Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #647, 5/26/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #647, 5/26/13

This Week In The Media’s Vulture Club: “IDF Lies … Thinks Earth Is Flat”
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What’s now 646 weeks ago, I began this media watch because it seemed to me then that the mainstream Western media gracing the news pages of our hometown Philadelphia Inquirer (“Inq”) regarded Israel and by extension the Jewish homeland’s supporters with ill-disguised disdain and contempt. How else, it seemed to me as I pounded out “BSMW Alert #1,” could you explain the media’s Bigs attributing “nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants” to “the creation of Israel” when there were in 1948 less than two million people in Palestine, a good third of them Jews, when what these media Bigs called “the creation of Israel” was in reality a war for Israel’s destruction begun by an invasion by multiple Arab nations not even media-named?

OK, the MSM years ago stopped saying “millions” (as the august New York Times put it, they’d referred to the number of Arab refugees “imprecisely”), but the “1948 creation and founding of Israel,” as though ex nihilo and artificially, remained. As has the rest of the loaded lexicon – “West Bank … East Jerusalem … Jewish settlers versus ‘Palestinian’ villagers … 1967 borders … ‘militants’ instead of terrorists … ‘the Palestinians … ‘hard-line Netanyahu versus ‘moderate’ Abbas,” etc, etc – in which we self-disrespectfully join. A good bit more about that below, but first, ask yourself whether the al-Dura fiasco, which began the year before this media watch, bubbling up now and again, and which exploded last week and this week, if not in headlines in the Inq, rises to the magnitude in media contempt for Israel and the Jewish homeland’s supporters of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation.”

Last week’s #646 recapped the devastating impact on Israel’s image of the year 2000 France 2 video of a young Palestinian boy first shown crouching behind a barrel with his father during an IDF-Gazans firefight and then shown lying limp in his father’s lap, having died, said France 2, “under a hail of Israeli bullets.” That video went super-viral, inflaming “the second intifada,” bin-Laden, the beheaders of Daniel Perl, etc. etc. A French Jewish media personality, Philippe Karsenty, early on called the whole thing a hoax, and got sued by France 2 in seesaw litigation a ruling in which was set for this week and has been postponed until June. Israeli response over time went from possible unintentional shooting through highly unlikely to the Israeli report handed to Netanyahu last week, denying that Israeli bullets had struck the boy and challenging whether any other bullets did either. That forceful Israeli report should have been Big News, rather than Non-News, Last Week In The Inq.

The Inq might have redeemed itself had it picked up This Week what, e.g., the Washington Free Beacon reported on Wednesday (5/22/13). Under the headline “Reporters, Human Rights Activists Trash Israel on Secret Facebook Site,” that news source led:

A ‘secret’ Facebook group of foreign correspondents and human rights activists quickly devolved into an anti-Israel hatefest on Tuesday following the release of a new Israeli government report that cleared the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of wrongdoing in the 2000 death of a Palestinian boy.

The Israeli government report contests the claim that the IDF killed a Palestinian boy, Mohammad al-Durrah, in a famous 2000 incident in Gaza that helped ignite the Second Intifada.

Journalists and activists mocked the report, attacked the IDF, and claimed pro-Israeli lobbyists were influencing the media coverage, in a private Facebook group for foreign correspondents known as the ‘Vulture Club.’

Vultures quoted in the article included “a senior official at Human Rights Watch” who immediately dismissed the Israeli report as “typical IDF lies,” and an Associated Press photojournalist who quipped “the IDF thinks the earth is flat, btw.” (BTW, if the earth is
flat that’s because it’s been trampled flat by the AP et ilk’s “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation.”)

The media’s rush to anti-Israel judgment began on the night the video first aired, with the unsupported accusation the young Arab boy died “under a hail of Israeli bullets.” This week, the new Israeli report was greeted with the same rush to judgment, media and “human rights’ activists’” anti-Israel judgment, at “the Vulture Club,” a “group of foreign correspondents and human rights activists” that “has around 3,500 members.”

