WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Lists of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing Dirty Words that I’ve put in these weekly emails from time to time just don’t pack the punch of an impassioned speaker pointing to Powerpoint slides of egregious instances vs. historical facts. A videographer captured me taking a shot at this to a synagogue group. Was my passion contagious? Come see.
Brother, Can You Spare a Half-Hour?
Lee said he and I gave our “Misleading Media Expressions” Powerpoint talk a hundred times to Jewish congregation men’s clubs, sisterhoods, Hadassah chapters, a couple Christian groups, a smoke-and-bourbon-clouded cigar club [really], and in The House That Mort Built. I remember the ZOA convention, the JCC with the huge screen, the cigar club and some others. A professional videographer captured one of those talks, in which we pointed out, I like to believe with some passion, that not just the media but Western publics and even we Jews ourselves too often use terms designed to delegitimize our people’s homeland of Israel, and that we absolutely must stop.
I’ve included lists of such misleading expressions in these weekly emails, and some of you readers have sent me others, but written lists just don’t pack the punch of an aroused speaker pointing to slides of egregious instances versus historical facts. So this week, Brother, if you can spare a half-hour, here’s my shot at enlisting Word Warriors.
Pour yourself a cup of coffee or grab a beer, go to our www.factsonisrael.com, click “Videos” in the menu bar, and select from near the top of the list that comes up “Misleading Media Expressions 1-5” and, if you’re still with me, then “6-10.”
In the course of this video, I say that Lee and I had written a book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, so there aren’t just 10 Misleading Media Expressions defaming our homeland of Israel, but at least 26, but here are the 10 that we picked.
“Israel Was Created and Founded in 1948” – off by about 3,000 years
“The War that Followed Israel’s Creation” – media-speak for a multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction
“Palestinian Refugees from the War that Followed Israel’s Creation” – Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab lands and Iran than Arabs left tiny Israel
“The UN Sought To Create in Palestine Palestinian and Jewish States” – the UN’s 1947 Palestine partition resolution said over and over “Arab and Jewish States,” not dividing Palestine between “Palestinians” and Jews
“Captured by Israel in 1967” – as though there’d been no pre-1967 Jewish connection to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria
“Judea and Samaria are the Biblical Names for the West Bank” – as though those Biblical names hadn’t remained in use all through the post-Biblical centuries, including by the UN itself in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
“East Jerusalem” – “East” Jerusalem had never been a separate place, but just the part of the thousands-of-years-old city which 1948 invader Transjordan held from 1948 until ousted by Israel in 1967
“Israel’s 1967 Borders” – a falsely-added gravitas to 1949 military ceasefire lines declared in their defining document not to be international borders, which were in any case obliterated and superseded by renewed 1967 fighting between the same sides, succeeded by that war’s Jordan River ceasefire lines, infinitely more militarily defensible and Jewishly meaningful for Israel
“Occupation” – as Bennett, then a cabinet minister, put it, you’re not an occupier in your own home (a homeland claim grounded in three-millennia physical presence and San Remo and the Palestine Mandate)
“Refugee Camps and Settlements” – descendants of Arabs who left Israel who live today in Arab “host” countries and Arab-controlled portions of Palestine itself aren’t living in temporary “camps,” and Jews living across the old half-century defunct 1949 ceasefire lines in their own homeland aren’t “settlers” living in “settlements”
Can a grassroots American Jew put a bit of contagious passion into explaining all this? Come and look – www.factsonisrael.com. If you’re fearful of being infected with enthusiasm for banning the biased terms, wear a mask.