#748 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #748, 5/3/15

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A longtime subscriber sent me an email last week, suggesting that I suggest to you media watch subscribers that you get actively involved in fighting anti-Israel media bias by writing letters to the editor, etc. Certainly, I would have everyone in email reach actively involved, but I have a very different view of what you should do.  Come take a look, and see if you should.

A Different Take On The Role We Frustrated Media Watchers Can Take

Not every unsubscriber to this weekly media watch over the past 14 years has gone beyond emailing just “unsubscribe,” but of those who’ve given me a reason the most common has been “the mainstream media (MSM) will never change its anti-Israel perspective, so give it up, stop wasting your time [and mine].”  My parting response to such folks has been that they’re only half-right.  The MSM is unlikely to change, but that should not dissuade us from lighting candles instead of futilely cursing the darkness.

Where I differ, I think, from other media bias activists who urge others to action is in the direction in which I would have the action I urge on you take.  We need to recognize that “anti-Israel media bias” is not some endless series of sui generis mainstream media reporting inaccuracies that can be effectively countered by endlessly writing letters “to the editor” painstakingly pointing out inaccuracies in each such news article’s statement of its particular event’s particular facts.  On the contrary, the great damage that mainstream media misreporting on Israel inflicts on Westerners’ perception of Israel lies in the loaded lexicon of poisonous pejoratives with which MSM news reporting on Israel is laced.  And this is what dictates the action that we must take.

This loaded lexicon is not some vilifier’s random collection of dirty words that have nothing in common beyond being derogatory.  Like a jigsaw puzzle’s pieces, they fit together into a meaningful picture, in this case a delegitimizing picture of the Jewish homeland of Israel.

So the action I would have each of us pro-Israel media watchers individually take is three-fold:

[a]  recognize, each of us, anti-Israel media bias’ core as what it is – persistent MSM purveying of its Israel reporting in a consistent vocabulary purveying delegitimization;

[b]  as individuals, personally stop using these delegitimizing terms, and instead use terms factually grounded in history; and

[c]  personally point out to Jewish leaders and writers who use these delegitimizing terms in their own pro-Israel talking and writing that they’re engaged in the equivalent of pleading against segregation while sitting in the back of the bus.

OK, so what delegitimizing specifics am I talking about?

***  Last week I pointed out that “Judea and Samaria” are not what the MSM has told Western publics is “the biblical name for the West Bank”;  that the United Nations itself had used “the hill country of Samaria and Judea,” not “West Bank,” in 1947;  that “West Bank” was invented by the invader, Jordan, in 1950 for the same reason that the Romans renamed Judaea as Palestine [after the long-gone Philistines, not Arafat’s ancestors] eighteen hundred years earlier, to disassociate it from Jews.  When we say “West Bank,” we’re delegitimizing ourselves.

***  Israel wasn’t “created” and “founded” in “1948,” as the MSM persistently tells Western readers, typically following up with “Palestinian refugees from the war that followed Israel’s creation.”  In historical fact, modern Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Jewish Judaea.  Every ruler in between – Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Omayyad-Abbasid-Fatimid dynasties that began as Arab and faded to Turk [and, except for Jordan between 1949 and 1967, were the only Arab rulers in that land’s rulership chain, ever], Crusaders, Mamluks and finally Turks – was a foreign empire invader.  And, currently visiting Jimmy Carter, in his book, to the contrary notwithstanding, the Romans in 135 CE did not exile almost all of the Jewish kingdom Judaea’s surviving Jews.  And in referencing this 1948 CE “war that followed Israel’s creation,” the MSM not only consistently fails to name those multi-nation Arab invaders for Israel’s destruction, but likewise ignores that that multi-nation invasion was thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews (not bad for a place that had just been “created” and “founded” before being invaded literally overnight),  and further that that Arab-started war and its wake saw more Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from vast Arab lands than Arabs left tiny Israel.

***  What the media calls “Israel’s 1967 borders,” as though they were internationally-agreed boundaries between Israel and its Arab “neighbors” that tried to destroy it in 1948 and again in 1967, were in fact what the document that drew them in 1949 called Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines only, expressly without prejudice to either side’s political border claims, and, as such, are no holier, indeed are less holy, then their successor 1967 war ceasefire lines.

***  What the LA Times and Inq last week (Inq, 4/21/15, A2) told readers were “the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem” are no more outsider “settlements” than Judea-Samaria is “the West Bank” and the core of Jerusalem “East” Jerusalem.  Jerusalem, the ancient capital of the Jewish kingdoms Judah and Judaea, and again Israel’s capital, has again had a Jewish majority since l800’s Ottoman Empire rule.  Between the times of ancient and modern Israel, Jews relentlessly returned to Jerusalem every time the ruling foreign empire kicked them out, and nobody called those homeland-claiming Jews living there in Jerusalem alien “settlers.”

***  And, finally, Palestinian Arabs aren’t “The Palestinians.”   David Bar-Illan, late editor of The Jerusalem Post, and pathfinder for Andrea Levin, and me, and all other activists against anti-Israel media bias, referred over and over in his ground-breaking “Eye On The Media” column to “Palestine” and “Palestinian” referencing Palestine’s Jews, down to his own newspaper’s incorporated name being “The Palestine Post.”  In its 1947 Palestine partition resolution, the United Nations referred to Palestine’s Jews and Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”  Indeed, if we abandon this calamitous gratuitous surrender of Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” we will be objects of ridicule of not just the media.  But, by me, partly by having committed this calamitous gratuitous surrender, we’ve made ourselves objects of ridicule.

The bottom line point is this:  If we can clean up our own use of language, shunning those delegitimizing terms which Israel’s enemies, the mainstream media, and anti-“Greater”-Israel Jews (who are riding the back of the most voracious of tigers) are foisting upon Western publics, we can credibly put to the MSM that it is parroting the Israel-delegitimizing, pejorative-laced narrative of Jewish homeland deniers.  It may not induce the media to rectify its Israel coverage terms and perspectives, but what will get through to Westerners is the Western media’s imbalance, which will do much to discredit it.  Is that worth your becoming an Israel-reporting lexicon activist?  A self-respecting, historically-accurate-terminology purist?  I think so.

Regards,
Jerry