#758 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #758, 7/12/15

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Maybe I hear a different drummer’s beat, but by me contending against anti-Israel media bias isn’t about reasoning with the mainstream media (MSM) in letters “to the editor” or meetings with the editor that it’s being biased against the Jewish homeland of Israel.  I’m not against such writings and meetings, having done some of both (with some limited success), but as for fundamentally changing the MSM’s purveying of the Arab narrative as history, we’d do as well at convincing the 4-H Club – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Human Rights Watch – that they’re Zionists.

 What then? As what happened last week ought to drive home to us, we have to directly make our case in the same marketplace that the Western media and the UNHRC directly make the Arab narrative case – Western public perception.  And we can start by stopping our own use of the Arab narrative’s very terms, dirty words when they come out of our mouths.

 Last Week at the UNHRC:  The Media-Purveyed Arab Narrative as History

The poison that anti-Israel media bias and last week’s UNHRC resolution purvey is the misperception that Palestine, at least every inch of it beyond “Israel’s 1967 borders,” including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem’s heart, belongs to “the Palestinians,” that Jewish presence there is “occupation,” and that ending that “occupation” urgently and without delay is what “the peace process” is about.

Commentary on the resolution has been about unjust association of the IDF with war crimes in last summer’s Israel-Hamas war (misleadingly called “the Gaza Conflict,” as though Israeli civilians weren’t targets of thousands of rockets and mortars), but This is the resolution that the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted on July 3, for which every European member of the Council – including Germany, France and England – affirmatively voted (emphasis added):

Resolution title: “Ensuring Accountability and Justice For All Violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem

Preamble paragraph:  “… the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, which is applicable to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Preamble paragraph:  “Stressing the urgency of achieving without delay an end to the Israeli occupation that began in 1967.”

Preamble paragraph:   “Deploring the non-cooperation by Israel with the independent commission of inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict and the refusal to grant access to or to cooperate with the international human rights bodies seeking to investigate alleged violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Operative paragraph 6:  “[The Human Rights Council] Calls upon all States to promote compliance with human rights obligations and all High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to respect, and to ensure respect for, international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem ….”

What I think the UNHRC’s July 3, 2015, “Gaza Conflict” resolution will be remembered, and quoted, for is not just its unjust association of the IDF with war crimes, but the joinder of the entirety of Europe, including Germany, England and France, on the side of the historicity of the Arab narrative of “the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

There is a limited amount that ordinary grassroots American Jews can do on our own.  One thing of course is to stop using the dirty words.  A second is to object to Jewish leaders and journalists who seem to wear, e.g., “West Bank,” on their sleeves, at times on their shoulders, using such terms, terms intentionally crafted to delegitimize Jews.

Here’s some of those heavily-media-used dirty words:  “1948 creation/founding of Israel … war that followed Israel’s creation … Palestinian refugees of the war that followed Israel’s creation … West Bank … East Jerusalem … Israel’s 1967 borders … East Jerusalem and West Bank Jewish settlements [in pointed contradistinction to Palestinian neighborhoods and villages] … occupied territories … Palestinian territories … the Palestinians.”

These words weren’t written in stone three thousand years ago.  The UN’s 1947 partition resolution said, not “West Bank,” but “the hill country of Samaria and Judea.”  It didn’t purport to partition Palestine between “Palestinians” and Jews, but into an “Arab” state and a “Jewish” state.  And it referred to Palestine’s Jews and Arabs (about 600,000 and c. a million, that’s all, respectively) as “the two Palestinian peoples.”

A third thing – recognizing the shonda on American democracy that an American city the size of Philadelphia has only one home-delivered daily newspaper – would be that if a second paper again comes along to this time support it, flock to it.  (When the briefly revived and quite good “Bulletin,” which didn’t seem to think advertisements were needed, gave up the ghost, I lamented in that week’s BSMW:  “A calamity befell all Philadelphians this week, but I fear too few will see it as such.”)

Other courses of action?  I’m open to your suggestions.

Regards,
Jerry