Right after October 7, 2023, Economist Magazine's Defense Editor Shashank Joshi posted X messages claiming that Hamas beheaded babies during the terrorist attack on Israelis. He has now deleted his posts. Instead of apologizing for joining the baseless Israeli propaganda campaign, Joshi has blamed it on "the fog of war", knowing fully well that this falsehood was used by the Israeli government to justify the Gaza genocide that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children. Here's what Joshi has now posted: "Some of these reports have turned out to be untrue, and yes, I was wrong to be as confident in what was reported as first-hand evidence as I was, particularly given the fog of war in those initial post Oct 7th days".
An X user Tom London dismissed Joshi's excuses as follows: . @shashj @TheEconomist
@zannymb when I heard the story that Hamas was said to have beheaded 40 babies I thought
1. This makes no sense at all. Where is the evidence?
2. This sounds like a fabrication to justify GENOCIDE
The Economist printing this is a journalistic crime of the gravest importance
 |
| Economist Magazine Cover Portraying Israel as Victim |
Joshi's bias extends beyond the Middle East. Contrary to what most western reports, including the US Congressional report, concluded, Joshi claimed that India won a "military victory" over Pakistan in the 2025 clash that India dubbed "Operation Sindoor". He did concede, however, that Pakistan won a "diplomatic victory".
While the Joshi excuses and his denunciations are going viral, Tucker Carlson's podcast with Zanny Minton Beddoes, Joshi's boss at the Economist, has attracted attention in social media where she is challenged to explain the meaning of "Does Israel have a right to exist?", a well-known Israeli government's talking point to justify Israel's aggression against Palestinians and other nations in the Middle East. Here's the full exchange between the two on this subject:
MINTON BEDDOES: You are critical of the government of Israel. Do you believe in Israel’s right to exist? Would you consider yourself a Zionist in that narrow definition?
CARLSON: What does that mean, a right to exist?
MINTON BEDDOES: The existence of the political state of Israel.
CARLSON: But it has a right. What does that mean?
MINTON BEDDOES: That you think it should continue in its existence as a state right now. So you do not agree with Iran, for example.
CARLSON: Let me just ask, since you asked me the question, it’s fair for me to get you to define the term so I can answer it. You’ve asked two questions. The first was, do you believe Israel is a right to exist? And the second question was, do you believe Israel should continue to go on as a nation-state? And those are very different questions. So, I often hear the phrase–
MINTON BEDDOES: Having been created as a political entity in 1948–
CARLSON: Does it have a right to exist? Is that what you’re asking?
MINTON BEDDOES: I don’t want to get hung up on the right to– should it continue to exist. That’s what, that’s how I define narrowly–
CARLSON: Because the phrase you used was devised by the Israeli government, of course. Does it have a right to exist? And so my question to you would be, what does that mean?
MINTON BEDDOES: Why don’t you answer my question? It’s a very simple question.
CARLSON: I don’t know what your question is. Are you asking, does it have the right to exist or do I want it to exist? Do I seek its destruction?
MINTON BEDDOES: Fine. Answer it that way.
CARLSON: Well, of course I don’t seek its destruction. I’ve already said, as you know, because I said it to you, I don’t want Israel to be destroyed or have to use nuclear weapons.
Notwithstanding the Zionist propapaganda about the “right to exist” vis-à-vis Israel, it is not an international legal concept. Under international law, no state has a right to exist. On the other hand, the right of self-determination, which is the idea that all peoples have a right to determine their own fate by forming their own political entities, is a fundamental principle of international law. Israel is denying that basic right to the Palestinian people living under its military occupation.
British historian William Dalrymple has succinctly summed up The Economist magazine's troubles in his recent X post saying:
@TheEconomist has utterly destroyed its reputation with its deeply racist and profoundly bigoted coverage of the mass-murder of the people of Gaza. For six months we have seen issue after issue of scandalously one sided-coverage which has has made it complicit in the continued enslavement of the Palestinian people, the on-going seizure of their land, the systematic abuse of their human rights and the industrial slaughter of their innocent civilians in both Gaza and the West Bank. Shame on its senior editorial staff responsible for the travesty of inhumanity and bias. @zannymb
The Economist magazine is widely seen by critics as a tool of western imperialism. It has faced recent denunciation for a 2023 article labeling Latin American workers "unproductive" and "useless". During the Southern India famine of 1876-78, The Economist condemned British officials who imported food to feed starving people. The publication argued that providing such aid gave Indians the impression that "it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive".
