Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #657, 8/4/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #657, 8/4/13

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: On four days this week, our Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) and its news sources distorted the Arab-Israeli conflict through some imbalanced expression or other. Wednesday, the AP packed a good half-dozen into one news article sentence. Pointing out such imbalances is a media watch’s business, so I take this week’s shot at that first. Whether and, if so, how we should get our act together to respond to such continuing distortions is one’s opinion. It won’t surprise you I have one, and I offer it this week as an appended, optional-reading BSMW “editorial” to those of you who think that activism, not passive acquiescence, is needed.

This Week In The Inq: Daily Doses of Distortion Dripping into Public’s Brainstream
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = == = = = = = =

AP, Wednesday

Wednesday’s Philly Inquirer (Inq, Wed, 7/31/13, A3, AP, Matthew Lee, “9-Month Timetable For a Mideast Deal”) contained this delightful sentence:

The Palestinians want a state based on the borders, with agreed land swaps, that existed before the 1967 war in which Israel seized East Jerusalem and occupied the West Bank and Gaza.

The AP added that “Israel wants security assurances and a recognition that it is and will remain a Jewish state,” but count the imbalances in that first AP sentence, and look at it as illustrative of the mainstream media (“MSM”) pushing Mideast reporting terminology against us as far as it can.

[a] There were no “borders,” which denote established permanent boundaries recognized internationally and by the parties themselves, before the 1967 war. There were only the armistice lines expressly declared by the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement as lines drawn exclusively by military considerations without prejudice to either side’s political claims.

[b] Israel didn’t “seize” upper- or lower-case E “east” Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria in 1967. It captured those areas from Egypt and Jordan in a defensive war for survival that began with Arab armies marshaling on Israel’s narrow (9-miles-wide in critical places) boundaries and Egypt closing the Straits of Tiran, kicking out the U.N., and bellowing “We intend to open a general assault. This will be total war. Our basic aim is the destruction of Israel.” And the MSM paints Israel as the land-“seizing” aggressor.

[c] Israel didn’t “occupy” Judea-Samaria and Gaza in 1967. Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are in Palestine, not Egypt and Jordan, and when Egypt and Jordan invaded Palestine and seized those areas in 1948, they did indeed occupy foreign territories. Israel in 1948 became Palestine’s next native state after the Romans conquered Judaea in four wars eighteen hundred years earlier and renamed Judaea as Palestine. Israel in 1967 didn’t invade and occupy lands formerly belonging to Egypt and Jordan, or to Palestinian Arabs, who’d never ruled an inch of them for one day in history.

[d] Jewish connection to Israel, including Jerusalem, didn’t begin in “1967.” Jerusalem has been three states’ capital in the past 3,000 years – Judah, Judaea and Israel, all Jewish – and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 19th century Ottoman Turkish rule. As British historian James Parkes correctly wrote in Whose Land?, the Jews’ continuous presence throughout the post-biblical era wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

[e] “East” Jerusalem isn’t a separate city apart from the rest of Jerusalem. The 19 years, ending almost a half-century ago, that Jordan seized and held part of Jerusalem, was the only time the city had been so divided in the past 3,000 years. When Israel reunited Jerusalem in 1967, it wasn’t annexing to it a separate city that had existed before the 1948 Jordanian seizure.

[f] The “West Bank” never existed before the 1948 Jordanian invasion and seizure either. What had been known through both biblical and post-biblical times as Hebrew-origin names Judea and Samaria was still “the hill country of Samaria and Judea,” and not “the West Bank,” to the U.N. in 1947.

