Jewish actress Scarlett Johansson with a carbonated bubbling machine from Israel's SodaStream. Photo: SodaStream.

The Guardian’s first few days of coverage of the debate over Scarlett Johansson’s role as global ambassador for SodaStream, and her subsequent decision to step down as Oxfam ambassador, was, by their standards, relatively fair.  However, yesterday, true to form, they published a commentary at ‘Comment is Free’ supporting the boycott and criticizing Johansson’s involvement with the Israeli based company.

Here is the most relevant passage in a commentary by Vijay Prashad titled ‘Scarlett Johansson is right; the face of SodaStream doesn’t fit with Oxfam‘, Jan. 30:

Johansson’s new job posed a serious problem for Oxfam. The charity has over the years taken a strong position against Israel’s illegal settlement construction at the same time as it has worked to deliver much-needed goods and services to the encaged population in the occupied Palestinian territories. In a powerful briefing paper from 2012, Oxfam called on Israel to “immediately halt the construction of all illegal settlements” and end “policies and practices that are illegal under international law and harm the livelihood of Palestinian civilians”.

Indeed, so fanatical is the BDS cause that Israeli-Palestinian co-existence and laying the seeds for economic development for the future Palestinian state necessarily take a back seat to their malign obsession with Israel.

(Curiously, the Guardian failed to note Prashad’s affiliation with the pro-BDS group, an extremely misleading omission in the context of his explicit support for boycotting SodaStream.)

Remind us again why such ideological extremists are continually framed as ‘liberal’ activists by the Guardian and the mainstream media.

Adam Levick is the managing editor of CiF Watch, an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).