Continuing This Week: The Media’s Drip, Drip, Drip Anti-Jewish-Homeland Pogrom
Ok, when I began these weekly emails as a “media watch” some nineteen years ago, I wanted to make a few points. I believe they remain true today:
[1] Anti-Israel media bias resides not only in distortion of particular facts of particular news stories, but more fundamentally in the consistently imbalanced terminology and historical perspective in which the media habitually purveys the Arab-Israeli conflict to the public.
[2] Over time, the constant drip, drip, drip of this consistently imbalanced daily reporting poisons American public perception not just of the State of Israel’s conduct and policies, but of that State’s very legitimacy – i.e., of our people’s historical right to our Jewish national home.
[3] By me, the way to fight this long-running, low-level pogrom is not just to write reasoned letters “to the Editor” protesting misstatement of particular facts in particular news story articles, but to challenge frontally the media’s loaded lexicon of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish-homeland poisoned perspectives and pejoratives.
Years ago, I featured on occasion in these weekly emails insights of a colleague first-hand knowledgeable in the ways of the media, a source I identified to readers hereof as Deep Quote. Surprise, he reappeared to me this week, attaching a Reuters piece amply perpetrating this drip, drip, drip anti-Jewish homeland pogrom. Yahoo, inter alia, ran it on Thursday. (CAMERA had criticized Yahoo back in 2016 as being wont “to pursue and promote radical anti-Israelism at the expense of decency and accuracy.” Not being a Yahoo follower, I don’t know whether that’s so today, but this week, I suppose, Yahoo could plead “vee vere only publishing Reuters.”)
This Reuters news article, Yahoo-headlined as “Dressmakers Keep Palestinian Tradition Alive in Refugee Camp in Jordan,” is disturbing on both perspective and terminology grounds.
The story’s about a “Palestinian refugee” born in Jordan c. 1973 in a “refugee camp” on the edge of Amman whose business is to sew expensive colorful dresses which she sells to wealthy women in Amman. She says this “unique Palestinian attire” preserves “Palestinian heritage.”
Mazel tov, but the article lede introduces her as a “Palestinian refugee” who lives in a “camp.” The term “refugee camp” conjures images of newly displaced homeless people huddling around fires in front of makeshift tents on windswept hills, not makers of $200-to-$990 fashion dresses in the very place they were born. (Only “Palestinians,” of all the world’s refugees, pass “refugee” status on to their descendants, apparently ad infinitum.)
The article says she “recalls [n.b.] how her parents left their village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank when Israel took the territory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.” It’s this – not high fashion dressmaking – that’s her true talent. Not many people can “recall” things that happened years before they’d been born. And I object, of course, to “Israeli-occupied,” to “West Bank,” and to “Israel took.” The terms “Israeli-occupied” and “Israel took” connote Israel taking and occupying territory of others to which it had no claim. But Israel does have a claim to Judea-Samaria – three thousand years’ historical presence plus San Remo and the Mandate, with its Jewish national home. On the contrary, it had been Jordan [nee Trans-jordan], 78% of the original Palestine Mandate, that “took” from the remaining Mandate a key chunk – Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – to none of which it had had any claim, in its invasion in 1948.
Reuters’ article goes on:
“Many of Jordan’s population are descendants of Palestinian refugees whose families left after the creation of Israel in 1948 and cling to their roots in villages and towns that are now in present-day Israel or the Palestinian territories.” [emphasis added]
Sorry, but the term “creation of Israel in 1948” is Jew-baiting. Israel was not artificially “created” ex nihilo in 1948, but re-attained its sovereign independence that year as the natural fruition into statehood of an organized people who’d lived there, twice previously sovereign, for three thousand years. “1948 creation of Israel” is the media hard-at-work dating Jewish presence in the land of Israel to 1948.
And I object to the media’s “the Palestinian territories.” They’re “disputed,” and balanced reporting would call them disputed and not “Palestinian.” (And Israel’s Jews are Palestinian too, indeed were Palestinians first.)
This Reuters’ article’s slants – a Jordan-born high fashion dressmaker as a “Palestinian refugee” in a Jordan [eastern Palestine] “refugee camp” who “recalls,” from before she’d been born, her parents leaving “the Israeli-occupied West Bank” when “1948-created” Israel “took it” [i.e., took it back] in 1967– drip, drip, drip, are an indictment of Reuters.
But, more to the point, it’s an indictment of us for religiously averting our eyes from this media-perpetrated pogrom, this unrelenting derisive portrayal by the media of Israel and those who believe in the land of Israel as the historic homeland of Jews.
Some years ago, the Philly ZOA’s Len Getz arranged a private restaurant luncheon for a few of us ZOAniks with the then-editor of Philly’s Jewish Exponent, a liberal woman named Lisa, who gamely showed up. We each got to tell her something. I told her that when the media portrays Israel derisively, it’s denigrating our entire community, not just right-wingers like me, and that our community’s organized leadership should be in the van in actively standing against it. Alevai, but in the interim us grassroots should do something – consciously construct an acceptable lexicon of non-loaded perspectives and terms, and badger our leaders and well as ourselves to use and demand others’ use of them. One place to start is our website, www.factsonisrael.com, where we’ve compiled and posted a collection of “Dirty Words” and other perspective and terminology guidelines. Our late colleague Lee had put it this way: If you forfeit the language, you forfeit our heritage and history.