A leading media watchdog forced a UK paper to correct its false headline about Israel’s Iron Dome system, which prevents Palestinian rockets from killing innocent civilians.
By United with Israel Staff
Since it was first deployed in 2011, Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system has saved countless lives when Palestinian terror groups indiscriminately fire rockets at innocent civilians.
Despite the clearly, and solely, defensive nature of Iron Dome, the UK’s Daily Express newspaper recently referred to it in a headline as a “lethal weapon.”
This outrageous misrepresentation of the technology did not go unnoticed by leading media watchdog group HonestReporting, which demanded the Daily Express correct the falsehood.
As HonestReporting’s Simon Plosker recently explained, “It’s important not to mischaracterize Iron Dome as a weapon. Doing so promotes the false narrative that Palestinian terrorists and Israel are, at times, involved in a tit-for-tat exchange of rockets.”
In reality, Palestinian terror groups in Gaza fire rockets at Israeli civilians in unprovoked attacks, which kill and maim Israelis. The Iron Dome system “saves Israeli lives by intercepting rockets before they can cause mass casualty events, and it saves Palestinian lives by reducing the necessity of IDF ground operations in densely populated civilian neighborhoods from where terrorists fire their rockets,” explained HonestReporting.
After the watchdog contacted the Daily Express, the paper changed the headline to correctly refer to the Iron Dome as a “defense system.”
HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based group that focuses on anti-Israel bias and antisemitism, accusations the media in the UK routinely faces and occasionally admits to.
This month, the publicly-funded BBC apologized for its “unacceptable” approach to anti-Israel bias, which included BBC Arabic slandering Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount as “foreigners” and “settlers.”
On Monday, British media regulator Ofcom slammed the BBC for its coverage of an antisemitic attack on Jewish teens in London in December 2021. The BBC’s report contained “significant editorial failings” with regard to accusations that the victims shouted “dirty Muslims” before they were attacked.
“The BBC’s reports claimed that an audio recording made during the incident included anti-Muslim slurs – which it later changed to the singular ‘slur’ – which came from inside the bus. Shortly afterwards, it received evidence which disputed this interpretation of the audio,” stated Ofcom.
“The BBC failed to ‘promptly acknowledge’ that the audio recording was disputed and did not update its online news article to reflect this for almost eight weeks,” reported the Guardian.