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
South Asia Investor Review
Modi and Netanyahu: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Israel's Gaza Attack is Criminal, Not Defensive
Congressman Massie Exposes Israel Lobby's Bullying Tactics
American College Campuses Rise Up Against Israel's Genocidal War on Gaza
Israeli Settler Colonialism
Islamophobia Driving US Policy in the Middle East and South Asia?
Israeli Scholars Offer Insights into Zionist Psyche
Total, Extended Lockdown in Indian Occupied Kashmir
What is India Hiding From the UN Human Rights Team?
Indian JNU Professor on Illegal Indian Occupation of Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland
Riaz Haq Youtube Channel
PakAlumni: Pakistani Alumni Social Network
6 comments:
Disappointed & appalled at the Economist coverage of the Palestinian Genocide. I had thought the magazine pro-Palestinian before 2024 and am totally disillusioned
Why name them tirelessly one by one. In Germany, most popular newspapers fare almost as good as IDF's X posts. None of them have any journalistic integrity or whatsoever. Ironically, it barely makes any difference whether they are left (Spiegel) or right (BiLD). They are all business entities with their own agendas, understand that and move on.
With Germans it might be because of their guilt.
for a naive observer, that is so..but you see that NYT, Economist etc. all get poor ratings. Ultimately, they (legacy western media) are agenda driven and their claim of superiority over press from "third world" should have never been taken at face value.
What is promising is the emergence of citizen's journalism and off beat neo media which has gained some traction during gaza genocide.
Mukul Kesavan
@mukulkesavan
We shouldn’t be surprised that when the editor-in-chief of The Economist was called out on Gaza by a far-Right conspiracist, notorious for flirting with anti-Semites, it was Carlson who emerged as the even-handed liberal while Beddoes was reduced to Israel’s stooge.
https://x.com/mukulkesavan/status/2038096091066106264?s=20
---------------
'The Economist' Israel bias | Grotesque priorities: The Economist is called out on Gaza by a far-Right voice - Telegraph India
By Mukul Kęsavan
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/grotesque-priorities-the-economist-is-called-out-on-gaza-by-a-far-right-voice-prnt/cid/2153643
Occasionally you know there’s something the matter with an argument when it sounds wrong, not because you have a fully formed rebuttal in your head. Listening to the editor-in-chief of The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, question Tucker Carlson, the far-Right American podcaster and influencer, about his views on Israel, I had that feeling. Beddoes asked Carlson, “Do you believe in Israel’s right to exist?” She then followed it up with a curious question: if Carlson did believe in Israel’s right to exist as a political entity, did that not make him a Zionist?
It was an interesting rhetorical manoeuvre. I can’t think of another country that would inspire this kind of question. For instance, if Tucker Carlson accepted the reality of India as a state, would Beddoes argue that this made Carlson, by definition, an Indian nationalist? I don’t think so. This bid to naturalise Zionism, to fudge an acknowledgment of Israel’s existence into support for the messianic Jewish nationalism that is Israel’s ideology, is a way of turning Zionism into consensual common sense.
This ideological one-two didn’t work with Carlson who recognised, as does everyone but Israel’s most fanatical supporters, that both questions were loaded. If to acknowledge Israel’s existence is to be a Zionist, then an anti-Zionist is someone who wills the destruction of the Jewish state and the Jews who live there. This makes anti-Zionism indistinguishable from anti-Semitism which was, of course, the whole point of Beddoes’ questions.
An American critic, Lee Siegel, criticised Carlson for making the right to exist seem like Israeli hasbara because a nation’s right to exist has respectable antecedents in Thomas Paine’s and Ernest Renan’s writings on the subject, and in Vladimir Lenin’s endorsement of the related right to self-determination. But as Siegel himself writes in his New Statesman article, the “right to exist” applies only to a “justly governed nation”. Israel, actually-existing-Israel, is a violent, apartheid state where a minority of Palestinians are second-class citizens and a majority are helots whose lives, property and human rights are forfeit to a violent settler state.
