#871 9/10/17 – This Week: Updating “10 Misleading Expressions” – New Media Shots at Us in 2017

This Week:  Updating “10 Misleading Expressions” – New Media Shots at Us in 2017

My co-author Lee Bender and I have a speaking engagement tomorrow evening at a congregation sisterhood, based on our book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z.  We do a “Power Point” talk, but instead of it being based, as is our book, on examining an aspect of mainstream media anti-Israel bias beginning with every letter from A-to-Z, we pick “10 Misleading Expressions” the media uses and illustrate them and the actual facts with Power Point slides.

This being our first talk this synagogue program year that begins in the fall, this week we updated the “10 Misleading Expressions” with new material with which the media has thoughtfully provided us in 2017.  Here are some, so to speak, highlights.

***  “Millions of Palestinian Refugees and Their Descendants”

Challenging the mainstream media’s “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” from “Israel’s creation” or “the war that followed Israel’s creation” was this media watch’s First Crusade.  In the early years of this century and this media watch, the AP et ilk repeatedly told readers this mathematically monstrous misstatement. Palestine’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a third of it Jews; not all the Arabs lived in the part that became Israel, and not all of them left (largely under invading Arab encouragement to leave); and more Middle-eastern Jews, mostly absorbed by Israel, were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in that war for Israel’s destruction and its wake than Arabs left what became tiny Israel.

In 2003, this media watch received an acknowledgment from the Philadelphia Inquirer, followed by a “clearing the record,” that the actual count of Arabs who left was only in the hundreds of thousands.  In 2004, CAMERA and other media watchers obtained retraction of “millions” from the Western media’s bigs.  (The New York Times allowed that it had referred to the Palestinian Arab refugee count “imprecisely.”)  I thought we had definitively driven a stake through that vampire’s heart.

But over the years, this canard occasionally cropped up.  On 6/22/17, the Associated Press reported to the world from Jerusalem that “deep disagreements” in the peace process revolve around “borders, dueling claims to Jerusalem, and the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.”  So one of our updated slide show’s new additions is “The Lie that Never Dies.”

***  “Judea & Samaria” as “the Biblical Name” of “the West Bank”

 One of our ten misleading expressions is, of course, “West Bank,” coined by the invader Jordan in 1950 for the same reason the Romans had renamed Judaea as Palestine eighteen hundred years earlier – to disassociate pieces of the Jewish homeland from Jews.

The media doesn’t tell readers that Jordan coined “West Bank” in 1950.  It tells readers that “Judea and Samaria” (Hebrew-origin names) are “the biblical names” of “the West Bank.”  Our slide show includes maps and quotations showing continued use of “Judea and Samaria” as place names throughout post-biblical times, including by the UN in its Palestine partition resolution in 1947:  “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”

But on 2/8/17, in quoting an Israeli cabinet minister saying “Judea and Samaria,” the AP explained to readers he was “using a biblical name for the West Bank.”  A month later, 3/7/17, a second AP reporter, writing as well from Jerusalem, quoted a different Israeli cabinet minister saying “Judea and Samaria,” followed by an AP explanation:  “Judea and Samaria is the biblical term for the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.”

***  “East” Jerusalem and What’s Inside It

“East” Jerusalem is, of course, another of our top-ten misleading expressions.  We show a street map of the heart of the city and ask where one city stops and the other one starts.  We show a timeline of Jerusalem’s rulers (mostly non-Arab, and Palestinian-Arab never), pointing out a division of the millennia-old municipality – capital of three states in history, Judah, Judaea and Israel – for only 19 of its many thousand years, 1948-67, during invader Jordanian rule.

But on 5/23/17, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a photo of President Trump at the Wall, Inq-captioned “President Trump visits the Western Wall in East Jerusalem ….”

We show a 3/27/17 AP article citing “settlement construction in east Jerusalem, where more than 200,000 Israelis now live.”  We add on that slide the statement that from King David’s time through the mid-twentieth century (i.e., three thousand years), nobody called Jews in Jerusalem – the capital of three states during that time, all of them Jewish – “settlers.”

We contrast same day, 7/15/17, Washington Post and Jerusalem Post news articles on the murder of two Israeli police officers by three Israeli-Arabs inside the Old City Lions’ Gate.  The JP called it a “terror attack” near “the Temple Mount.”  The WP called it a “bold attack” at “the entrance to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.”  (The Philly  Inquirer headlined it: “5 Die in Shootout in Israel.”)

Two days later, 7/17/17, the Washington Post referred to the site as “one of Islam’s holiest sites . . . . the sacred Al-Aqsa mosque compound, a site that is also revered by Jews . . . .  Israelis, who refer to the site as the Temple Mount [how quaint].”

We say as a preface to our “10 Misleading Expressions” that reporting on Israel is laced with Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives, and that even when the media gets the facts of particular stories right, the reporting remains inherently biased.  We add, though, that these loaded expressions – e.g., “Jews as Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem settlers … 1949 ceasefire lines as Israel’s 1967 borders . . . Palestinian [as opposed to two-sided] refugee issue ,” etc. – weren’t written in stone three thousand years ago, but are post-Israel-independence creations.  In the struggle for Western perception of homeland equities in the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict, we can confront and contest the loaded expressions, beginning by ceasing to mouth them ourselves.