#764-65 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #764-65, 8/30/15

A Disturbing Inq Habit:  Playing Up “Victim’s” Foreign Connection When Israel Blamed

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Sometimes when you look, not just at today’s morning paper or even at this week’s, but at a longer course of a daily paper’s coverage of an aspect of international news, as I had occasion to do these past couple weeks, you begin to see slights made manifest more by recurrence than by degree of outrage in the individual case.  In the instances cited below, our Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) seemed selective in drawing into headlines ethnicity of foreigners who became involved in the long conflict between Arabs and Jews, with that selectivity based on whether, in the Inq’s eyes, Israel was to blame. [emphasis added throughout]

Case #1:  Italian Protestor Headlined, Meat-cleavered American Rabbis Not

Compare these two Philadelphia Inquirer headlines one week apart:

Israeli Troops Wound Italian

“4 Jerusalem Worshipers Slain”

The 11/29/14 Philadelphia Inquirer carried a news service article reporting that the Israel Defense Force had injured an Italian participating in Palestinian Arab demonstration in Samaria [“West Bank”] “after tear gas and other crowd-control measures failed to stop them from burning tires and throwing rocks.”

Disregarding the context – participation in a tire-burning, rock-throwing protest that tear gas and other crowd-control measures failed to control – entirely, the Philly Inquirer seized for its headline upon an anti-Israel inciting irrelevancy: “Israeli Troops Wound Italian.”

Ten days earlier, 11/19/14, that same Philadelphia Inquirer ran a front-page article reporting that Palestinian Arabs rampaging in a Jerusalem synagogue with meat cleavers and guns slaughtered four rabbis in a blood-soaked prayer shawls scene.   The Inquirer headlined,

 4 Jerusalem Worshipers Slain

neatly suppressing the ethnicities of both perpetrators and victims.  In point of fact, three of those four “Jerusalem Worshipers” were joint American-Israeli citizens.  That they were Americans, and were rabbis meat-cleavered to death for being rabbis in prayer shawls at prayer, was at least as relevant to an Inquirer headline as was the Italian ethnicity of the participant in the rock-throwing anti-Israel riot who, as far as we know, was not singled out by the IDF because he didn’t look “Palestinian.”

Case #2:  “Palestinian-American” Teen, but not “Israeli-American” Teen

The Sunday 6/15/14 Philadelphia Inquirer headlined its Washington Post news article reporting that three Israeli teens, one of whom “is a dual Israeli-American citizen, as “Netanyahu: 3 Teens Kidnapped.”

On the other hand, the 4/18/13 Inquirer headlined as “Palestinian-American Teen Gets Two-Week Prison Term” an article that an Israeli court had given a two-week [international news?] jail term to an Arab youth who the military said “threw rocks at vehicles on a highway and at Israeli forces on several occasions.”

Case #3:  “Israel: American Inmate Dies In Raid”  [not exactly]

The 2/24/14 Philadelphia Inquirer headlined a brief AP piece

Israel: American Inmate Dies In Raid

Not exactly.  The Inq’s own AP piece led:

“A U.S.-born inmate shot and wounded three guards Sunday before being killed by a SWAT team that responded to the attack.”

Here’s how Israel Hayom that same day, 2/24/14, headlined and summarized that Israeli “raid” on its own prison:

Israeli-American Murderer Killed in Prison Shootout

Israel Hayom sub-head:  “Samuel Sheinbein, serving a life sentence for a gruesome 1997 murder in Maryland, shoots eight people at Rimonim Prison before being killed by police special forces….”

Case #4:  Inq:  IDF Shooting [Rioting] “Israeli-Arab” Man “Triggers Riots”

Sunday, 9/9/14’s Philadelphia Inquirer headlined:

Israel: Police Shoot Israeli-Arab Man, Triggering Riots

The brief Bloomberg News article which this Inquirer headline graced led (emphasis added)

Police shot and killed an Israeli Arab man who attacked officers with a knife, setting off riots outside his village in northern Israel.

