 2:55 PM

To be fair to Borger he has attacked AIPAC and the Jewish Lobby in general over their undue influence on US policy and lawmakers.
However, broadly speaking, it is impossible not to notice that the entire western mainstream media always APPLAUDS AS ONE anything that is pleasing to Zionist/Neocon interests.
All these wars that destabilise countries surrounding Israel are GOOD.
The solution to unpayable debt is always more debt.
The solution to the heartbreaking (stop grinning you White Helmeted fiends you) sight of dead babies is always more dead babies.
The deep public loathing that fuelled the Brexit and Trump phenomena will be greatly amplified when (or, rather, if) Trump turns out to be the thing he appears to be …. another traitor to his electorate.
We must pray, keep faith. stay in God’s good grace and do what we can. The script that is now running might be leading to all kinds of catastrophes but enough of humanity’s eyes are now opened to ensure that this story can only end one way. The controlling elite are becoming desperate. They are losing the great and most real war. The war for our minds. Ultimately they must lose and what is best in humanity will win.
As evidence, look to the old Soviet Union and modern Russia. There’s still plenty wrong with it but this is a wise people who have learnt the difference between the words of their leaders and their real intentions. Souls, once hijacked and placed in submission to a diabolical ideology, have made themselves free.
if we continue to work towards it, liberation awaits.

mog
mog
Apr 8, 2017 2:43 PM

I am convinced that those witless headline writers (for that is all that they are) have no idea what they are doing. They are naive priveledged arrogant and morally under-developed, but I don’t think they are psychos.
Though someone, somewhere at the Guardian (management) surely is certifiably insane.

bevin
bevin
Apr 8, 2017 3:50 PM
Reply to  mog

They are not just ‘headline writers’ these are the messages selected by the News Desk, which is where, at every major daily in the NATO world the key figure is an agent of the security services. The Guardian is in the unusual position of having both MI6 and CIA agents taking these decisions for it, because it is now as much a North American as a British publication.
This means, to reduce matters to their crassest level, that nobody should feel tempted to give the paper any money: they have been bought. And paid for. Out of the taxes.

Chris Rogers
Chris Rogers
Apr 8, 2017 4:06 PM
Reply to  bevin

Bevin Sir,
However, it is disgraceful that when you enter on to the website of The Guardian to see it morally bankrupt itself day after day one is assaulted by that BEGGING NOTE asking to donate money for their allegedly wonderful journalism, well propaganda would be a more honest note. Indeed, its readership, or those it allows to Comment BLT, and of course only on certain articles, mostly anti-Left, one but cannot note how rightwing and rabid its ‘new’ readership actually is. I remember in the 80s when the paper sold more than 400,000 copies daily, that the Grauniad was the paper of the Liberals and soft left, it was in council offices, schools, colleges and universities – some wore it as a badge of honour as it attacked Thatcher, now it attacks constantly a humble man Leading a divided labour Party, its venom and warmongering stance a disgrace, as are most who now contribute to its pages – the sooner its put out of its misery or merges with the Daily Mail the better.

mog
mog
Apr 8, 2017 7:50 PM
Reply to  bevin

What I meant by the headline comment was that the work-a-day hack is something like a production line worker, merely re-wording PR and sticking a headline on it.
The psychos – in my opinion are the content creators, the ‘information warriors’, the psywar experts, the editors and managers of news.
Those and the strategic planners who give them their briefs.
The Guardian is, to me, the most sinister news organisation operating in the UK, and like you, I stopped relying on it as a source of news some years ago.

Seraskier
Seraskier
Apr 8, 2017 5:58 PM
Reply to  mog

Oh no, they’re not psychos. They know which side their bread is buttered. Rather like the nasty little scrote Daniel Boffey – formerly a hatchet-man at the Mail On Sunday, now turned neocon henchman for The Observer.