Charlie Wolf

Forget the timing - this was simply amateurish reporting

Thursday 2nd 2012f February 2012

The Guardian newspaper has expressed "regret" at the timing of an article questioning government funding for security for Jewish schools. The hit piece against Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, ran on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Timing aside, if the Guardian was really about issues of fair play and equality in this country, why has it never questioned the fact that one group of people has to pay extra to protect their children at school - simply because they are Jewish? If the Guardian was truly for fair play, it would bring up the fact that in this free and democratic country, Jews must spend extra to protect themselves in worship and the education of their children.

Instead of a hit piece on Gove at the Jewish community's expense, why not a Guardian feature on the CST (Community Security Trust) on Holocaust Memorial Day to highlight the fact that antisemitism, even 70 years after the Holocaust, is still a threat to the Jewish community.

No other community is as resourceful. No other has an institution like the CST. No other single group needs one. My wife and I have had to pay extra every term since our son first started nursery school - a surcharge of about £150 per term. In addition, we are asked to take part in rotas to back up the security guard, both at the start and end of the day (although at the existing site there is not presently a rota). Should Israel be in the news (and I am not Israeli), the security is doubled.

It is a sign of the times, because of the threat of terrorist attack, that security has been tightened at all schools. But Jewish schools - which in addition to security guards have to invest in gates, CCTV and other measures - have to secure themselves because of their religion. Jewish parents cannot send their children to school in peace.

Let's face it. Holocaust Memorial Day is a day well worn and trivialised by the left-wing press and liberals in general. It's an opportunity to drag up moral relativistic comparisons between the Holocaust and perceived injustices to the Palestinians. Fatuous, silly and baseless comparisons between Gaza (home to two luxury shopping malls, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and five-star restaurants) and the Nazi death camps (home to human experimentation, work camps and gas chambers). The comparisons are about as disgusting as one can get and reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal mindset.

To be fair to the Guardian, based on past stories, this story was pretty mild - more a poke at the Education Secretary than the Jewish community. But it is not the timing that should concern us. This is another example, by papers like the Guardian and the Independent, who let bias colour and lead their news reporting. If you don't like Mr Gove, keep it in the comments section.

Far worse, the story was another example of rank amateurish reporting. Bias and sloppy journalism took over from the kind of high-calibre journalism the Guardian is capable of when not intellectually involved in the story.

The article is wrong and misleading - although the paper denies this. The piece does not give all the facts or context to the story. This could have all been cleared up with a simple phone call - a reporter's duty to gather all the facts. The impression the newspaper gives is that Gove, an advisor to the CST, was helping out his friends with a £2million bung. But a simple call to the CST would have told the Guardian that the money wasn't going to the CST at all, but to Jewish schools - distributed by the CST. The CST also claims the story was misleading because it implied the government was paying the charity to handle security at schools. School security is handled individually, each school hiring its own private firm. The CST provides training and coordination but does not provide security to schools.

According to the CST: "The project actually costs CST money, the exact opposite of the impression given by the Guardian. If the Guardian had contacted the CST for comment before running the story, we could have explained this to them."

If the Guardian cannot get a story this simple right, how can it report on the complexities of the Middle East with any competence? Its reporting on Israel is skewed and coloured by a pathetic left-wing anti-Zionist bias. And it shows.