Historically, Israel is unique amongst nations in that its existence was and is premised on the continuous displacement and ethnic cleansing of the people who occupy the land that it covets and claims as its own. Historically, Israel’s right to exist was established through the violent denial of Palestine’s right to exist.
There was a time when the question, does a Palestinian state have the right to exist, had some small traction. Now, Israel has abandoned the pretence of gesturing at a Palestinian Bantustan in the distant future. Every Jewish political party in Israel rejects the ‘two-state solution’ out of hand. The West Bank, the putative home of the Palestinian state, is being sliced and diced and occupied by homicidal supremacist settlers who kill, displace and sexually assault Palestinians with near-perfect impunity.
Last month, the United States of America’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said that it would be fine if Israel “helped itself” to all the land between the Euphrates
and the Nile. The US government issued a half-hearted clarification but under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Israel’s irredentist drive to violently expand into the lands of neighbouring nations has been winked at and encouraged.
'The Economist' Israel bias | Grotesque priorities: The Economist is called out on Gaza by a far-Right voice - Telegraph India
By Mukul Kęsavan
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/grotesque-priorities-the-economist-is-called-out-on-gaza-by-a-far-right-voice-prnt/cid/2153643
Beddoes could have asked, do Israel’s neighbours have a right to resist Israel’s determination to annex large chunks of their territory? Not content with the Golan Heights, Israel recently annexed a ‘buffer zone’ in Syria. In the course of its ongoing invasion of Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces has now announced that it plans to occupy a large ‘buffer zone’ in southern Lebanon. Israel has ordered the evacuation of large parts of Beirut as a preliminary to their flattening, as in Gaza. It is simultaneously bombing Tehran. It is in this context, as Israel rampages around the Middle East and West Asia like a juggernaut licensed to slaughter civilians, that the editor of England’s oldest ‘liberal’ paper, The Economist, leads with the question: “Do you think Israel has the right to exist?”
Grotesque as Beddoes’ priorities are, they should surprise no one who followed The Economist’s reporting and editorialising through the destruction of Gaza. In a strong field, it outdid the West’s mainstream news organisations in its enthusiasm for Israel’s cruelty. Early in the war, its journalists spread inflammatory canards about Israeli infants decapitated by Hamas, confidently asserted that the IDF couldn’t be responsible for bombing hospitals, and insisted that the IDF was incapable of targeting civilians. The Economist helpfully suggested that Gazan civilians could be “temporarily” parked in Egypt’s Sinai to allow Israel to kill off Hamas undistracted. Its editors insisted throughout the war that the Hamas-run health ministry’s figures for deaths in Gaza were unreliable and inflated only to acknowledge at the end of it that the health ministry had, if anything, undercounted the horrific toll.
Even at the tail-end of the genocide, after the IDF had killed seventy thousand and more Palestinians, The Economist persistently argued against a ceasefire because Israel’s righteous war couldn’t end till Hamas was destroyed. When Carlson asked Beddoes what she thought of Gaza, she replied that the war was a perfectly reasonable response to the horrors of October 7 that subsequently turned into a disaster. Really? Why then was her magazine arguing against a ceasefire when the scale of the ‘disaster’ had become obvious?
Carlson caught Beddoes out when she began by saying that the war was a disaster for Israel before mentioning the Palestinian dead. It was more than a gotcha; for Beddoes, as for most of the West’s mainstream media, the Palestinians are always an afterthought, a footnote to Israel’s well-being, its right to exist.
Does Beddoes think that Palestine has a right to exist? When the British government announced that it was going to formally recognise a Palestinian state, The Economist was wholly against it. The Economist is vaguely in favour of the two-state solution that Israel has categorically rejected. Beddoes and the magazine she edits find numberless ways of justifying Israel’s wars, its ethnic cleansing, its mass killing of civilians, but they will deny Palestinians the consolation of symbolic recognition. In this The Economist is wholly representative of the derangement that allows the West to go on about the rules-based order while facilitating genocide.
After Gaza, it’s impossible for liberal pundits to talk out of both sides of their mouths at once. So we shouldn’t be surprised that when the editor-in-chief of The Economist was called out on Gaza by a far-Right conspiracist, notorious for flirting with anti-Semites, it was Carlson who emerged as the even-handed liberal while Beddoes was reduced to Israel’s stooge.
Post a Comment