The Telegraph Butchers The Truth

By Melanie Phillips


In the Telegraph today, a poisonous little paragraph was slipped into its terror attack coverage. Its Middle East correspondent Tim Butcher, whose reporting of Israel is unfailingly one-sided (guess which side) — and who, as I reported here, once described a Palestinian on Palestinian atrocity as ‘Old Testament-style brutality’ — had this to say about the father of the Jordanian terror suspect being held by the British police:

Mr Asha, who comes from the Jordanian population of Palestinians made refugees by the creation of Israel, worked for 20 years as an Arabic language teacher in Saudi Arabia. The Asha family originally come from
Hebron, a town in the West Bank, part of the territory occupied by Israel.

But when Israel was formed in 1948, Hebron was not part of it, just as it is not part of Israel today. It lay outside Israel’s borders in the no-man’s land that was thereafter illegally occupied by Jordan until 1967, when the Israelis took and held the West Bank after the Six-Day War. So if the Asha family came from Hebron, they could not have been ‘made refugees by the creation of Israel’ because their home was outside Israel. They then seem to have moved to Jordan proper. So why does the Telegraph publish such a gratuitous lie?