[g] And, truth to tell, for all that we ourselves gratuitously bestow that mantle upon them, “the Palestinians” aren’t really “The Palestinians.” The AP (12/11/11, Inq, A4) has acknowledged that during the Mandate “Muslims, Christians, and Jews living there were ALL referred to as Palestinians” (emphasis added). And the U.N. in 1947 called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”

AP, Monday

Wednesday wasn’t the only day this week the MSM pushed Mideast reporting terminology against us as far as it could. Monday’s Inq AP article (Inq, Mon, 7/29/13, A1, 8, AP, Karin Laub, “Israel OKs Prisoner Release in Kerry Plan”), which called Bibi, but not Abbas, who has again called for a judenrein western Palestine Arab state, “hard-line,” included this statement of what it called “the outlines of a deal” that “have emerged”:

. . . a Palestinian state in most of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, lands captured by Israel in 1967, with border adjustments to enable Israel to annex land with a majority of nearly 600,000 settlers.

OK, “captured” is fairer than the Jew-baiting (excuse me, but that’s the truth of it) “seized,” but it still ties the time of the Jewish connection to “1967”; it’s not “the West Bank” and “East Jerusalem”; Jews are not “settlers,” whether we ourselves idiotically say so, in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem; and the “adjustments” are not to “borders.” [BTW, an Arab MK said this week “We [Arabs] were here before you, and we’ll be here after you,” to which Bibi took the floor and responded, to MKs’ applause: “The first part isn’t true, and the second part won’t be.” – JPost, 8/1/13]

Inq On Its Own, Thursday and Friday

Thursday’s Inq ran a Trudy Rubin “Worldview” op-ed column (Inq, Thu, 8/1/13, “Why Is Kerry Pushing Talks?”) which commented:

Abbas is already too weak, and the Arab world too fragmented to back him. Even were Netanyahu inclined to confront the settlers and return most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (which he has shown no interest in doing), the Arab world’s convulsions would make him hesitate. (emphasis added)

“Return,” sharing a paragraph with just Abbas, implies that Palestinian Arabs controlled Judea, Samaria and the heart of 19th-century-and-since-Jewish-majority Jerusalem (“the West Bank and East Jerusalem”) before Israel took these parts of Palestine from them. Israel took them from a foreign invader, Transjordan.

The next day’s, Friday’s, Inq editorial (Inq, Fri, 8/2/13, A18, “Middle East Needs More Than Just Talks”) drove home the Inq’s Palestinian-Arabs-as-Palestine’s-original-owners claim even more forcefully. Here the Inq included among the core issues

… whether displaced Palestinians can return to their original homelands.

“Homes,” maybe, but not “homelands.” And certainly not “original.” The Inq here might have informed interested readers that the test uniquely adopted by the United Nations for caring for Palestinian Arabs’ children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren ad infinitim [isn’t it great to have Jews for your enemies?] was whether the Arab family patriarch had resided in their “Palestinian original homelands,” as the Inq charmingly put it, for two years before leaving (not exactly Jebusite geneology). See Peters, From Time Immemorial, p. 18, quoting Special Report of the Director, UNRWA, 1954-55, UN Document A/2717.

BSMW Editorial: And What We Should Do About It
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

If you think an active response, not simply averting our eyes from it, is the appropriate response to the media pushing Mideast reporting terminology as hard against Jewish homeland historicity as it can get away with (and not that long ago it got away for years with “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation”), I have a suggestion for local grassroots Jewish cooperative activism in which countering anti-Israel media bias can be among many actions.

A couple weeks ago, a long-time Brith Sholom Media Watch sufferer emailed me her assessment of a concern that I share:

My sense has always been that cooperation/coordination of any pro-Israel groups has failed; each group seems to want to husband its members, i.e. funding and this has become even worse in our present economy.

So why not a local grassroots groups’ “right-wing JCRC”? No budget, no dues, no expenses, no power of the group to bind or speak collectively for anybody. Just a group of folks, some of whom belong to organizations that can come and make brief pitches, and to which they can take back others’ ideas, that meets, say monthly, some place (maybe homes, for openers) that’s rent free. Communication by email. We sit around, say monthly, and talk about what we’re each doing, and what we might do more effectively working together. Want to play? Email me, mentioning any groups to which you belong, whether or not you’re a macher. Silly idea? Email me that also.

Regards,
Jerry