Guardian: No Israeli Nobel Peace Prize Winners – ever!
British broadsheet The Guardian has not been known of late as a friend of Israel, but their latest attempt to remove from the history books Israeli achievements is disgusting.
In a piece entitled Nobel peace prize winners list: how does Barack Obama compare? the Guardian removes from the list three recipients to the award, who happen to be Israeli (1978 Menachem Begin, 1994 Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin).
Below are the screen shots just in case they update their site.
The columns on the table are: Year, Winner 1, Shared Winner 2, Country 1, Country 2, Sex 1, Sex 2
The Guardian should be ashamed of themselves.
UPDATE 15.57 GMT
Just noticed that the Guardian has finally realised that Israelis have won the Peace prize.
Whether the initial exclusion was intentional or not I don’t know – but with their track record one can only speculate.
Good thing I have those original screen shots!
UPDATE 2 16.20 GMT
Simon Rogers from the Guardian is arguing over at Harry’s Place that this was a simple mistake:
The errors happened when we decided to put joint winners in two columns – which is why the country reference survived, but the name didn’t, ie you see “Israel” but not Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. When the table first went up this lunchtime, it also missed out John Raleigh Mott, The Quakers and the League of Red Cross Societies. We assumed all the errors were at the top but unfortunately they weren’t.
Here is my response:
Sorry, don’t buy it.
26 double entries seem to have been logged correctly, including the years directly before and after the Arafat/Rabin/Peres win.
How can you get it right so many times and wrong when Israelis are meant to be listed?
And here is the complete screen grab.
I have no doubt that it was a legitimate error, and as I stated elsewhere:
As an educated person, I didn’t have the need to look at a list on The Guardian to know that Begin, Rabin and Peres have all been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The bottom line is simple, people are far too paranoid these days.
Cheers, Martyn.
Note this additional point raised on the Guardian site comments.
Quote from BobbyTimbo
It is also interesting that the link in the article to download the data has a link that points to http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t428ng6efkWu-fCkABi4YgQ
In which, out of all the cells in the entire spreadsheet, only the cell D95 (a cell containing the name of a country) is in a smaller font than the rest. Care to guess which country? Why Israel of course – must be yet another coincidence. Is this document one uploaded to google docs by the Guardian? If so, after all this, why is Israel in a smaller font? If it is not a doc owned by the Guardian it means that this list was compiled independantly before Simon’s. If so, then Simon’s excuse that the error was introduced when the winners were split into 2 columns is implausible since this google list is exactly the same form, same headings, punctuation etc as SImon’s yet it doesn’t have the errors.
Further to my previous post,
Simon Rogers has shown in another post that he owns the Google spreadsheet. He has now updated it so that it no longer has Israel in a smaller font than any other country. He has done so but made no mention of doing so or explanation as to why Israel was in a smaller font than any other country to start with despite commenting on other changes he made to the spreadsheet.
I still have a copy of the original screensnap at
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_J8LSJP1YWRM/StEYAX2UOkI/AAAAAAAAAAM/A-vTdaLWE-M/s1600-h/nobel.JPG
Again it looks like someone was trying to make a subtle point about diminishing the importance of Israelis and Israel by placing Israel in a smaller font than every other country in the list. Add the likelihood of that to the omission of 3 Israeli PMs and it looks much more likely that a particular staff member was deliberately trying to make a point about diminishing Israel.
I have asked him the following on the Guardian blog:
Please explain why only Israel had the small font and why, after I highlighted it, you changed it without commenting on it.
The original screensnap is hosted at
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_J8LSJP1YWRM/StEYAX2UOkI/AAAAAAAAAAM/A-vTdaLWE-M/s1600-h/nobel.JPG
Steve
What concerns me more is the fact that Mr Rogers feels he can fob us off by claiming that JR Mott, Red Cross and the Quakers were also left off the list when my screen shot proves that not to be the case. Furthermore the fact that he has made a mention of getting Mr Annan’s country wrong as if to prove that mistakes were made, is, well just plain silly.
There is a difference between getting a country wrong and omitting three people from Israel.
Dov,
You are absolutely correct. The reason given doesn’t stack up. I think that some staffer with an anti Israel bias probably thought it would either be “funny” or a way of making a subtle point that the Israeli’s aren’t worthy. Taken together with the smaller font given to Israel in the spreadsheet, it sends the message that someone thinks that the Israeli contributions are less important than all the others.
If his excuse were valid and it was a technical glitch, how is it possible that in addition to the glitch of leaving out the 3 Israelis, the spreadsheet contains a smaller font for Israel. You have to actively change the font size for the single cell. He has now changed the font with no explanation as I guess he is hoping the evidence is now gone. I specifically snapped the page just like you did so that it can’t be denied later.
The fact that they had Israel in significantly smaller letters is perhaps more significant.
I doubt that it’s a coincidence that the only country with its peace prize winners omitted, is also the one they put in smaller letters.
I agree that the omission was intentional, but why didn’t he omit Israel from the “Country,2″ column?