David Marsh

Just in: IPSO has refused to investigate the Telegraph cartoon of Mothin Ali, the Green Party's Muslim deputy leader, grinning over a knife and fork at the severed head of Zack Polanski, its Jewish leader, who is drawn with a hooked nose. Nearly 1,200 of you complained. IPSO's reason: the cartoon is about two individuals, so only Mothin and Zack can complain. How racist the drawing is doesn't come into it. IPSO did not have to do this, and it has done the opposite before. IPSO's rules let it take up a complaint from people other than the person written about, when the breach is significant, and there is a substantial public interest in looking at it. In July 2023 it used that power. It ruled that Jeremy Clarkson's Sun column about the Duchess of Sussex was sexist, after complaints from two women's charities, the Fawcett Society and the WILDE Foundation. The Duchess did not complain. The Telegraph's editor, Chris Evans, chairs the committee that writes the Editors' Code, which is the rulebook IPSO enforces. The Telegraph is still selling prints of the cartoon today. IPSO's rule says it may take up a complaint like this, not that it must. So this was a choice. Picture a school. One boy draws two classmates, a Muslim boy and a Jewish boy. He gives the Jewish boy a hooked nose and puts his head on a plate, and draws the Muslim boy about to eat it. He pins the picture to the noticeboard and sells copies at the gate. A thousand pupils go to the head teacher. She tells them she can only act if the two boys in the picture come to her themselves. So the picture stays on the board, and every Muslim and Jewish child in the school walks past it each morning. The boy who drew it learns he can do it again. And the rulebook the head teacher is reading from was written by a committee his dad chairs. Nobody would say that head teacher is protecting the children. She is protecting the boy who drew it. That is what IPSO has done. It says it regulates the Telegraph, and it has just told nearly 1,200 people that a racist cartoon in a paper it regulates is not its business unless the two men drawn in it come and ask.

The past 20 days have marked one of the most monolithic pushes by British media to vilify the Zionism is Racism Green Party motion. Imbalanced coverage would be an understatement. The papers wrote 447 articles on the Greens' Zionism vote. Israel, pro-Israel groups and the Chief Rabbi got 12,133 words. Palestinians got 3,173. Any institution that parades as a "news outlet" can no longer be taken seriously if it covers this motion without also covering the people, Palestinians, who have endured, suffered and been oppressed the most by the ideology in action. What the figures show: • Israel's government alone got 3,904 words. More than every Palestinian put together. • 2,422 of the 3,173 Palestinian words came in stories tying Lubna Speitan, the Palestinian who proposed the motion, to al-Qaeda. • Apart from Lubna, two Palestinians were quoted across 436 articles, for 76 words between them. Nobody in Gaza, the occupied West Bank or Lebanon was quoted at all. • Lubna told the Telegraph that 56 members of her family had been killed in Gaza. One article mentioned it: the Telegraph's own al-Qaeda story, in paragraph 44 of 51. • Lubna has received death and rape threats since the vote. Al Jazeera reported it. None of the 447 British articles did. • 43 articles said, in the paper's own voice, that the motion meant the destruction or abolition of Israel. The motion calls for one state with "equal rights for all". • 36 headlines said antisemitism. Not one of 447 said genocide. • 304 of the 436 articles we read in full never mentioned the genocide at all. • 0 of 89 comment pieces backed the motion. • The Daily Mail ran 38 articles on the motion, and in that time, just 2 on Israel's ongoing attacks across Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Full report: newscord.org/editorials/zion…