#776 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #776, 11/15/15

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  There are two things to look at this week in the Inq: imbalanced headlines, though hardly the most egregious of late, and delegitimizing terms, particularly in Thursday’s Inq’s Washington Post article on the new EU labeling guidelines.

 Perhaps, the time’s come, as a start, for grassroots initiative in getting our own advocates to cease using terms intentionally crafted to delegitimize us.  So, for those of you inclined to email me back, I give you a couple instances of BSMW involvement in actions before now, and ask would you join in emailing some of our own to stop, e.g., using “West Bank.”

This Week In The Inq: Telling Omissions in Inq Headlining of Arab Attacks on Israelis

Three Philly Inquirer (Inq) articles on Israel this week dealt with Arab attacks on Israelis.  None of the Inq’s three headlines fairly captured the Inq’s wire service article’s lede.

*** Monday’s (11/9/15, A16) Inq AP article led: “A Palestinian attacker rammed his vehicle into a group of Israelis standing at a hitchhiking station ….”  The Inq’s headline substituted an unidentified “Driver” for “Palestinian” –  “Driver’s Attack Injures 4 Israelis” – and failed to convey the brutality of an attacker having “rammed” his car into people standing in a group by the roadside.

*** Wednesday’s (11/11/15, A10) Inq AP article led: “Two Palestinian boys, ages 11 and 14, stabbed and wounded an Israeli guard on a train ….”  The lede paragraph then referenced a second knife attack by two Arabs, again in Jerusalem.  Identifying neither perpetrators nor victims, or even that two knifing attacks had occurred, the Inq headlined vaguely: “Jerusalem’s Lull is Shaken,” relegating to a much smaller sub-head: “Two Palestinian boys stabbed an Israeli, who shot, wounded one in response.”

*** Saturday’s (11/14/15, A4) Inq AP Around-the-World news squib led:  “A Palestinian gunman ambushed an Israeli family in the West Bank on Friday, killing a father and his son,” adding that Israeli security forces killed two Arabs in “clashes.”  The Inq’s headline – “West Bank: Violence Claims At Least Four More Lives” – failed to convey that while the two Arabs died in an Arab-Israeli “clash,” the Jewish father and son had been murdered in an “ambush.”

The Inq’s headline to its LA Times article Friday (11/13/15, A8) – “Palestinian Killed as Israelis Raid Hospital” – on the other hand, did clearly state who (“Israelis”) killed whom (“Palestinian”), if not in the course of clearly describing the circumstances.  An Arab who’d been wounded while stabbing a Jew “fled the scene and was later smuggled into the hospital for treatment.”   Israeli forces in Arab garb went to the Arab hospital and arrested the attacker.  The Arab they killed had “attacked them during the arrest.”  So he wasn’t as innocently uninvolved in violence as the Jews standing by the roadside (Monday’s article), guarding passengers on a train (Wednesday’s) or driving with family in a car (Saturday’s).  But you’d never glean any of this from the Inq’s headlines (“Driver’s Attack … Lull Shaken … Violence Claims … Israelis Raid Hospital”) this week in the Inq.

Would You Join In a Grassroots Campaign???

A few weeks short of 15 years ago, Dr. Goldblatt of the ZOA suggested to me that we start a “media watch” in the century-old fraternal order Brith Sholom.  I began reading our hometown Inq with a more critical eye and was shocked by what I saw – mainstream wire service news article after article insistently claiming there’d been “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants [Palestine’s entire population had been less than two million, a third of it Jews] from the creation of Israel.”  And by what I did not see, the Jewish community rising against such reporting. At a Brith Sholom Board of Governors meeting the first Sunday morning in January, 2001, we started this weekly emailed Brith Sholom Media Watch.

Our first campaign, so to speak, was against those “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” from the events of 1947-49.  It culminated in the spring of 2003 with a foreign staff research memo commissioned and honorably sent to me by the Inq’s then foreign editor, Ned Warwick, that “Mr. Verlin is right in saying there are not millions of refugees from the 1948 war” and that “the Inquirer has at times been too inexact in its use of language to state the number of people involved.”  This antedated by a year the successful campaign of CAMERA and others for mainstream media abandonment of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.”

