To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #658, 8/11/13
This Week In The Inq: Israel “Alarmed” Iran “Might Chart More Moderate Course”
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Thursday’s Philadelphia Inquirer’s (Inq’s) LA Times news article (Inq, Thu, 8/8/13, A2, LA Times, “Israel Steps Up Warnings Over Iran”) led (emphasis added):
Alarmed by the prospects of renewed U.S.-Iran negotiations and suggestions that the new Islamic leadership might chart a more moderate path, Israel is ramping up its threat to take unilateral military action against Iran’s nuclear program.
An objective news article would have cited the real-world basis for Israel’s alarm, not ridiculed it as a war-monger’s dreaded fear that Iran’s “new Islamic leadership might chart a more moderate path.” Both Iran’s words and deeds – its new president’s own words and its actions furthering its nuclear program subsequent to his election two months ago – reveal unequivocally that “suggestions” of Iran’s Islamic leadership charting a more moderate path are utterly baseless. Portraying Israel’s alarm over what Iran is actually saying and doing as alarm it might moderate is not news reporting.
Iran’s Path-Charting Words
Even the Inq’s Trudy Rubin last Sunday (“Worldview,” Inq, Sun, 8/4/13, C1, 2. “Not The Time To Slap Iran’s New Leader”) acknowledged:
Iran’s hostility toward Israel remains unchanged. (At an annual pro-Palestinian celebration last week, [Iran’s new president] Rowhani called the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands ‘a sore … on the body of the Islamic world.’)
BTW, they’re disputed, not “Palestinian lands,” and not under “Israeli occupation,” all Trudy Rubin words, but Rouhani’s words were more action-oriented than Trudy quoted them. Here, per Reuters quoting Iran’s student news agency, Friday, August 2, a week before this Inq LA Times article, is Iran’s new president Rouhani:
“The Zionist regime is a wound that has sat on the body of the Muslim world for years and needs to be removed.”
Treating Muslim threats to “remove” Israel as no basis for Israeli alarm, let alone action, is nothing new for the MSM, including the Los Angeles Times. Utterly ignoring Egypt’s threat on the eve of the Six Day War to annihilate Israel – “We intend to open a general assault. This will be total war. Our basic aim is the destruction of Israel.” – the July 20, 2013, LA Times (Inq, A2) told readers Israel “seized” lands in that war. To the same effect was the AP last week (7/31/13, A3) in the Inq: “… the 1967 war in which Israel seized East Jerusalem and occupied the West Bank and Gaza.”
Iran’s Path-Charting Deeds
As for Iran’s new Islamic leadership’s path-charting deeds, here’s the Jerusalem Post quoting Bibi on Thursday this week (emphasis added):
Since Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was elected two months ago, Iran has installed 7,000 centrifuges, indicating that he is nothing more than a new face to an old regime, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Wednesday.
Two further developments reported this week bearing on the LA Times and Inq-cited unattributed “suggestions that the new Islamic leadership might chart a more moderate path”:
[1] Thursday’s JPost article: “In addition to accelerating its enrichment capabilities, Iran was also pursuing an alternative route, ‘the plutonium route,’ the [Israeli] prime minister said.”
[2] The British paper Telegraph reported Wednesday (8/7/13) that analysis of a Jane’s photo of a newly discovered Iranian site concludes that it “is most likely used for testing ballistic missiles,” and quoted a Royal United Services Institute research fellow that “We often talk about Iran’s nuclear programme, but what really spooks countries in the region is the ballistic missiles that could act as a delivery system.”
“The prospects of renewed U.S.-Iran negotiations”
And as for that other worry over which an alarmed Israel is ramping up military threats, per the LA Times this week in the Inq – “the prospects of renewed U.S.-Iran negotiations” – this alarm, if not false, is at least tempered by American skepticism regarding actual Iranian intentions. Reuters on Tuesday (8/6/13) reported U.S. State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki’s response to newly inaugurated Iranian president Rouhani’s claimed readiness to enter “serious and substantive” negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program:
Asked about those remarks, Psaki said, “we want to see credible steps taken” to address concerns that a nuclear program that Tehran says is purely for peaceful needs is actually an effort to build a nuclear bomb.
