#771 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #771, 10/11/15

 

This Week In The Inq: “Palestinian Leader Calls For Calm [not exactly] Amid Fighting [not exactly]”

Compare these two takes published on the same day this week – Wednesday, 10/7/15 – on the same thing, the nature of violence in Israel and Palestinian Authority President Abbas’ role in it.

Start with the two headlines, which have two different takes on two aspects:

Philadelphia Inquirer headline to AP article, Wed, 10/7/15 (A9):

“Palestinian Leader Calls for Calm Amid Fighting”

The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh writing in http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6647/ abbas-palestinians/murder, Wed, 10/7/15, headline:

“Abbas Calls for Murder, Palestinians Attack”

The reality is that Toameh is right, and the AP and our hometown Inquirer wrong, on both counts: the violence going on in Israel is in fact Palestinian Arab attacks and Israeli responses, not contextless “fighting,” and Abbas can fairly be called “calling for calm” only to the extent that an arsonist posing with a bucket of water beside the raging forest fire he started can fairly be called Smoky The Bear.

Not that the Inq’s 9-paragraph AP article Wednesday didn’t portray the forest fire as having spontaneously ignited:  Paragraph 1: “heightened unrest”;  par. 2: “outbreak of fighting”;  par. 3: “clashes erupted”;  par. 5: “the violence”;  par. 8: “clashes took place”;  par. 9: “clashes also erupted….”

And not that the Inq’s AP article Wednesday (paragraph 2) didn’t portray Abbas as the Peace Dove and Bibi as the War Hawk:

The comments [Abbas’ call “for calm” Tuesday] marked the Palestinian leader’s strongest attempt yet to restore calm after the worst outbreak of fighting in months, and came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to take even tougher measures to quell the violence.  [emphasis added, but not by much]

Toameh, in his article Wednesday, dates the recent rise above the background level of anti-Israel incitement to the arson attack in July that killed three members of an Arab family in Judea-Samaria.  (The perpetrators have never been identified, but “settlers” are blamed because crude Hebrew was sprayed on the walls, even though the house was in the center, not near the edge, of the Arab village in which the family was reportedly engaged in a long-running intra-Arab feud.)

“Since then,” Tomeah wrote on Wednesday, “Abbas and his senior officials have been waging an unprecedented campaign of incitement against Israel in general” and “settlers” in particular.  Specifically, Tomeah cites Abbas accusing Israel of promoting “a culture of terror and apartheid,” and of whipping up Temple Mount-centered fury by accusing Jews of “defiling the Aqsa Mosque with their filthy feet,” and by declaring “Every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood.”  He cites statements of captured Arab attackers of Jews that they were defending the Al Aqsa Mosque as their having literally acted upon “precisely what Abbas and other PA officials have been telling them for the past few months.”

AP and Inq on Palestinian Arab Anti-Israel Incitement

A classic case of the AP and Philadelphia Inquirer collaborating to pooh-pooh Israeli concern over Palestinian Arab leaders inciting their masses occurred on November 4, 2010.  On that day, the Inq ran an AP news article that it headlined

Israel To Monitor Palestinian “Incitement”

with the word “incitement” in Inquirer-quotes to portray it as merely an Israeli claim, and followed it with the Inq sub-head:

Palestinians Accused Netanyahu of Trying To Divert Attention from the Impasse in Talks

The AP article text adopted the Palestinian Arab view.  It portrayed Israel’s “announcement” that it planned to monitor the incitement (which the AP neglected to state that the Road-Map called on Palestinian Arabs to cease), not the incitement itself, as having “further strained” the “increasingly tense” atmosphere following breakdown of peace talks.

Why Media Watchers Should Attend Philly ZOA’s Gala Wednesday, October 21

In last week’s #770, I told you about Philly ZOA’s gala awards dinner on Wednesday, October 21, and asked you to join in honoring the deserving awardees who’ve rendered outstanding service to Israel and our Jewish community.

This week, let me give you, more directly, a media watcher reason to attend.

Twice, in my memory, members of the Philadelphia Jewish community stood in sidewalk protest at the Philly Inquirer’s then headquarters, its Dark Tower on Callowhill Street, demanding an end to our hometown paper’s anti-Israel imbalance.  I participated in both.  And both, though years ago, bear on your attending Philly ZOA’s awards dinner later this month.

Three groups – Philly ZOA, Brith Sholom and CAMERA’s then chapter in Philly – organized the first Inq-sidewalk demonstration, in 1988.  (Those of you Brith Sholom members who remember its Israel Activities Committee under the leadership of Gene Cohen and Art Rubinstein have a model of proud activism to look back upon.)  Years later, Philadelphia Jewish journalist Leon Brown told us at a Brith Sholom convention (in the Catskills or Poconos, I don’t remember) that “the community was not with us on that occasion.”  But like the Brith Sholom of those days, Philly ZOA was in the thick of it.

The second demonstration, organized principally by Philly ZOA, with Brith Sholom and me tagging along, was in the summer of 2002.  I remember, because as its executive vice-president and then president, I represented Brith Sholom at JCRC, that the community was likewise not with us on that occasion.  At the demonstration on the Inq’s sidewalk, I was given the honor  to be one of the three speakers.  At the top of my voice, I told Inq editor Lundy, who honorably stood there in the hot midday July sun for an hour hearing us out, that we were there that day because murderers of Israeli civilians are terrorists, not “militants,” and because, despite what the AP and Inq were repeatedly printing, there hadn’t been “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation,” but hundreds of thousands from the Arab invasion for tiny Israel’s destruction, exceeded by that era’s media-ignored,mostly-Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands.

Those two much-needed ZOA-led Inq sidewalk demonstrations, protesting our hometown paper’s anti-Israel imbalance, aren’t the direct reason for you to attend Philly ZOA’s October 21 gala, but the reality that if there’ll one day be another such still much-needed protest demonstration, Philly ZOA will be at the heart of it, and likely be the prime organizer of it, is. Along, of course, with all the other grassroots members-involved activist work Philly ZOA does.

And I’ll add this.  This isn’t a formal assigned-tables dinner, but a wide good food choices (and sinful desserts) buffet at which you’ll get to mingle with and meet some of the most active among our fellow pro-Israel Jews, and hear truly inspiring speeches.

Community Announcement

PHILLY ZOA AWARDS DINNER

Wednesday evening, October 21

Hilton Hotel

4200 City Avenue, Philadelphia

Info: office@zoaphilly.org

Regards, and hope to see you there,
Jerry