Our second campaign, in anticipation of the Inq’s looming coverage of Israel’s then upcoming 60th independence anniversary commemoration in 2008, called on the Inquirer to correct four relentlessly-repeated misstatements of history in its Israel reporting: Stop calling the U.N.’s attempted 1948 partition of Palestine between its Jewish and Arab populations the “founding” and “creation” of Israel, as though artificially and out-of-the-blue;  stop calling the partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction “the war that followed Israel’s creation,” without the invading Arab states even named; stop blaming seemingly exclusively Arab refugees from the war begun by that Arab invasion “Palestinian refugees from the war that followed Israel’s creation”; and start mentioning with equal prominence and persistence that period’s greater number of mostly Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs who left tiny Israel.

We sent a 60-page dossier of Inquirer misstatements of history, and 150 BSMW readers’ endorsements, to then Inquirer publisher Tierney.  We claimed responsibility, as the saying goes, for all but the last line of a long Inq staff writer article on Israel’s milestone.  The Inq’s Mr. Matza, not known for expressing his views on the subject in that particular manner, wrote a 5/8/08 Inq Israel independence day piece, uncharacteristically referencing “the United Nations partition vote,” 1948 as the year “Israel gained its independence from the British,” and as the year “when the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq invaded the land Israel claimed as its home.”  It wasn’t until that article’s very last sentence that Mr. Matza signed off with a signature “the creation of Israel and war that followed.”

Now then, this week in the Inq:  Thursday’s (11/12/15, A2) Inq Washington Post article, “Israel Denounces New EU Rules on Labeling Products,” reported that the European Union has just enacted rules, affecting Israeli products made in “East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan Heights,”

“requiring that Jewish settlements clearly label export products as coming from occupied territories.”

The labels “must tell consumers they come from a ‘settlement’ in the territories, which were captured by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war,” and

must display labels such as ‘product from the Golan Heights (Israeli settlement)’ or ‘product from West Bank (Israeli settlement).

On the other hand:

Products produced by Palestinian-owned enterprises in the West Bank could be labeled ‘product from the West Bank (Palestinian product)’ or ‘product from Palestine.’

The Inq’s WP article quoted Palestinian Arab official Erekat “applauding” the EU move as “a significant move toward a total boycott of Israeli settlements, which are built illegally on occupied Palestinian lands,” and a U.S. State Department spokesman that “settlements are illegitimate.”

See also AP in Inq, Wed, 11/11/15, A10: “Palestinians say the unrest is the inevitable result of nearly 50 years of Israeli occupation and no hope for gaining independence”;  AP in Inq, Mon, 11/9/15, A16, referencing “a West Bank settlement” and “a Palestinian village”; McClatchy in Inq, Mon, 11/9/15, A16 (Joel Greenberg), referencing Netanyahu proposing easing “some restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank, steps that fall short of larger policy decisions like a freeze on Israeli settlement expansion that might help break the impasse on peace efforts.”

Language like this that delegitimizes Jewish homeland equity in Judea, Samaria and heart of Jerusalem permeates mainstream Western media reporting.  And, yes, alas, even the best of our own sometimes use these delegitimizing terms in their own writing.

But is it not more persuasive and self-respecting for us, rather than arguing that “West Bank Jewish settlements” are not “illegal” or “illegitimate,” to make the case that it’s Judea and Samaria, not “the West Bank,” and that they’re Jewish communities, not “Jewish settlements”?

It’s unrealistic to expect the Western media to start calling Judea-Samaria “Judea-Samaria” [which, btw, is what the U.N. itself did call it in 1947 – “the hill country of Samaria and Judea”], but what we could do, if we can get our own act together, is make clear to Western publics that in using “West Bank,” and all the other slanted terms, the media is parroting Israel-delegitimizing pejoratives.

Together with other media watchers, I’ve met in the past with Inquirer editors.  There is talk about arranging a meeting again.  I would be for such a meeting, not to schmooze, but to present to them, for the formality which that is worth, a list of imbalanced Arab-Israeli conflict reporting expressions, unequivocally shunned by us, which balanced reporting demands they cease using themselves.

It begins with us.  Would you be part of a grassroots effort, e.g., through emails, to bring to pro-Israel writers’ and advocates’ attention that particular terms that they used in specific instances are imbalanced against us and weakening the credibility of efforts to make clear that mainstream media use of them is imbalanced?  We could include specific instances in the media watch with contact info and balanced term example and context.  It would be a miniscule beginning, but judged even by the terminology used just this week in the Inq, it would be a step toward lighting candles instead of just cursing the darkness.  Worth a shot?

Regards,
Jerry