What’s the answer? Stop using these terms – all of the loaded lexicon’s terms, from renaming Judea-Samaria as “West Bank” to renaming Palestinian Arabs as “The Palestinians” – so that the world will see that Israel’s enemies and the mainstream media are aligned in using these loaded Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms.

Lee and I got some insight this week into a question that has perplexed us: Why do our most knowledgeable advocates, who appreciate the falsity and delegitimizing impact of these loaded terms even more surely than the reporters who for years regaled readers with “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation” knew that there weren’t, deliberately use them?

Whether or not you agree with this learned advocate’s reasoning cited below, recognize that his reasoning applies to him and his fellow op-ed submitters, not to us ordinary grassroots Jews.

Email Exchanges with an Expert Pro-Israel Advocate Who Uses “West Bank”

Lee to Advocate:

“Excellent article. But – and this is a big BUT – please in the future use the terms that Jerry Verlin and I have been fighting for our community and the media to use that do NOT delegitimize Israel and the Jewish people’s rights: ‘Judea and Samaria’ – not “West Bank,’ or at minimum: ‘West Bank/Judea-Samaria’; ‘Palestinian Arabs,’ – not ‘Palestinians.’ We all must be far more conscious of our language!!! Make the pledge to break that bad habit from now on.”

Advocate back to Lee:

“Thank you for your note and sorry to take so long to get back.

“Even ____ and I use ‘West Bank’ in much of the general media, as to do otherwise is presently self-defeating. We certainly don’t use them from ‘habit.’ In some cases, our op-eds or letters would simply be disregarded.

“We fight the language battle on terms that are both more important and easier to combat – as you would have seen in our recent pieces – ‘settlers,’ ‘settlements,’ ‘militants’ and so on. All these are deliberate corruptions. ‘West Bank,’ unfortunately, has a pre-67 provenance and is a bridge too far at the moment. ‘West Bank/Judea & Samria’ will be the way to go at a suitable opportunity. We think about this all the time.”

Jerry to Advocate:

“Thanks for copying me in your answer to my fellow ZOAnik and co-author Lee’s email about your using ‘West Bank.’

“I get your point that using Judea-Samaria in your general media writing would be ‘self-defeating’ in causing some of your op-eds and letters to be dismissed out of hand.

“May I respectfully offer two counter-points:

“[1] At least many, if not most, of the readers of pro-Israel letters and op-eds are readers at least neutral if not well-disposed towards Israel and the Jewish homeland connection to Israel. When the best of our best use terms like ‘West Bank’ instead of Judea-Samaria, it says to Western publics in general and to our grassroots in particular that such use is acceptable and the uncontested norm. Weigh whether the price of we ourselves using Jewish people-delegitimizing terms is too high.

“[2] I agree that ‘West Bank’ has ‘pre-67 provenance,’ but ‘Judea-Samaria’ is not what the media has called ‘the biblical term for the West.Bank.’ As Ettinger has pointed out, [Trans-]Jordan invented ‘West Bank’ about 1950. What did the United Nations call it in #181 in 1947? ‘The hill country of Samaria and Judea.’ (It also said, over and over, ‘the Jewish state’ and ‘the Arab [not ‘Palestinian’] state,’ and called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs ‘the two Palestinian peoples’ [really, go look]). How we have allowed the language to change.

“Thanks for all that you do.”

Advocate back to Jerry:

“Thanks for your follow-up note. All your points are more than well-taken!

“As I mentioned, there is both logic and long-term goals in mind when we depart from the proper terms which, as you say, were once in general official use even by the UN.

“First, we need to obtain a hearing for even more pressing points. Second, we must introduce the correct terms, and initiate a discussion of them, at suitable opportunities. It takes time.

“We are like generals, fighting on a disadvantageous front with scarce resources with the result that even important objectives we would dearly like to attain are not even pressed at times because we need to do other things even more urgently.

“Keep up the good fight.”

I, and I think most of you Gentle Readers, have the luxury not to be Generals. Uninhibited by broader considerations than choosing the most self-respecting terms we can choose – in the face of a media that contemptuously rushes to judgment to dismiss the Israeli side of contested claims out of hand – let’s stick to those time-honored terms.

Regards,
Jerry