Ask yourself what sense of these actual Iranian words and deeds threatening Israel and “spooking countries in the region” was purveyed by the Inq’s LA Times article Thursday mentioning none of them but portraying Israel as “ramping up its threat to take unilateral military action against Iran’s nuclear program” because it’s “alarmed by the prospects of renewed U.S.-Iran negotiations and suggestions that the new Islamic leadership might chart a more moderate path.”
Also This Week In The Inq: The Delegitimizing Terms We Acquiesce In
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That Israel now has to deal with trying to roll back rather than pro-actively prevent an EU anti-“settlements” policy that’s now a fait accompli ought to enlighten us of our folly in passively acquiescing in and even putting our own hecksher upon the loaded lexicon intentionally crafted to delegitimize the Jewish homeland connection to Israel. But here’s the AP again Monday, 8/5/13, A3, This Week In The Inq:
The Palestinians want to establish a state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem – lands Israel captured in 1967 – and renewed talks are to draw Israel’s borders with such a state. Since 1967, Israel has built dozens of settlements on war-won land – deemed illegal by most of the international community – that are home to 560,000 Israelis.
The thrust of this narrative is denial of a pre-“1967” Jewish connection to this “war-won land” in which Jews acknowledge themselves to be “settlers.” There is an answer to this and to newly inaugurated Iranian President Rouhani’s dismissal of Israel as the “Zionist regime” that’s been a blot on “the Muslim world” for “years.” That answer is that for not just “years” but for 3,000 years Jews have been indigenous to the Mideast, both in our homeland of Israel and, until the mid-20th century, in what are today Muslim lands.
Indubitably, Israel must lead in making that case that Jews are not and have never been “settlers” in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Toward that end, that “hard-line” Bibi has shelved the Levy Commission Report that Judea and Samaria aren’t “occupied,” is discouraging. But if you want a brief look at the continuous presence, starting from Israelite origins, that, as historian Parkes put it, wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds,” I immodestly commend to you my book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, www.pavilionpress.com, and Amazon.
This Week In The Inq: The Media Mindset on Full Display
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Those wonderful folks who brought you this week Israel being “alarmed” that Iran’s “Islamic leadership might chart a more moderate path,” and who this week called Jewish connection to Judea, Samaria and the heart of Jerusalem 1967 “war-won land,” weren’t done. They ended this week, LA Times, Bless It, Sat. 8/20/13, A2, in the Inq by telling readers an Israeli drone strike in Sinai
… killed five suspected [emphasis added] Islamic militants and destroyed their rocket launcher.
There’ve been some earlier “suspected militants.” E.g. (emphasis added):
*** The 8/17/02 Philly Inquirer reported that “Israeli soldiers destroyed two houses belonging to suspected West Bank militants yesterday,” [but neither was around to protest because earlier in the year each “blew himself up,” as the article put it, one killing 17 Israelis and the other wounding two.]
*** Inq, 11/8/02: “…The suspected bomber, one of three Palestinians in a taxi stopped at the checkpoint, was wearing an explosive belt and yelled “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) as he ran at the troops, who fired at the man, the army said. The belt exploded, killing the second man and injuring the third….”
*** Washington Post in the Inq (8/23/03): “An Israeli man was killed when a suspected Palestinian assailant fired at his car…. .Israeli officials said. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, associated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the attack.”
*** A 5/4/05 Inq AP article reported that for “the first time a suspected member of a Hamas rocket squad was taken into custody [by Abbas’ P.A.] since the group promised Abbas in March that it would halt attacks on Israel.” He was arrested with a rocket launcher in his car “minutes after insurgents had fired two rockets toward an Israeli town.” The article noted that he was shortly released by the P.A. under Hamas and Egyptian pressure.
? A.P. (11/5/08, Inq., A7): “… Hamas then fired mortars across the Gaza border into southern Israel, and Israel answered with the air strike, killing five suspected Palestinian extremists, Israeli and Palestinian officials said. The army said the air strike aimed at the mortar launchers and him them.”
Ah, the presumption of innocence!
Regards,
Jerry