Will El País Stop Its "Spanish Inquisition"?

Masha Gabriel

§  The paper's opinion section has grown increasingly slanted, with more and more pieces penned by members of blatantly anti-Israel organizations, falsely presented as neutral observers of the conflict.

§  In spite of numerous pleas to El País, it is only on rare occasions that it has issued corrections to its repeated factual errors and lack of historical context. This indicates that it is not oversight at work, but rather a purposeful effort to defame and delegitimize the Jewish state -- in other words, anti-Semitism.

Over the past year, Spain's flagship newspaper, El País, has reemerged as the anti-Israel publication that it used to be. Until 2009, when it changed its approach to coverage of the Middle East, El País was so openly hostile to the Jewish state that 14 members of the U.S. Congress sent a letter to then-Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to express concern over the systematic publication of "articles and cartoons conveying crude anti-Semitic canards and stereotypes" in the pages of El País.

That year, the paper began to present a more balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even ceased the practice of referring to Tel Aviv -- rather than Jerusalem -- as the Israeli capital. It continued in this vein for the next seven years.

In 2016, however, El País reverted to its old ways, as the following three examples illustrate:

§  Leila Khaled, a member of the terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – notorious for taking part in the August 29, 1969 hijacking of TWA Flight 840 on its way from Rome to Tel Aviv, and in the September 6, 1970 attempted hijacking of El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York – was described by El País as someone who came from "a traumatic life experience: the occupation, which, when she was a child in 1948 [the establishment of the state of Israel], expelled her and her family from Haifa," along with "millions of refugees who were forced to leave their homes."

§  Ismail Haniyeh, a senior official of Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, was referred to by El País as "moderate" and "pragmatic," while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was described by the paper as the leader of a "radical" and "extremist" government.

§  It also claimed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "derives from the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank" and "subsequent blockade of the Gaza Strip," and that since the Six-Day War in 1967, "Israel hasn't stopped colonizing."

Ismail Haniyeh, a senior official of Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, was referred to by El País as "moderate" and "pragmatic," while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was described by the paper as the leader of a "radical" and "extremist" government.

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