Certainly, the text of that brief Bloomberg article, the record on which the Inq fashioned its headline, required reference to the Israeli-Arab man as the attacker, particularly given the Inq’s headline kicker of the police’s shooting of that man as “triggering riots.”

But this police action “triggered riots” only in the sense of fueling riots that were already raging all week, incited by Arab leaders, blame for which the Inq and its mainstream media sources did not lay at the feet of its causers.  Only Israel got Inq headline blame for “triggering riots.”

In a “Behind the Headlines” press release Wednesday (11/5/14), the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the points:

The Palestinians have carried out three terrorist attacks in Jerusalem in less than two weeks and instigated numerous riots on the Temple Mount since the summer.  Incitement and the glorification of terrorists have played an important role in triggering the violence and in encouraging further attacks.

With the Western media casting causation on Israel.

Case #5:  “ISRAEL: Canadian Premier Heckled”

Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, a Western democracy with a land mass several zillion times Israel’s, visited Israel and delivered a ringing address to the Knesset in January 2014, garnering a standing ovation.  Among the newsworthy things Canada’s Prime Minister said:

Our view on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is absolute and non-negotiable….

… we refuse to single out Israel for criticism on the international stage.

… Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state.

… And we understand that Israelis live with this impossible calculus:  If you act to defend yourselves, you will suffer widespread condemnation over and over again.  But, should you fail to act, you alone will suffer the consequence of your inaction, and that consequence will be final, your destruction.

It was at the “apartheid” point that two Arab members of Israel’s parliament, per Politics-Canada, “started yelling and waving their hands, then stormed out of the Knesset.  The remaining Knesset members then rose in a lengthy standing ovation for Harper.” 

The Philly Inquirer ran a one-paragraph “Around the World” AP squib Tuesday, 1/21/14, which led that the Canadian PM “got a taste of Israel’s rough-and-tumble parliament when he was heckled by Arab lawmakers.”  The squib went on to mention that Harper was “praising Israel” and condemning boycotts and “apartheid” claims, and ended that “after the outburst, Harper received a standing ovation from other parliamentarians.” 

The international news story here was the Prime Minister of Canada calling “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state absolute and non-negotiable,” stating Canada’s refusal to join in “singling out Israel for criticism on the international stage,” denouncing claims that Israel (with its Arab MPs and all) is an “apartheid state,” and recognizing that “if you act to defend yourselves, you will suffer widespread condemnation, over and over again.”  Instead, the AP let a pair of this Jewish state’s Arab Knesset members hijack this news story with outbursts.

In headlining this squib “ISRAEL – Canadian Premier Heckled,” and not “Canada PM: Israel’s Right to Exist as Jewish State ‘Absolute and Non-Negotiable’,” the Inq served as these Arab hijackers’ willing executioner.

Let the record show, though, that in his Philly.com blog,  the Inq-related Philadelphia Daily News’ Stu Bykofsky, saw Harper’s Knesset appearance for what it was, and told readers so:

Speaking to the Israeli Knesset on what is Martin Luther King Jr. day in the States (Rev. King was a Zionist, which means those who believe the Jewish people are entitled to a homeland) Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper laid down a gripping declaration of why Canada does, and the West should, embrace the Jewish state.

Mostly, it was a shared belief in justice, freedom and democracy, something absent in the rest of the Middle East (and much of the world).

“Israeli Troops Wound Italian . . . Israel: American Inmate Dies In Raid . . . Israel: Canadian Premier Heckled [without stating it was two Arabs who heckled him in the face of a standing ovation]” and these other misleading headlines, and missing American ethnicities from the other cited headlines manifest yet one more facet of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s derisive view of the Jewish homeland of Israel.  Should a chance come again to challenge its monopoly as Philadelphia’s daily international news newspaper, we should leap on it.  In the meantime, we should make as many people aware of its imbalance as we can.

Regards,
Jerry