#772 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #772, 10/18/15

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  HonestReporting and CAMERA are loaded this week with examples [some “corrected,” for what that’s worth] of horrible headlining of Palestinian Arabs’ knife attacks on Israeli Jews.  Our hometown Inq ran a headline this morning that, by me, is open to being misread as Jews randomly killing three peaceable Arabs in retaliation for knifing attacks.  And the New York Times corrected a piece that last week had, mistakenly, questioned the Jewish Temples’ existence.  Or had it?

 This Week In The Inq:  “3 Palestinians Slain After Knife Attacks”

Our hometown Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) headlined on its front page this morning (Sun, 10/18/15)

“3 Palestinians Slain After Knife Attacks”

All that this Inq headline communicated to readers is that “3 Palestinians” had been “slain” and that this slaying had happened “after knife attacks” had occurred.

Start with “after.”  “After” suggests that the three Palestinians’ slaying was not part of, not directly connected with, the knife attacks, but was something that happened, literally, “after.”  Our Inq offered its readers no headline help on any connection between the “knife attacks” and these “3 Palestinians” afterwards getting slain.

But the Inq’s Washington Post’s article’s lede did provide such a nexus.  Indeed, one which might temper sympathy naturally generated for three seemingly by-happenstance-in-the-vicinity peaceable folks, identified simply as “Palestinians,” slain for no headlined-reason, who knows how long “after” the un-headline-connected “knife attacks.”  WP lede:  “. . . three Palestinian attackers wielding knives were shot dead by Israelis.”  [emphasis added and needed]

So why not an Inq headline

“3 Knife-wielding Palestinian Arab Attackers Shot”

It’s probably fair to assume, given, e.g., the news coverage of what page 1, paragraph 2, of this morning’s Inq WP article called “the unceasing attacks by Palestinian youths against Jewish targets,” and the publicity given a Palestinian Arab cleric’s illustrated anatomy lesson to followers on the most vital body spots for stabbing a Jew, that most Inq-headline readers would grasp that the “knife attacks” had been perpetrated by Arabs on Jews.

But [1] how long after those knife attacks were these three “Palestinians” slain, and [2] whether those  three slain, otherwise undescribed “Palestinians” were, if at all, connected with those knife attacks, were left completely open by the Inq’s headline “3 Palestinians Slain After Knife Attacks.”  Inq headline readers could fairly come away believing that, hours later, Israeli “extremists” had randomly picked out and murdered three innocent Arabs in a revenge attack.

An Inq headline unambiguously reflecting its headlined article’s lede – “three Palestinian attackers wielding knives were shot dead by Israelis” – would have precluded this.

Last Week In The New York Times:  Another NYT Attack on Jews’ Jerusalem Link?

There are two points to think about in assessing the New York Times’ “correction” of its original article on October 8 about the existence or not on the Temple Mount of the two Jewish Temples.

The New York Times’ October 8 Temple Mount article stated (emphasis added):

Within Jerusalem’s holiest site, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims, lies an explosive historical question that cuts to the essence of competing claims to what may be the world’s most contested piece of real estate.

The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered, is whether the 37-acre site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was also the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.

This is, of course, rubbish.  The scholarly uncertainty was not whether the Temples existed on the Mount, but precisely where on the Mount they were situated.

On reflection, the New York Times admitted as much, correcting its article text to read (emphasis added):

The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered, is where on the 37-acre site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.

[1]  The first of my two points is this.  Look at the NYT’s correction again, this time with different emphasis added:

The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered, is where on the 37-acre site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.

“Both long since gone” suggests that no physical evidence bearing on the Temples’ location on the Temple Mount remains.  “Long since gone” is an overstatement.  We likely know from physical evidence still present today on what part of today’s much larger Temple Mount Solomon’s Temple stood.

As explained in lay terms by, e.g., Hershel Shanks in “Jerusalem: An Archeological Biography,” archeologist Leen Ritmeyer has fitted together from physical evidence and a line of text in the Mishnah (second or third century CE) a convincing case on where on the Hasmonean and especially Herodian-expanded Mount the original 500 x 500 cubit square Temple Mount was.  It’s a piece of observation and reasoning well worth reading about.  To cite today’s physical evidence, the analysis uses the angle and distance from the eastern wall of one set of today’s western side set of steps, the structure of that set’s first step, which may be Solomonian, some northern wall-relevant findings by Warren, and a slight bend in the eastern wall that may mark where the southern wall stood.  Shanks says “most scholars” think Ritmeyer is right.  If so, the Temples’ location on the Mount has been substantially narrowed by physical evidence from ancient times still in existence.

[2]  What the New York Times expressly sought to purvey to readers in the original version of its October 8 article was, as it put it on October 8,

… an explosive historical question that cuts to the essence of competing claims to what may be the world’s most contested piece of real estate.

Precisely where on the Temple Mount the two Temples stood is hardly the stuff of “an explosive historical question.”  But whether the Temples stood there certainly is.  My guess is the NYT saw a chance to challenge historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem and took it.  Am I being fanciful?  Indisputably, the New York Times has done this before.

The August 5, 2005, N.Y. Times and International Herald Tribune reported on Israeli archeologist Eilat Mazar having unearthed in the City of David area of Jerusalem an enormous well-preserved public building dating back to the 10th century B.C.E. that may have been King David’s palace.  N.Y. Times (emphasis added):

The find will also be used in the broad political battle over Jerusalem–whether the Jews have their origins here and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians have said, including the late Yasser Arafat, the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.

International Herald Tribunes language (emphasis added) went even further, ending that “many Palestinians believe–including the late Yasser Arafat–that the notion of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a religious myth used to justify occupation and colonialism.

 

Regards,
Jerry

PS:  If all of this beating-up-on-the-Jews bothers you to the point of wanting to be part of standing up for the Zionists’ claim to the land of Israel as the Jewish people’s historical homeland, you might want to consider coming, if there’s any tickets left, to Wednesday night’s awards dinner at the City Line Hilton of the local chapter of the organization that for over a century has proudly called itself The Zionist Organization of America.  office@zoaphilly.org