Complaints to The Guardian newspaper over an incomplete list of Nobel peace prize winners have led to a hasty amendment on the paper's website.
The incomplete list was up for four hours, despite comments below the list which pointed out the omissions of Yitzak Rabin, Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres.
Immediately following the announcement of President Barack Obama's win of the 2009 Nobel peace prize, Guardian news editor Simon Rogers posted what he claimed was "every peace prize winner ever", stating that the information came from the website Nobelprize.org
But the Guardian list omitted Israeli winners Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin.
Menachem Begin, the sixth Prime Minister of Israel, jointly won the Nobel peace prize in 1978 for signing a peace treaty with Egypt with President of Egypt Anwar Sadat. Only Sadat was listed by the Guardian...
Stephen Pollard writes there at the JC:
The Guardian's ommission of the Israelis gets more bizarre.
They have told us that it was down to:
technical issue during the data transfer from the
site, which meant that many of the names of the joint winners of the Nobel Peace
Prize were accidentally omitted, although the country of origin of the winners
was not.
Eh? There are many, many other joint winners listed on the original, and they all transferred over to the Guardian's site. Somehow this technical issue only affected the three Israeli names.
I do not believe the Guardian's explanation.
UPDATE
Melanie Phillips writes:
Here is a little quiz. The Guardian has posted up a list here of everyone who has won the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception.
Q: Which three names are omitted from the Guardian list ( even though they do appear on the Nobelprize.org list which the Guardian has purportedly reproduced)?***
A: Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.
And what is the common link between these three names? Precisely.
It appears someone at the Guardian actually went to the effort of removing the names of the three Israeli statesmen who won the prize. Facts are sacred?
Here’s a further curiosity. If you look at the years 1978 and 1994, although the Guardian has air-brushed out the names of Begin, Peres and Rabin it has apparently added in the name of their country, Israel, which is given in a neighbouring column – thus managing to suggest that Sadat and Arafat represented Israel along with Egypt and ‘Palestine’ in winning the prize in those years. So what happend? Did the hand typing in the name of the country accidentally hit the keys three times so that the names that went with it were coincidentally all deleted?
Tsk – standards of censorship on Planet Bigotry are clearly slipping.
***Update, 1650: Lo and behold, the three Israeli names have now been added to the Guardian list.
