#756 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #756, 6/28/15

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: In a welcome bit of here’s-what-to-expect and why-its-imbalanced, media-watcher HonestReporting (HR) came out with a reader’s guide to media coverage of the UN report on last summer’s Israel-Hamas war just before the UN came out with its report. HR warned that the media might report UN assertions, including specifically civilian casualty counts, “without question or independent verification,” present disparity in Arab versus Israeli casualty counts as evidence of Israeli “disproportionate force,” and portray Israeli and Hamas actions as “morally equivalent.”

How did the AP’s report on the UN’s report this week in the Inq measure up? Come and look.

This Week In The Inq: HonestReporting vs. AP on UN’s Israel-Hamas War Report

On June 15, international pro-Israel media watcher HonestReporting issued a “what-to-look-for” guide – “3 Media Angles to Beware Ahead of the Schabas Report’s Release” – to the then-looming UN Human Rights Council’s report on last summer’s Israel-Hamas war.  On Monday this week, the UN released its report, and on Tuesday our hometown Philly Inquirer (Inq) ran the AP’s take on it  (Inq, Tue, 6/23/15, A14, AP, Josef Federman and Karin Laub).

The good news for us Inq readers, to the extent that association of the Jewish state with war crimes can come wrapped in good news, is that our hometown Inq Tuesday refrained from hysteria.  Indeed, it headlined, back on page A14:

U.N.: Militants May Be Guilty of War Crimes

The report on the Gaza fight, also accusing Israel, was rejected by both sides as biased

Certainly, by us, terrorists who aim their rockets and mortars at civilians in Israel aren’t mere “militants,” and last summer’s “fight” occurred not just in “Gaza,” but given our hometown Inq’s history of too often mis-headlining articles on Israelis defending themselves (see, e.g., Lee’s and my Pressing Israel:Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, chapter “H – Headlines: Not Always What Happened”), Tuesday’s Inq’s headline focusing on the “militants” was actually good.

Well, so much for the “good” news. HonestReporting’s user guide of “media angles” of which to “beware” in reading media coverage of the then-looming UN report listed three “angles”:

  1. The Halo Effect
  2. Disproportionate Force
  3. Moral Equivalence

How’d the AP this week in the Inq measure up?  Let’s take a look.

“The Halo Effect”

HonestReporting(HR) defines “the halo effect” as the media presenting the UN report’s issuer, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), as, without question, “apolitical and unbiased.”  Specifically, HR says here that media accounts of the UNHRC report should acknowledge that “the UNHRC is made up of human rights abusers who are in no position to judge Israel” and that the influence of its original, midway-resigned chairman Schabas, a PLO-consultant who’d expressed anti-Israel opinions, tainted the final product.

Tuesday’s AP account made no reference to the UNHRC’s membership composition or to its Israel-Hamas war investigation’s original chairperson, but it is in the AP’s presentation of casualty count composition that the AP’s mis-bestowed halo upon the UNHRC shines most undeservingly brightly.  The AP wrote, and wrote only:

More than 2,200 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, were killed in the fighting, according to the U.N.

Just last week (see, e.g., BSMW #755), Israel released its 2014 Israel-Hamas war report, in anticipation of the UN releasing its report, in which Israel, in thorough detail, totally contradicted the UN-asserted Arab civilian casualty claim. In its report, Israel identifies 2,125 Gaza casualties, of which 936 have been identified as “militants” (Israel’s term, ycch), and 761 as civilians, leaving “428 males between 16-50” as so-far unclassified between civilian and combatant.  A far cry from the UN’s “1,462 civilians,” and indeed surprisingly low given international norms.

HonestReporting,ahead of the UN report’s issuance, specifically called on journalists reporting on it to make transparent the UN’s reliance on unreliable Palestinian sources and non-governmental organizations for disputed facts like a basic casualty count and breakdowns between civilians and combatants.

In referencing only the UN civilian casualty count figure, the very crux of the UNHRC’s accusation of possible war crimes by Israel, without referencing from what sources the UN obtained its figure, and without referencing that the very previous week Israel had, in thorough detail, hotly contested this figure, the AP this week engaged in one-sided reporting.

Is it fair to charge AP reporters Josef Federman and Karin Laub, writing this week from Jerusalem, with knowledge that Israel, last week in Jerusalem, issued its report expressly in anticipation of the imminent UN report?  AP reporter Josef Federman, writing last week from Jerusalem (Inq, Mon, 6/15/15. A9), was the author of the AP’s report on Israel’s report.  One thing for certain: No halo this week for Israel-report-ignoring AP reporter Josef Federman.

“Disproportionate Force”

The AP’s article Tuesday compares in successive sentences “more than 2,200 Palestinians” having been killed versus less than 100 Israelis.  The impression left with lay readers is that this disparity (thanks to Iron Dome, not to Hamas) is evidence of Israel not using “proportionate force,” which, as AP reporter Federman reported last week, is one of Palestinian Arabs’ accusations of Israel having “violated the rules of war.”  But as Israel’s report last week pointed out,“proportionality” is not a matter of equal casualty counts but of armies weighing likely civilian casualties versus military accomplishments in forming attack plans.  (By this standard, Arabs aiming rockets at Jewish towns and cities in which the Israeli army was not only not fighting but not present was hardly “proportional.”)  But here’s a proportionality count in Tuesday’s AP Inq article:  the UN report says that “the Israeli military carried out more than 6,000 air strikes in Gaza during the war, including many that struckr esidential buildings” and that “Hamas fired 4,881 rockets and 1,753 mortars toward Israel.”  The AP, and maybe the UN, didn’t say at what in Israel this total of 6,634 rockets and mortars was aimed at, but you can bet “residential buildings” were not avoided.

“Moral Equivalence”

“Moral equivalence” in the conflict between Arabs and Jews has to be fought on two planes – military tactics in battle, and ultimate aims.  In this 2014 Israel-Hamas war that so absorbs the UN and the media, there was no moral equivalence between rocketing civilians and responding against the rocketers, however deeply they enmeshed themselves amongst their civilians.  In ultimate goals, there is no moral equivalence between the Jewish people defending its homeland and enemies which, as the AP labeled Hamas in the next-to-last paragraph of Tuesday’s Inq’s AP article, are “sworn to Israel’s destruction.”

The burden’s on us to make all this clear, not to the Western media, but to Western publics.  We have to begin by shunning the media’s loaded lexicon of Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict reporting and by affirmatively making our case that the land of Israel, in which the modern State of Israel, is the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, is and has been the Jewish people’s homeland for three thousand years.  The Arabs, as PMW repeatedly points out, claim all of the Palestine Mandate – west as well as east of the Jordan – as Arab.  The answer is not to say that “Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not illegal,” but that the land of Israel, including Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, is and has been the homeland of the Jews.

Regards,
Jerry