Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #645, 5/12/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #645, 5/12/13

This Week on an Egyptian English Language News Site: The Same Terms as The Inq’s
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A Jerusalem rabbi pointed me this week to Ahram Online, “the English language news website published by Al-Ahram Establishment, Egypt’s largest news organization, and the publisher of the Middle East’s oldest newspaper: the daily Al-Ahram, in publication since 1875.” (http://english.ahram.org.eg/UI/Front/Aboutus.aspx)

It’s worth taking a look at the words this major Arab news source uses in English, and how they are used. Three of its articles Saturday, two apparently by its staff and one by AFP, caught my attention. They furnish another lesson in everybody but us being consciously consistent in the language employed to deliver their message.

AFP: “West Bank Settlers Clash with Palestinian Neighbours”

Ok, this Saturday (5/11/13) Ahram Online AFP article is Egyptians telling English speakers how the French described Arabs and Jews throwing stones at each other in Palestine, but whoever chose the English words the English text of this article used, the message of those words was not subtle (emphasis added, but not by much):

Note the contrast of “settlers” versus “Palestinians,” and between “settlement” versus “town” and “village.”

*** “Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the northern West Bank hurled stones at each other on Saturday after the settlers marched into the village of Burin, witnesses said.”

*** “One villager was slightly hurt ….”

*** “An [Israeli] army spokeswoman told AFP that about 50 settlers and 20 Palestinians were involved ….”

*** “The Israelis came from the settlement of Yitzhar, home of a settler [31-year-old father of five] stabbed to death by a Palestinian ….”

*** “The killer came from the town of Tulkarem ….”

Ahram: European Report Says Israel Erodes Peace “To Point of Collapse”

A second Saturday Ahram Online article, this one by its own staff, reported that a report by the European Council of Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think-tank with former British and German foreign ministers among its 170 members, warns Israel that it risks international isolation and an “apartheid” fate “if it continues to entrench its illegal occupation of Palestinian land.”

Titled ‘Europe and the Vanishing Two-State Option,’ the report argues that the ceaseless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, the lockdown of Gaza, and the systematic undermining of Palestinian presence in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, have eroded the basis for a Palestinian state ‘to the point of collapse.’

But the unreality of the Two-State Solution, which is defined by both the U.S. and Israel as “two states for two peoples,” is firmly grounded in Palestinian Arabs’ adamant rejection of its fundamental essence, that one of the two states is Jewish.

Abbas. 9/23/11, the day he addressed the U.N. (YNetNews, 9/23/11, emphasis added):
“They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state,” Abbas said in a meeting with some 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the US, shortly before taking the podium and delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.
Caroline Glick’s Jerusalem Post column (Townhall.com, 8/5/11, emphasis added) quotied a senior P.A. negotiator stating clearly that Palestinian Arabs understand precisely what the U.S. and Israel mean by “two states for two peoples,” and that they expressly reject it:

Israel has no one to negotiate with because the Palestinians reject Israel’s right to exist. This much was made clear yet 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 here. We will never accept this.”

Ahram: “Mirage of Palestinian-Israeli Negotiations” Told in Loaded Terms

A third Saturday Ahram Online article, also staff-written, quoted a recent statement by Egypt’s foreign minister:

“… We, as Arab states, support the Palestinian position. Our position is also to support the Arab peace initiative [of 2002], which calls for the full (Israeli) withdrawal from all occupied territories to the borders of 7 June 1967 and a just solution that includes the creation of a sovereign Palestinian sates on the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 with its capital in East Jerusalem.”

Interestingly, this article (which, btw, called Israel’s capital “Tel Aviv”) had a realistic assessment of the significance of Israel’s insistence on Arab recognition of Israel as a Jewish state – “recognition from the Arabs that they – the Jews – had a historic right to the land before 1948.”

So there you have it. All these loaded terms, which we ourselves validate and honor by using them, are the paint in which the Arab narrative – Jews had no historic right to the land before 1948 – is painted for sale to English-speakers in the West.

Settlers versus Palestinians, settlements versus towns and villages, West Bank versus Judea-Samaria, East Jerusalem, occupied territories, Palestinian territories, occupied Palestinian territories, 1967 borders, a Palestinian state (as though Israel and Jordan aren’t), a “two-state” solution that’s not two-states-for-two-peoples, etc., no Jewish historic right to the land before 1948.

Working backward, in 1948 it was a homeland Jewish army that threw back five Arab invaders; Israel as the land’s next native state after Judaea; the Palestine Mandate with its Jewish National Home and close settlement of Jews on the land; San Remo; continuous tenacious post-biblical Jewish presence culminating in the Zionist movement; sovereign Hasmonean Judaea; the biblical kingdoms.

Regards,
Jerry