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Just Journalism Newsletter   20 July 2010  VIEWPOINT:'White' Israel and its migrant workers By Carmel Gould The picture painted by Mya Guarnieri in her Guardian Comment is free article, 'Children are just Israel's latest victims' is stark. Readers unfortunate enough not to know better would doubtless reach two false conclusions: first, that Israel treats its migrant worker population exceptionally badly; and second, - and perhaps the most demonstrably untrue - that Israel is a 'white' country, which does not like non-white people. The trigger for these accusations is a decision by Israel in 2009 to deport back to their countries of origin a group of illegal migrant workers, including up to 1,200 children who were born in Israel. The story's headline, standfirst and opening paragraph together implied that the children were to be sent away alone but the second paragraph actually admitted that the minors were in fact due to be sent back 'along with their families'. Guarnieri's central complaint is that the children were born in Israel and that sending them to their parents' countries of origin would be an act of 'inhumanity' completely out of step with civilised behaviour. This provides the context for her accusation that the policy is born of a racist country. But deporting migrant children controversially is by no means unique to Israel.The European Union has gone out of its way to make legal its planned deportation of thousands of lone Afghan asylum-seeking minors, including by committing to build 'reception centres' in war-torn Afghanistan 'that can provide care for minors when the family cannot be found'. The Guardian itself reported these measures last month when the UK announced that it would be participating in the scheme, although the issue of race was not mentioned. Little ought need to be said about the dire predicament of migrant workers in the wider Middle East. In Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. they are widely documented to be treated more as slaves, not to mention the notorious Lebanon, where, as Human Rights Watch reported last year, Asian and African workers are only allowed to enter private beaches when accompanied by their employers and are usually banned from the swimming pools because "people are not used to the sight of workers swimming." To continue reading, click here. Spies, Passports, and The Guardian By Michael Weiss, published in The Weekly Standard Read coverage of this article in the New York Republic & The Atlantic   When Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated in Dubai last January, and his cause of death later ascribed to foul play, it didn't take long before the British press found itself the beneficiary of a troika of good copy. First, al-Mabhouh's end had been delivered by the injection of a muscle relaxant and a suffocating pillow - so clearly the result of a "wet job" performed by well-trained agents of a foreign intelligence service. Second, that service was almost certainly the Israeli Mossad. Third, the movements of the dozen or so disguised suspects throughout the corridors of the murder scene - Dubai's posh Al Bustan Rotana Hotel - were captured on closed circuit television, which inspires pride and paranoia in equal measure in Londoners who are typically invigilated on this form of technology whenever they venture outside their own homes. International condemnation of Israel's alleged action came swiftly, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom, especially after it was discovered that twelve of the assassins had used forged British passports to enter and leave Dubai. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said at the time, "The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care. A British passport is an important part of being British." Brown's foreign secretary David Miliband went a step further on March 23, calling the forgery "intolerable" in an umbrageous speech before parliament. He chose not to blame Israel explicitly for al-Mabhouh's murder, but he did state that Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency had concluded that the country must have been behind the passport forgeries. (Miliband's strongest evidence being the fact that all of the identities counterfeited were of people who hold dual citizenship in the UK and Israel). Milliband then made the decision to expel the Mossad chief resident in London. More telling than the British government's muscular response was that of the correct-thinking British media, best exemplified by The Guardian. On March 24, the newspaper's editorial on the affair carried the ominous title, "Israel and Britain: The rule of law," and described Israel as "an arrogant nation that has overreached itself" -- not just in terms of identity theft, but also land theft. Indeed, it actually devoted more than half of its column to arraigning Israel for rejecting Washington's instructions on settlement build-up in East Jerusalem and refusing to even consider that territory as the site of a future Palestinian capital. If this seemed a non sequitur, then one clearly hadn't grasped a fundamental principle of The Guardian's moral outrage: So incensed was it by an allied nation's covert toying with sensitive British documents that it felt obliged to bring up other instances of Israel's misbehavior in recent months. "Mr Netanyahu has to face the consequences of an ideological stand over East Jerusalem which precludes any other. Here, as in the rest of the West Bank, where the number of Jewish settlers has more than doubled since the Oslo peace accords were signed in 1993, Israel is pre-empting the shape of the final agreement by creating facts on the ground. No deal with the Palestinians can be made in these conditions," The Guardian editorialized. To continue reading, click here. For more information about Just Journalism, or to contact us, please visit www.justjournalism.com