To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #754, 6/14/15
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Three occurrences in the Philadelphia Inquirer this week unfairly portrayed Israel in an unfavorable light. One was a headline that Israel built “dirty bombs,” relegating to a much smaller sub-headline the purpose. The second was a news squib on Israel declining to prosecute soldiers involved in a last summer attack that killed “four children playing on a beach,” without telling readers that that beach was a battlefield. And a third was news article text defining Jerusalem’s Jewish connection as Israel having “controlled western Jerusalem” since 1948 and “occupied East Jerusalem” since 1967. There’s 3,000 years more to that Jewish connection that the Western media leaves out.
This Week In The Inq: Headline, Squib and News Article Text All Did Israel Injustice
Headline
Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) headline Tuesday, 6/9/15, A8:
Israel reportedly built and tested ‘dirty bombs’
Far smaller sub-headline:
The concern was being attacked, not using them. The effects were limited.
The AP article’s lead echoed the sub-head:
Israel built and exploded so-called “dirty bombs,” explosives laced with nuclear material, to examine how such explosives would affect the country if it were to be attacked by the crude radioactive weapons, the Haaretz newspaper reported Monday.
The bottom of the article placed Israel’s actions in context: “The international community long has feared that extremists like the Islamic State group or al-Qaeda could make such weapons to attack civilian areas, potentially rendering them inhospitable.”
A lot more people read headlines than sub-heads and article text. If the New York Times had reported that the U.S. army had defensively tested the effects of explosives laced with radioactive material, would an American paper have headlined out-of-context
U.S. reportedly built and tested ‘dirty bombs’
I don’t think so. A little misleading link-Israel’s-military-with-something-unsavory here? I think so.
News Squib
This is the full text of a 1-paragraph “Around The World” news-in-brief squib our hometown Inq ran on Saturday (Inq, Sat, 6/13/15, A4):
ISRAEL: No criminal charges
The Israeli military has decided not to pursue criminal charges against soldiers involved in missile strikes in the Gaza Strip last summer that killed four children playing on a beach. The Military Advocate General Corps investigated the incident, which took place on July 16 in view of hotels where international journalists were staying. – Washington Post
Israel was entitled to something more Saturday at the hands of the Washington Post and Inq than that Israel has decided not to criminally prosecute soldiers involved in missile strikes that “killed four children playing on a beach.”
The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday that “the death of the four boys during the shelling of the Gaza beach on July 16 is one of the most well-known incidents of the war. A number of journalists were on the beach at the time and caught it on camera.” The JPost went on: “Photographs of the dead Palestinian boys went viral online and across the airwaves with there seeming to be no possible explanation of why an IDF missile would have targeted a beachhead that was empty of anything but the four minors.”
What was utterly missing from the WP’s and Inq’s brief account Saturday of Israel not prosecuting soldiers who “killed four children playing on a beach” is what Thursday’s JPost account said next, that this latest IDF report on its investigations into war crimes accusations “gives an entirely different and highly detailed picture.”
This IDF report, based on “a myriad of interviews” with IDF personnel and affidavits from Gazans, placed the four minors as “unexpectedly in a gated off area that was known by the IDF and by Gazans to be a military location of Hamas’s naval commando unit.” It stated that the IDF “had undertaken several attacks on the same area against Hamas’s naval commandos or their stashed munitions,” including on the previous day, that Israeli aircraft identified several persons running into an installation on the beach near where the IDF had attacked on the previous day, and that “at no point was the IDF able to identify that these persons were children and not Hamas naval commandos.”
Friday’s Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ Daily Alert carried this excerpt of the IDF’s report:
The incident took place in an area that had long been known as a compound belonging to Hamas Naval Police and Naval Force (commandos), and which was utilized exclusively by militants. The compound is closed off by a fence and clearly separated from the beach serving the civilian population. Affidavits provided by Palestinian witnesses stated that the compound was known to the local residents as a compound which was used exclusively by the Hamas’ Naval Police. The IDF carried out a number of attacks on the compound in the days prior to the incident. On the day prior to the incident, a container inside the compound used to store military supplies was attacked.
So were Philly Inquirer readers entitled to have been told more on Saturday than that the IDF has declined to criminally prosecute soldiers involved in a missile attack that “killed four children playing on a beach” in view of hotels housing international journalists? And were those international journalists’ own hands innocent of involvement in the viral spreading of photos implying that the IDF, with no conceivable military justification, had attacked what the WP and Inq this Saturday still called “four children playing on a beach”?
Article Text
Tuesday’s Inq also carried a page A1, 8 Washington Post account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision negating the law allowing U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem to include “Israel” on their passports. The media watch aspect involves again, as do the Inq headline and news squib discussed above, media failure to give readers a fair presentation of context.
The language at issue is in two paragraphs towards the end of the article:
Both Israel and the Palestinian national movement claim Jerusalem as their capital. But the city was divided in 1949 following the war that broke out after Israel declared its independence.
Israel has controlled western Jerusalem since then, and nearly two decades later occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Ok, the Washington Post and Inq get a modicum of credit for stating that Israel “declared its independence,” not sneeringly that Israel was “created and founded in 1948,” as long was their wont, but the credit stops there.
For one thing, the war didn’t just “break out” in 1948, but was a multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews.
But the Western media needs to tell readers more than that Israel has “controlled western Jerusalem” since 1948 and “occupied East Jerusalem” since 1967. E.g., that Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the mid-1800’s; that it has been the capital of three states in the past 3,000 years, all of them Jewish; and that modern Israel is the land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea, that every ruler in between, from 135 to 1948, was a foreign invader, and except between 638 and 1099, a non-Arab foreign invader at that.
Regards,
Jerry