#734 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #734, 1/25/15

WHILE YOU STAND ON LEG:  More scrutiny is being given these days to the anti-Israel imbalanced terms lacing mainstream Western media news reporting on Israel.  Blogger Elder of Ziyon spotted an exacerbation Friday to an imbalance long-purveyed by the New York Times.  By Saturday, the enhancement, at least, to the long-running imbalance was gone.  No explanation for the original’s restoration was given, but perhaps spotting and shining light on at least newly-minted misleading expressions works.

 This Week: NY Times Adds, Quietly Pulls, Appendage to Imbalance That Made It Worse

 On Friday and this morning, the highly respected blogger Elder of Ziyon posted media bias spottings on Algemeier .com:  “The New York Times Anti-Israel Style Guide Adds a New Phrase,” and “New York Times Silently Changes ‘1967 Borders With Palestine.’”

Friday’s New York Times news article on the stormy relationship between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu used a phrase that Elder of Ziyon noted “the newspaper has never used before.”  In referring to “an angry conversation” between the two in May 2011, the NY Times stated that “Mr. Obama suggested that the 1967 borders with Palestine should be the starting point for peace negotiations”  [emphasis Elder of Ziyon’s].

Elder of Ziyon pointed out Friday that there never had been borders, just armistice lines [expressly declared as such in their defining document, and as without prejudice to borders claims]; that they’d been drawn in 1949, not 1967; that they’d been between Israel and Jordan, not Israel and “Palestine.”  Elder of Ziyon:  “No one in 1967 or 1949 considered Judea and Samaria to be ‘Palestine.’”

What’s new here, Elder of Ziyon observed, is that “this is the first time they [NY Times] are implying that the land that had been illegally annexed by Jordan in 1949 was considered a separate ‘Palestine’ in 1967.”  Citing the Times’ adherence to its style guide “where the usage of words and phrases is meticulously defined and refined over the years,” Elder of Ziyon calls “the 1967 borders with Palestine” to be “not an accident,” but the Times’ update of its “style rules to subtly push the lie that every inch beyond the 1949 armistice lines belongs to an entity, that is at least 47 years old, called ‘Palestine.’”

Mispurveying the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines as “Israel’s 1967 borders” is nothing new for the mainstream media (MSM), including our beloved hometown Philly Inquirer (Inq).  By me, what the NY Times was purveying by appending “with Palestine” was to give that non-existent state a de jure existence with internationally recognized “borders” since 1949.

This morning’s Elder of Ziyon posting on Algemeiner observes that the NY Times has made one unacknowledged substantive correction to its Friday article:  It now states that “Mr. Obama suggested that Israel’s pre-1967 borders [as opposed to the original “1967 borders with Palestine”] should be the starting point for peace negotiations.”

Elder of Ziyon this morning:  “It is still wrong, of course:  they weren’t borders but 1949 armistice lines, never agreed to as borders by the international community, as UNSC 242 makes clear.  But the NYT has erroneously referred to them as ‘borders’ for decades as I showed in my original piece.”

By me, there’s a ray of light here in America’s Newspaper of Rectum retreating from a newly advanced enhancement  – Israel’s “1967 borders with Palestine” – of a long-standing misportrayal back to the original long-standing misportrayal – “Israel’s 1967 borders.”  It may be that the media feels it has less creditability stake in standing behind called-out newly-minted misportrayals – e.g., “Israel’s 1967 borders with Palestine” – than with those that have become deeply ingrained in MSM misreporting on Israel – “Israel’s 1967 borders” for the old 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines.

[Optional obiter dicta for fanatics like me]  A couple of kickers:

[1]  President Obama’s May 2011 “Israel-Palestine borders” position was more grievous, from our perspective, than that the 1949 ceasefire lines should be “the starting point for peace negotiations,” as the New York Times put it on Friday.  What the President actually said, at the State Department on May 19, 2011, in  a play on words on UNSC 242, was:

I believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both sides.

Note [a] that “the 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines with mutually agreed swaps” [fat chance original] makes those 9-miles-wide in key parts [“Auschwitz,” per Eban] lines the ending, not starting, basis for borders.

But note also [b] that President Obama referenced those 1949 lines as “lines” and not “borders.”  Compare NY Times above, and Inq front-page headline the next day, May 20, 2011:  “Obama Maps a Peace Path; In a major speech, he said a starting point for Israeli-Palestinian talks should be the borders set before the 1967 war.  Netanyahu criticized the idea.”  [emphasis added]

[2]  Elder of Ziyon’s Friday blog post included a photocopy of the top of a June 10, 1967, UPI news article quoting an Israeli minister on Israel’s just-won victory in the Six Day War.  This news article directly quoted him using the term “the 1949 armistice agreement,” and indirectly that the just-ended war “had nullified the armistice agreements.”  The article text’s own terms included “earlier frontiers … boundaries … the status quo before this happened,” but also once in the part of the article shown “previous borders.”  In contradistinction to Friday’s NY Times reference to Israel’s “1949 borders with Palestine,” this June 10, 1967, article stated that Israel “may try to keep some Jordanian [emphasis added] territory.”  The article’s headline was “Israel Rules Out Return to Frontiers.”  [emphasis added]

But what sense can we make of this 2011 MSM mixing of “previous borders” and less definitively permanent boundary terms?  Perhaps the MSM failed to appreciate back then the difference in international reaction consequence to a Least Favored Nation crossing over ceasefire lines versus international borders.

The Inq, on that same day, May 20, 2011, that it ran a different news service article that it headlined as Obama referencing “the borders before the 1967 war,” also ran an AP article in which the AP, on its own, called the term “the armistice lines of 1949” to be “a term synonymous with the pre-1967 borders.”  To be sure, the MSM appreciates that difference today.  Its repeated mischaracterization of what the 1949 Israel-Jordan armistice agreement expressly defined as military ceasefire lines only, expressly without prejudice to either side’s border claims, as “Israel’s 1967 borders” – with or without “with Palestine” – is an agenda-driven aim to imbue in those 1949 ceasefire lines a political permanence transcending that of military ceasefire lines rendered void by renewal of fighting between the same sides.  Especially when those new post-1967 war ceasefire lines are vastly securer for Israel than their 9-miles-wide in key spots, vulnerable [Eban said “Auschwitz”] 1949 predecessors.

Regards,
Jerry