AP This Week: “Israeli Military says it struck several militant sites in Gaza,” quoting IDF lower down saying “terrorist groups” [emphasis added]
This morning’s (Sunday, 7/3/16,A6) Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) carried an AP article, leading
“The Israeli military says it struck several militant sites in Gaza early Sunday in response to a rocket attack that hit a kindergarten [empty at the time] in the Israeli border town of Sderot.” [emphasis added]
Further down in the article (paragraph 3), the AP reiterated:
“The military said airstrikes targeted four training sites run by Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers. [emphasis added]
The only Israeli quoted in this AP article (pars. 4 and 5) was indeed an Israeli military spokesman. Here’s what the AP itself said that he said:
“Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said the rocket attack was ‘a horrific reminder of the intentions of terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip to target communities, people, men women and children.
“’Over the past two days Israeli civilians have witnessed and experienced the devastating effects of incitement-fueled terrorism based on hatred and radical beliefs,’ he said.” [emphasis added]
I sent a comment to the AP at http://www.ap.org/contact-us/general-information, saying they should not lead with “The Israeli military says it struck several militant sites” unless it puts right up there in its lede a direct quote of an Israeli military spokesman actually saying “militants.”
Final paragraph 6 of this morning’s AP article reported:
“On Friday, a Palestinian gunman ambushed a family traveling in a car in the West Bank, killing an Israeli man and wounding his wife and two children. The previous day, a Palestinian teen stabbed a 13-year-old Israeli American to death as she slept in her bedroom in a West Bank settlement.” [emphasis added]
Read that just-quoted AP paragraph in this morning’s newspapers, from which the T-word is conspicuously absent, in the context of the following article in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post:
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation attempted to include a section in the 15-page resolution stating that “self-determination and national liberation does not constitute terrorism.”
NEW YORK – Israel’s Mission to the United Nations said that it managed to thwart an attempt by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to insert language justifying terrorism in the UN Counter-Terrorism Strategy resolution passed on Friday by the General Assembly.
The resolution, which was adopted by consensus, focuses on adapting the UN’s global counter-terrorism strategy to current threats by calling the international community to “step up their efforts” against terror and reaffirm their unequivocal condemnation of terrorism “in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes.”
Yet according to the Israeli mission at the international body, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation attempted to include a section in the 15-page resolution stating that “self-determination and national liberation does not constitute terrorism.”
Israel’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, Ambassador David Roet, addressed the General Assembly on Friday and spoke about the murder on Thursday of Hallel Yafa, and the attack against a family in Hebron on Friday morning.
“Do these murders not constitute terrorism?” he asked. “Do these attackers not constitute terrorists? The UN must decide if it wants to be a relevant actor in facing the challenges of terrorism in the 21st century, or if it prefers to cave in to narrow political interests of a number of member-states,” Roet said….
Well said, but our struggle runs deeper than the scope of the T-term. We must contest the vastly widespread perception that what’s going on in “the West Bank” (and “East” Jerusalem) is a one-way struggle by “the Palestinians” for self-determination and national liberation from “occupying” Israel and “Jewish settlers.”
We, all of us, without regard to support or not for final borders that would leave Israel 9 miles wide in the critical lowland middle where most of its population resides, must make the case that on both historical and legal grounds, the Jewish homeland – in which today’s State of Israel is the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea – includes what the UN itself in 1947 called “the hill country of Samaria and Judea” (because “West Bank” had not yet been coined by then Transjordan) and Jerusalem’s core (with its 1800’s-restored Jewish majority).
Making the Jewish homeland case begins with we ourselves abandoning the terms – all of them – coined to disparage and ridicule that very case.
Best Jewish History Books – Period: Modern Israel’s Struggle for Independence
Fifteen and a half years ago, I started this weekly media watch because there seemed to me an unmet need in our community to respond, initially, to the media’s insistent “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation,” and thereafter to other misleading media-purveyed misperceptions of Israel.
There has long seemed to me an unmet second need, a need to encourage pro-Israel members of the Jewish and broader American communities to familiarize ourselves more fully with some of the illuminating inspiring, mostly non-fiction, books on critical eras of mostly homeland Jewish history. As I said in a recent watch, for half-a-century I’ve haunted “used” book stores and Jewish neighborhood friends-of-library book sales and have accumulated a personal collection of close to a thousand “Jewish history” books.
My association with Pavilion Press has enabled me to put this personal obsession onto a sharing basis. This week I want to tell you briefly about three “used” books on a momentous Jewish history event that occurred in our time – the homeland’s struggle for renewed independence.
If you have not read The Revolt by Menachem Begin, you have short-changed your own understanding and appreciation of a supreme Jewish history moment that, if you’re my age, occurred in your lifetime. The Muslim nations sought this week in the UN to exclude terrorism in the name of national liberation from terrorism, and Israel, as quoted above, opposed this. The Irgun did not bomb the King David Hotel because it was a hotel, which would have been terrorism, but because it was the headquarters of the British effort to prevent Jews, in violation of what the Mandate with its Jewish National Home was all about, from reaching their homeland. And warning was given. This, among other key events in the struggle, in Begin’s own words, is in The Revolt. Pavilion Press has one copy on the “used” books virtual shelves.
One tremendously moving aspect of the Jewish people’s mid-twentieth century struggle to regain independence in the homeland was the Aliyah Bet. I’ve read every book on it I could find. Some of them, Gruber’s, Patzert’s and Holly’s in particular, are very engrossing. By me, the most moving of the lot is Arie Eliav’s The Voyage of The Ulua. There are moments in that book on Holocaust survivors’ struggles to reach the ships, and on that particular ship’s preparation and voyage into the teeth of the utterly unjust and unlawful British blockade that will remain in your memory for a long time to come. One copy on the virtual shelf.
By me, a particularly moving book that takes you right there on the ground in both Israel and diplomatic halls in the 1948 war is Dan Kurzman’s Genesis 1948. We have three copies of this acclaimed account on Pavilion’s virtual shelves.
If any of this means something to you, visit www.pavilionpress.com, select “Facts On Israel,” then “Used Books” and then “Modern Times.”
We have lots of books on many eras to put on the virtual shelves, and will offer comments on a few of what I’ve found myself as the most moving and illuminating in future weeks.