WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: All of us, Zionist or not, have to evaluate whether newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer have over many years portrayed Israel in such a mockingly negative light that it reflects badly on not just Israel but us. I believe that it has, and that our community must cease averting our eyes.
An Alternate Test for When Anti-Israel Becomes Anti-Semitic: When It’s Delivered With Contempt & Derision, e.g., by the Inq
Much attention’s been given to when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic – when it’s obsessive, invokes double-standards, etc. Here’s my alternate test – when it’s delivered with contempt and derision. An illustrative case? A big American city’s main newspaper, my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer (“Inq”).
The Inq habitually perpetrates, of course, all of the mainstream media’s loaded lexicon of anti-Israel poisoned pejoratives – Israel was “Created & Founded in 1948,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue; the 1948 Arab invasion was “the war that followed Israel’s creation”; the 1949 ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to constitute international borders, were “Israel’s 1967 borders”; Judea and Samaria are the media’s quaint “biblical names for the West Bank,” even though those Hebrew-origin names remained in use for three thousand years, including by the UN itself in 1947 (invader Jordan coined “West Bank” in 1950, for the same reason the Romans had renamed Judaea as Palestine – to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews); “the West Bank” and “East” [i.e., historic] Jerusalem, neither of which Palestinian Arabs have ever ruled ever and foreign Arabs only between 638 and 1099, were “captured by Israel in 1967,” as though there’d been no prior three-millennia twice-previously-sovereign Jewish connection, internationally acknowledged in the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate; Jews who believe the Jewish homeland historically and legally includes historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria are “”ultra-nationalist” Believers in a “Greater Israel,” even though, on the contrary, it is those (e.g., the UN in UNSC 2334, President Biden, a majority of American Jews) who’d divest from Israel much of the 22% of the Mandate left for its Jewish national home after excision from it of the 78% east of the Jordan River as all-Arab Transjordan (today’s Jordan, with its Palestinian Arab majority) who are calling for a Lesser Israel; etc.
Unlike AP-bylined news article text, newspaper headlines and photo captions are the paper’s own doing, so let’s focus on some Inq-distinguishing manifestations of anti-Israel imbalance delivered, it seems to me, in a mockingly imbalanced manner.
“250 Jews visited the mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam”
To a typical American newspaper reader, what image comes to mind when their hometown newspaper prints the word “mosque”? The image of a building, the Muslim analog of a Jewish synagogue or Christian church. So when my hometown Inq, on May 24, 2021, included in a photo caption (not descriptive of what’s in the photo) that “250 Jews visited the mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam,” Inq readers into whose perception had been drilled that Jerusalem’s Temple Mount’s al-Aqsa Mosque is “the third-holiest site in Islam,” undoubtedly understood that the previous day some 250 Jews had for some reason entered that al-Aqsa mosque building on the Temple Mount that Muslims regard as their third-holiest site.
That wasn’t what had transpired at all. What had happened was that Israel, having temporarily closed access to the Temple Mount only to Jews following Muslim violence depicted in the photo, reopened Jewish access thereto. In a double distortion of the plain meaning of “mosque,” the Inq’s photo caption endorsed the extreme Muslim bestowal of “third-holiest” al-Aqsa mosque status to the Temple Mount in its entirety, not just to the al-Aqsa mosque building at the Mount’s southern end, and incorrectly portrayed Jews, not as having ascended onto the plaza of Jews’ holiest site, the Mount, which they had, but as having entered “the mosque,” which they had not. The Inq’s headline rubbed in: “Mosque Visits Resume.” Jews’ holiest site counted for zilch.
By contrast, the Jerusalem Post, for one, didn’t exactly see it the Inq’s way. It headlined, 5/23/21, “Temple Mount Reopens to Jews After Weeks of Clashes and Unrest.” Its photo showed Jewish civilians peaceably walking on the plaza, captioned “Jews visit Temple Mount after closure ….” Its lede: “The Temple Mount was originally closed to Jews on Jerusalem Day, following clashes between Arabs and Israeli police ….” (emphasis added)
Israeli Civilian-Murdering Terrorists “Militants,” Executed Israelis Just “Die”
A 4/29/08 Inq AP article reported: “The Israeli army shot four Palestinian militants [n.b.] who were trying to plant explosives near the Gaza Strip border fence,” and quoted Hamas calling them its members “on a jihad mission.” Inq headline: “Israeli Army Shoots Four Palestinians.”
Just three days before that, a 4/26/08 Inq AP article reported that two Israeli factory guards had been shot dead by a Palestinian Arab whom “a spokesman for Islamic Jihad” said had snuck into Israel and reached the plant in a border industrial zone in which “Israeli factories employ Palestinians.” Inq headline: “Two Israeli Factory Guards Die.” (A week later Inq news squib reported a rocket from Gaza killed an Israeli civilian mowing his lawn. The Inq headlined something factual. I’d expected: “Israeli Gardening Enthusiast Dies.”)
