‘As a Jew’: Sky News Falls for Professional Anti-Israel Activist
Illustrative: Antisemitic vandalism in London’s Golders Green neighborhood, as pro-Palestinian demonstrators assemble in the British capital. Photo: Social media images
Holding a placard specifically identifying herself as a Jew supporting the Palestinians, this protester stood out amongst the massive crowd of people who joined a “pro-Palestinian” demonstration in the heart of London on Saturday.
There’s nothing the media likes more than finding the minority of Jews who will castigate Israel, and Sky News correspondent Adele Robinson couldn’t help herself.
“You’re a Jewish lady who has come down from Hastings,” Robinson said, introducing Katy Colley on live TV.
“What we are seeing today is undoubtedly a genocide in Gaza,” said Colley, followed by accusations against Israel of “collective punishment,” “war crimes” and the charge that “the root of this violence is occupation.”
She referred to Israel as a “settler colonial state imposing apartheid and oppression on an indigenous people” in an interview that was later repackaged for the Sky News website.
But Katy Colley is hardly representative of Jewish opinion in the UK, where some 71% of the Jewish community have family living in Israel and almost 90% have visited the country at least once according to a recent poll.
Another poll published in 2015 found that Israel plays a major role for British Jews, with 93% saying the Jewish state plays a “central,” “important” or “some” role in their Jewish identity, and 90% supporting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
While Colley may have succeeded in getting on live television by virtue of self-identifying as a Jew, either she failed to tell the Sky News correspondent the truth, or it was not deemed important enough to mention Colley’s other background.
Colley isn’t just “a Jewish lady” from Hastings in the south of England. She also happens to be the chairperson of her local branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign — an organization that is a leader and chief proponent of the most virulent anti-Israel campaigns in the UK, which frequently invoke the “apartheid” libel.
Sky News had a duty to inform viewers that their interviewee held a public position relevant to the subject on which she was speaking. Colley wasn’t simply a concerned member of the public plucked out of the crowd.
Instead, Colley was interviewed “as a Jew” instead of a dedicated activist on behalf of a viciously anti-Israel organization.
Sky News owes its viewers an explanation for both a lack of transparency and for why it deemed someone who represents such a tiny fringe of the UK Jewish community to be worthy of this amount of attention.
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