#800 5/1/16 (Media’s Loaded Lexicon)

 

The Loaded Lexicon of Poisoned Pejoratives Pervading Israel Reporting:  Whose Fight Is This Anyway?

Well, if I really can count to 800, I calculate that this is my 800th week of railing against the loaded lexicon of poisoned pejoratives permeating the mainstream Western media’s Israel reporting.  Lately, I’ve been agitating for more folks to involve themselves in this fight.

#1 – Our Community-Owned Voice in the Media

The April 7 edition of Philadelphia’s Jewish community-owned Jewish Exponent carried an editorial and an op-ed that caught my attention.

The op-ed author expressed being “troubled” by some expressions used by some in our community, such as “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.”  That week’s Exponent editorial, “The Human Rights Smoke Screen,” deplored U.N. organizations putting their hechsher on loaded expressions like “occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”  Last week’s April 21 Exponent edition carried my letter “to the Editor”:

Exponent Should Battle Loaded Terminology

The “Divisive Discourse on Israel” op-ed (April 7) cited a number of Jewish homeland delegitimizing expressions, starting with “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank,” used by some in our community, with which the author rightly declared himself “troubled.” We should all feel troubled.

The Exponent’s own editorial (“The Human Rights Smoke Screen,” April 7) cited even more deeply delegitimizing expressions applied to Israel by U.N. organizations — such as “occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem” — with which we should be even more deeply troubled.

Our Jewish Exponent, among its other functions, is our community’s voice in the media realm, which is saturated in reporting on Israel, with Israel-delegitimizing expressions. Its editorial concluded its lament over “blaming of Jews for the miseries of the Middle East” by asking, “When will it end?” It won’t before we, as a community, combine in active effective efforts to end it. The Exponent’s role in this is to contest the mainstream media’s loaded lexicon of anti-Israel pejoratives.

Jerome R. Verlin | Elkins Park

This was not my first effort at suggesting to our organized community that this was its fight.

The Exponent’s previous editor, a Liberal with a capital-L, gamely had lunch early in her term with a small group of our local ZOA leaders, of which I was one.  We went around the table and each of us got to suggest to her one change the Exponent should make.  In my turn, per recollections in BMSW #495 a few years ago, I said that

when our community’s mainstream daily newspaper disparages Israel unfairly, it’s not just denigrating perceived “right-wingers” like me, but our entire community, and that our community leadership – our Federation, our Board of Rabbis, our Jewish Exponent – should be at the forefront of our community standing against it.

Before Lisa was Jonathan, who began his remarks to the Brith Sholom brunch which we invited him to address with “Jerry doesn’t think I’m tough enough.”

Before Jonathan was Buddy, for whom I held high hopes, his having led a local CAMERA – local ZOA – Brith Sholom anti-Israel bias protest on the sidewalk of our hometown Philly Inquirer’s (Inq’s) dark tower on Callowhill Street in which I’d participated.  In a personal letter to him during his Exponent stewardship I pleaded:

Left to themselves, the Inquirers in the media will continue to ride roughshod over Middle East history, to Israel’s great detriment in the continuing struggle between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine.  In Philadelphia, our Philadelphia Jewish Exponent is all that stands in the way of our Philadelphia Inquirer having the field to itself….

What if you were given five minutes to stand before the Board of Trustees of the Philadelphia Federation of Jewish Agencies and tell them, while all of us stood on one leg, that anti-Israel media bias was our organized community’s fight?  It turns out that my Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z co-author Lee wheedled us ten minutes, so I said in my five that years ago I’d represented my organization, Brith Sholom, in that very building when the then-editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer addressed JCRC.  I said that at that meeting I’d initiated a discussion with that Inq editor that culminated a year later with that paper’s foreign editor honorably sending me a foreign staff research memo he’d commissioned commencing “Mr. Verlin is right in saying that there weren’t ‘millions’ of refugees from the 1948 war ….,” that the Inquirer at times had been too inexact in stating the number of refugees.  I asked the Federation’s Trustees, “So who’s Mr. Verlin?” , that should not that memo have said “The organized Jewish community is right in saying that there weren’t millions of 1948 refugees….”?

#2 – ZOA Activists

Lee and I had an article this week in the Spring 2016 edition of National ZOA’s handsomely-designed, Israel advocacy-packed semi-annual ZOA Report, including departments such as by   ZOA’s Center For Law and Justice, this edition focusing on countering campus anti-Semitism, and Israel Office, this edition focusing on Arab incitement and the Legal Grounds campaign advocating Jewish rights to our homeland, supporting the rights of all Jews, in Israel and the Diaspora.  Our three-page article, “Words That Hurt,” urged ZOA members to involve themselves in the campaign to root out Jewish homeland-disparaging terms from private and public discourse.

With a major United Nations agency, with the shocking joinder of France and other free nations, having just expunged Jewish (and Christian) connection to the Temple Mount, down to “the al-Buraq Wall plaza,” the consequences of averting our eyes from terminology and perceptions intended to delegitimize us have never been plainer.  We said in this article, excerpted by ZOA Report in a side-bar headline:

Scholars say, “History is what historians say it is.”  But, in reality, history is what ordinary people believe it is.  If we forfeit the public-perception-forming word choices of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we forfeit our people’s history.

If you’d like to look at this article, with its “baker’s dozen of poisoned pejoratives” we have to stop saying ourselves, go to www.zoa.org, click “Magazines” in the home page menu bar, select the top “ZOA Report Spring 2016,” and scroll down to page 46.

#3 – Jewish and Christian Groups in Our Area

When our anti-Israel media bias book, Pressing Israel, came out, Lee and I began giving a Powerpoint talk to synagogue and other groups in the Philly area.  I illustrate ten terms the media uses to disparage the Jewish homeland, and Lee follows with in-depth issues in which media bias distorts historical and current events realities.

Videos of a recent presentation are now on the website www.factsonisrael.com, which is still a work in process, but click on “Videos” in the menu bar at the top, and they’re right there – starting with “10 Toxic Terms – Part 1, 1 through 5.”

The question I posed at the top:  “The Loaded Lexicon of Poisoned Pejoratives Pervading Israel Reporting:  Whose Fight Is This Anyway?”  I’ll stand on the way I put it to Lisa at lunch:  When our community’s mainstream daily newspaper disparages Israel unfairly, it’s not just denigrating perceived “right-wingers” like me, but our entire community.  If, like the Exponent op-ed author I quoted above, you’re troubled by terms like “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank,” by UNESCO expunging Jewish (and Christian) connection to the site where two Jewish Temples stood for a millennium, down to the “al-Buraq Wall plaza” of the not-Temple Mount, make yourself part of this fight.  Start by stopping your own use of terms designed  to delegitimize us, and lean on others to stop.  And then, as we said in our ZOA Report article:  “And then, together, let’s lean on the mainstream media to clean up its language.”