Civilian Bus-Bombing Terrorists “Militants,” “Militants” Stuffed in Mouth of Israeli Spokesperson
On June 20, 2002, the Inq headlined on its front page the second of two consecutive days’ mass-murder bombings of downtown Jerusalem municipal buses, murdering 25 and maiming 85 Israeli bus passengers. Front page headline of the Inq: “Jerusalem Hit Again – and Militants Promise More”
Shortly thereafter, July 12, the Philly District of the ZOA led a media bias protest on the Inq’s then sidewalk. I had the privilege to be one of the three speakers. I led off:
“We’re here today because mass murderers who pack bombs with nails, screws, rat poison and hate, to murder and maim as many men, women and children as they possibly can, in buses, restaurants, shopping malls, discos, pool halls, parks and a Bat Mitzvah and a Passover seder, aren’t militants, anytime, anywhere. They’re terrorists, every time, everywhere ….”
For years, the Inq’s Michael Matza was chief of the Inq’s only-such-place-in-the-world Jerusalem Bureau. Around that same time, we had this exchange:
“Dear Mr. Matza:
“Last Thursday, you substituted ‘[militants]’ for another word in a direct quotation of [Israeli government spokesman] Ranaan Gissin: ‘Given the fact that the Palestinian Authority is doing nothing . . . we have to deploy our forces in such a way that [militants] won’t be able to leave their launching pad.’
“I’m a long time Inquirer reader. Please email me the word Mr. Gissin actually used.
“Jerome Verlin”
= = = = = = = = = = =
“Dear Mr. Verlin,
“The word Mr. Gissin used in his quote was ‘they.’ Because the word ‘they’ would have been unclear, we substituted the word ‘militants’ and placed it in brackets to accurately convey Mr. Gissin’s meaning.
“Sincerely,
“Michael Matza”
= = = = = = = = = = =
“Dear Mr. Matza,
“Thanks very much for your email supplying the word [‘they’] actually used by Mr. Gissin. To be perfectly frank, I’d suspected he’d used a different word, also beginning with ‘T’. To that extent, I did you injustice.
“However, still to be perfectly frank, I do not think that your putting the word ‘militants’ in brackets did in fact ‘accurately convey Mr. Gissin’s meaning.’ ….
…. “What you did, Mr. Matza, was to … stuff the media’s word ‘militants’ into a direct quote of an Israeli official, as though he’d have used it. Would Sharon’s spokesman really have used it? If not, it was not Mr. Gissin’s meaning that you accurately conveyed to your readers. Am I wrong?
“Jerry Verlin”
“Did Peace Die With Sheikh Yassin?”
On Wednesday, 3/28/04, the Inq ran a house cartoonist Auth cartoon, “Continuing Progress Reported in the Middle East,” depicting Israel as the Angel of Death strangling the Peace Dove for its targeted killing of Sheikh Yassin, founder of Hamas. The day before, the Inq had run an op-ed with the top-of-page banner headline, “Did Peace Die With Sheikh Yassin?” Left out was reference to an Inq-run AP article a mere two months earlier (1/20/04), quoting Yassin. AP:
“…. Also yesterday, the founder of Hamas said the Islamic group would increasingly recruit female suicide bombers. Last week, Hamas sent its first female assailant, a 22-year-old woman who blew herself up at the Gaza-Israel crossing and killed four Israeli border guards. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said in Gaza that there had not before been a need for women to carry out bombings. Now, he said, women must step up to fulfill their obligations. He suggested that male bombers were increasingly being held back by Israeli security measures.” (emphasis added)
Did Peace Die With Sheikh Yassin? Our #169 of that week queried whether medical ethics had died with Mengele.
Where We Come Out: Inq Imbalance Descends to Contempt & Derision
The above, of course, is a sampling. There are a lot more examples over the now 1130 weeks of these weekly emails which began as a “media watch” focusing on the Israel miscoverage of mostly the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Inq has not treated Israel, the Jewish State, and ergo its Philadelphia and wider Jewish and Christian supporters, with the objective respect which balanced journalism requires, but instead on too many occasions, it has seemed to me, with ridicule and mockery descending to contempt and derision. There are more examples still in the book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, co-written by my late colleague, Lee Bender, and me, in which we assigned a letter – <A>partheid, <B>orders, <C>reation-of-Israel, <D>enial of Jewish History …. – to the media’s mischaracterizations, not least the Inq’s, of our Jewish homeland of Israel. Do not believe that mocking mischaracterization of our Jewish people’s homeland does not mischaracterize even “non-Zionists” among us. It’s time for us to stop averting our eyes.