Love of the Land: Some facts appear to be more sacred than others at the Guardian

Some facts appear to be more sacred than others at the Guardian

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
09 October 09

Here is a little quiz. The Guardian has posted up a list here of everyone who has won the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception.

Q: Which three names are omitted from the Guardian list ( even though they do appear on theNobelprize.org list which the Guardian has purportedly reproduced)?***

A: Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

And what is the common link between these three names? Precisely.

It appears someone at the Guardian actually went to the effort of removing the names of the three Israeli statesmen who won the prize. Facts are sacred?

Here’s a further curiosity. If you look at the years 1978 and 1994, although the Guardian has air-brushed out the names of Begin,Peres and Rabin it has apparently added in the name of their country, Israel, which is given in a neighbouring column – thus managing to suggest that Sadat and Arafat represented Israel along with Egypt and ‘Palestine’ in winning the prize in those years. So what happend? Did the hand typing in the name of the country accidentally hit the keys three times so that the names that went with it were coincidentally all deleted?

Tsk – standards of censorship on Planet Bigotry are clearly slipping.

***Update, 1650: Lo and behold, the three Israeli names have now been added to the Guardian list.

Love of the Land: Some facts appear to be more sacred than others at the Guardian