Robert Fisk, a Middle East correspondent for The Independent, wrote an article in response to the US’s recent recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan. The original headline of the article was “By accepting Israeli control of the Golan Heights, Trump has accepted that Israel controls America.”
.@Independent Did your editors truly approve this headline? This is a classic antisemitic trope https://t.co/YjugI5qqUe
— UK Media Watch (@UKMediaWatch) March 26, 2019
He also claimed that Israel has “annexed America.”The media watch group contacted the editors who later changed the headline, however, Media Watch still believes the content is antisemitic.“In our nine years of monitoring the British media, we have rarely come across an article with such an explicit use of antisemitic tropes,” said Adam Levick, Managing Editor of CAMERA’s UK Media Watch.
The group was careful to ask its supporters to call Fisk’s language antisemitic and not him or The Independent.
The NGO called out Fisk for bringing up age-old antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty and the conspiracy that Jews control the world and or media.
“Such stereotypes and bigotry should have no place in The Independent,” the press release from Media Watch wrote.
Fisk wrote in his piece, “It [America] doesn’t need new Arab-origin legislators, with their dodgy, unpleasantly revealing remarks and their sloppy grasp of history, to understand that Americans will not and dare not complain about the dual loyalties of their countrymen and countrywomen,” complaining about what he calls the “utterly false arguments about antisemitism.”
Fisks main argument is that the media and the US are “groveling, cowardly, craven obeisance to Israel,” as not to be called out for antisemitism. The new headline is "US grovels to Israel the same way 'supporters' fawned on Saddam," and was published on March 26th, 2019.