Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #638, 3/24/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #638, 3/24/13

This Week In The Inq: Loaded Terms, Missing Facts Marred Obama Trip Coverage
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Did Israel get a fair shake in the mainstream media’s reporting on President Obama’s first presidential visit this week? In important respects, the answer is no.

“Two-States”

Take, for one thing, media portrayal of Netanyahu’s position, and non-portrayal of the Palestinian Arab position, on “two-states-for-two-peoples.” On Thursday, the Inq ran a Washington Post report (Inq, Thu, 3/21/13, A1, 6, Washington Post, Scott Wilson) that after calling Netanyahu “hard-line” (par. 2), went on:

Obama received a boost Wednesday from Netanyahu, who in the past has endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state with so many caveats that Palestinian leaders have dismissed the notion as a ploy.

In his opening statement, Netanyahu said: “Israel remains fully committed to peace and to the solution of two states for two peoples.’” It was one of his strongest public comments in favor of a Palestinian state.

What’s fundamentally outrageous here is that having called Bibi “hard-line” and cited Palestinian Arab leaders as having “dismissed” his qualified endorsement of the two-state solution as “a ploy,” the Washington Post became obligated to tell readers those Palestinian Arab leaders’ own position on two states, which, contrary to the impression left by the reporter’s remaining silent on that position, is one of total rejection.

“U.S. policy favors … a two-state solution, which would have a Palestinian state living in peace alongside a Jewish state of Israel” (Amb. George Mitchell quoted by AP, 4/17/09, Inq); “We have said many times that our vision is for a two-state solution that includes a Jewish democratic state of Israel” (Amb. Mitchell, 9/14/10); “… two states for two peoples, Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland of the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people” (Amb. Susan Rice, to Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, 12/14/11).

As Bibi was quoted in Thursday’s very Washington Post article, “Israel remains [n.b.] fully committed ,,, to the solution of two states for two peoples.” See also, e.g., Cabinet meeting statement 4/20/09, Amb. Prosor to U.N., 7/26/11.

Compare Abbas, 9/23/11: “They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond them with a final answer: ‘We shall not recognize a Jewish state,’ Abbas said….” (YNetNews.com)

Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick, Townhall.com, 8/5/11:

Israel has no one to negotiate with because the Palestinians reject Israel’s right to exist. This much was made clear again last month when senior PA ‘negotiator’ Nabil Sha’ath said in an interview with Arabic News Broadcast: “The story of ‘two states for two peoples’ means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people over here. We will never accept this.”

ZERO sense of this was purveyed by a Washington Post this week in the Inq that rested on telling readers that Netanyahu’s qualified endorsement [i.e., meeting Israel’s security concerns] of a western Palestine Arab state has been “dismissed” as “a ploy” by seemingly two-states-for-two-peoples-endorsing Palestinian Arabs.

“Israeli settlement construction on land it occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War”

The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson was back again on the front page of the Inq the next day, Friday (Inq, Fri, 3/22/13, A1, 8, Washington Post, Scott Wilson) with a news article referencing “settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem” and “Israeli settlement construction on land it occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War.”

A couple months ago, my co-author of Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-toZ, , Lee Bender, and I had the much-appreciated opportunity briefly to address Philadelphia’s Board of Trustees of the Federation of Jewish Agencies. I led off by telling them [1] Israel reporting is laced with imbalanced terms loaded against us; [2] we ourselves have fallen into using these terms; and [3] ironically, it’s the non-loaded terms that we should use, not the loaded ones that we do, that are actually grounded in history.

Western Palestine, the land of Israel, is disputed between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish people has a very strong and legitimate historical claim. It is no more “occupied” by Jews than by Arabs. “Judea and Samaria,” not “West Bank,” was the hill country’s name for 3,000 years. The U.N. itself used it in 1947. Jews are not “settlers” in Judea and Samaria, while Arabs (“The Palestinians”) “reside” there in “neighborhoods, towns and villages.” Or in neighborhoods of Jerusalem, a city’s that’s had a renewed Jewish majority since 19th century Turkish Ottoman rule, that’s been the capital of three states, all of them Jewish, in the past 3,000 years, that Palestinian Arabs have not ruled for one day in history, and foreign Arabs only for part of the time between 638 and 1099, and part of the city from 1948 to 1967, ending almost a half-century ago.

Obiter Dicta

The ZOA rightly assessed in a pair of simultaneously issued press releases on Friday that in his presidential visit this week “President Obama made a number of important, positive statements,” and also “a number of deeply troubling statements.” I commend to you both press releases.

My deep concern about President Obama’s understanding and appreciation of the Jewish people’s homeland connection to Israel centered upon his characterization of it in his 2009 Cairo speech as “rooted” in centuries of persecution of the Jewish Diaspora, culminating in the Holocaust. I’d written my first book, originally titled Homeland and in the updated edition Israel 3000 Years, to document historian James Parkes’ assertion that the continuous tenacious presence of the Yishuv all through the post-Biblical foreign rule centuries wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” I wrote in the preface: “The Jewish people’s sense of homeland is place-specific, Israel-specific. It would not play in Uganda.”

President Obama did an important and honorable thing in this visit in acknowledging the ancient Jewish connection to Israel. It’s not only Israel’s enemies (a/k/a “peace partners”) who challenge the Jewish people’s ancient homeland connection. Here’s how America’s Newspaper of Rectum characterized the significance of archeologist Eilat Mazar’s unearthing in 2005 in Jerusalem’s City of David an immense well-preserved 10th century BCE public building that may well be King David’s fabled biblical palace:

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. (New York Times, 8/5/05)

Regards,
Jerry