#753 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #753, 6/7/15

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  In a pair of recent statements, one this week, Israel’s respected Amb. Dore Gold portrayed Hezbollah as embedding mass rocket-power in civilian areas in the same manner, and, by me, to the same end, as Hamas did last summer – to influence international opinion-makers, not least the media, to portray Israel, not as defending its citizens against civilian-targeting rockets and tunnels, but as itself the civilian-targeting aggressor. 

Why was Hamas so successful at this, portending Hezbollah or Hamas being successful again in the next round?  A staunch female Israel defender indelicately said on the internet recently, the whole world hasn’t suddenly become anti-Semitic, that the fact is ‘we suck at making our Jewish homeland rights case to the world.’  My thought on how we can start doing something about it.

This Week: Dore Gold on Hamas’ Success With the Media, Portending the Same by Hezbollah.  Food for Thought for Media Watchers

Widely-respected Israeli diplomat, author and commentator Dore Gold made two observations in recent days, one of them this week, bearing directly, it seems to me, on the importance of ordinary folks like you and me contending against anti-Israel media bias.

The connection begins with the pogrom, there’s no other word, the mainstream Western media, including our hometown Philly Inquirer (Inq), conducted against Israel during last summer’s Hamas war (I don’t call it “Gaza” war, because Israel too was part of the battleground – ask the Israeli civilians who were repeatedly rushing to shelters.)

In a Facebook post on May 15, Amb. Gold stated that Hezbollah is “building up a vast military arsenal in hundreds of Shiite villages just north of the Israeli-Lebanese border.”  He warned that this is “a blatant violation of [U.N.] Resolution 1701, ending the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, which established the Lebanese area south of the Litani River as “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons” other than those of the Lebanese army and U.N.  Gold warned that if war breaks out again, Israel will either have to destroy those weapons in those civilian areas or “let Hezbollah fire thousands of rockets into Israel.”

(Sorry, but I don’t think even Amb. Gold did Israel’s Jewish civilians justice with his AP-ish “rockets into Israel.”  Hezbollah’s Nasrallah’s 2006 target wasn’t an inanimate “Israel”:

“I have a special message to the Arabs of Haifa, to your martyrs and to your wounded.  I call on you to leave this city.  I hope you do this … Please leave so we don’t shed your blood, which is our blood,” Nasrallah said.)

But Gold’s point was that by embedding its rockets among southern Lebanon’s civilians, “Hezbollah has turned Lebanese civilians into human shields – much like Hamas did in the Gaza Strip [last summer].”

This Tuesday’s (June 2) Jerusalem Post carried an article on a press briefing Amb. Gold held on Monday.  He said that last summer’s Hamas war presented a case of dueling narratives which Israel is still fighting today, including “then UN commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay’s assertion that 74 percent of the casualties in the Gaza Strip were civilians,” which Gold called “a figure that can’t possibly be true.”

Here’s a brief excerpt of the Jerusalem Post’s account of what Gold said at Monday’s press conference:

Hamas’s manipulation of the international media has “affected the perceptions of governments, international organizations and NGOs alike,” Gold wrote in the monograph.

“The real truth about what transpired during the war was superseded by a highly subjective presentation that suited the Hamas interest, and which it skillfully sold to international opinion-makers.”

Specifically, Hamas succeeded in persuading the international media to understate the danger Hamas posed to Israel and that it is a moderate force that can be negotiated with, and wildly skewed the figure of civilian casualties to create a sense of victimhood worldwide where Israel is portrayed as the asymmetric aggressor.

With all the civilian-victimizing horrors being perpetrated daily in today’s Middle East – barrel bombs, possibly containing chlorine gas, being dropped on cities by their own government; car-bombings of markets and mosques; blocking of rivers’ waterflows to civilian areas; mass executions, beheadings, sexual enslavement of minorities’ women; displacement of millions of civilians as refugees – it is still casualties, “the vast majority of them civilians,” in Israel’s inescapable, warning-civilians-where-feasible, response to intentional attacks on its civilians that gets the biggest rise out of the mainstream Western media.

Can we explain this, make the least bit of sense out of it?  Here’s my two cents on this sense: Certainly, anti-Semitism is in it, but as a staunch defender of Israel recently said on the internet, the whole world has not suddenly become anti-Semitic.  As this female defender of Israel indelicately put it, “we suck at explaining our right to the land.”

By me, suck-stopping starts with our jettisoning, utterly, completely, in its entirety, the mainstream media’s loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing slurs and pejoratives – “Israel’s 1948 creation and founding … Palestinian refugees of the war that followed Israel’s creation . . . West Bank . . . 1967 borders . . . East Jerusalem . . . ‘the’ Palestinians” – all of it.

San Remo and the Palestine Mandate didn’t envision a “Jewish National Home” penned inside what the liberal Abba Eban called 9-miles-wide, lowland “Auschwitz” borders.  The media mocks Jews who claim Jewish rights beyond what the media studiously avoids correctly calling the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines as “ultra-nationalist” believes in “Greater Israel.”  Reject this mockery, like Bennett self-respectfully rejected CNN’s insistence on “occupation.”  Consider that Hillel was right in telling us that if we don’t stand up for ourselves then no one else will be for us.

Regards,
Jerry