Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #662, 9/8/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #662, 9/8/13

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: For the second time in recent weeks, the AP this past week referenced “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.” It would be difficult to conjure a more damaging misleading misstatement. This same AP article called Jews in “East” Jerusalem “settlers,” and linked Jewish connection to “the West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” to their capture by Israel in 1967. There’s a lot longer Jewish connection than that.

This Week In The Inq: “Millions of Palestinian Refugees and Their Descendants”
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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s (“Inq’s”) AP article Thursday (Inq, Thu, 9/5/13. A3, AP, Josef Federman, Jerusalem, “Palestinian Official Details Offer by Israel During Talks”) sported some of the media’s usual imbalanced expressions, touched on below, but also resurrected an old egregious mainstream Western media misstatement that pro-Israel media watches have long believed dead and buried. Let’s start with that.

“Millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants”

British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin stated to Parliament in 1947, just months before the U.N. partition resoluton, that Palestine’s population was “about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews” (quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, p. 188). Samuel Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine (p. 23) cited authorities that there were fewer Arabs than that, that not all of them lived in the part that became Israel, and that not all of them left. But using the higher British figure, Katz put the actual Arab refugee count at between 400,000 and 500,000. This, not that the media mentions it, is well less than the number of Middle Eastern Jews who fled Muslim lands (mostly to Israel) in the mid-20th century.

From at least 2001 into 2004, the AP and its ilk wrote repeatedly of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” from “the war that followed Israel’s creation.” CAMERA and other media watchers, including BSMW, protested. These protests ultimately resulted, we thought, in laying this monstrous misstatement to rest.

Recognize the effect of this “millions” misstatement upon Western publics’ perceptions of respective Arab (“Palestinian”) and Jewish Palestine equities. It can only have poisoned public perceptions. And combined with the other entries in the MSM’s loaded lexicon for purveying those competing Palestine equities – “West Bank and East Jerusalem Jewish settlements … Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories … 1967 borders … 1967 war-won lands … seized by Israel in 1967 … creation and founding of Israel” etc, etc – “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” drives home a misperception that Arabs (“Palestinians”) are indigenous natives and Jew are outsiders.

So when the AP wrote last month (Inq, Wed, 8/14/13, A3, AP) about the current peace talks’ “truly explosive issues” being

dividing Jerusalem and finding new homes for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

BSMW (#659) wrote that stopping such egregious misleading of the public ought to be an explosive issue for us.

And now the AP wrote on Thursday this week in the Inq of

the thorniest issues, such as the fate of Jerusalem and the status of millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants

If these two recent instances, including this past week literally on a high holiday of the Jews, mark the commencement of an uncontested resurrection of this “millions” canard, then shame on us.

“East Jerusalem settlements”

This AP reference this past Thursday to “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” didn’t appear in a vacuum. It was joined by some other niceties, including referring to “Israeli construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem” as “these settlements.”

Here we are partly to blame of course for ourselves propagating “West Bank” and “settlements” terminology. But Jews from Netanyahu to the Reform’s Rabbi Yoffie have expressly contested calling Jews anywhere in Jerusalem “settlers,” so the media in applying these terms to the heart of Jerusalem is using contested partisan terms.

“Territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war”

Two non-partisan terms the AP did use in this article were “pre-1967 lines,” not “1967 borders,” and “captured” in 1967, not “seized,” but it was still misleading for the AP to write that for their new state

the Palestinians seek the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war.

Personally, I contest the terms “the Palestinians,” “the West Bank” and “East Jerusalem,” but I concede my view as extreme. But all of us should contest this media-purveyed perception that Jewish equities in this “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” commence with their capture by Israel in the 1967 war. And they were captured from the invader, Transjordan, not from “the Palestinians,” who’ve never ruled Palestine. The city of Jerusalem, including “East” Jerusalem, has had a Jewish majority since 19th century Ottoman Empire rule, and the public is entitled to be told that by the AP and Inq. The public is likewise entitled to be told by its APs and Inqs that what these media magnates call “the West Bank” was known since antiquity, including to the U.N. in 1947, by its Hebrew-origin names “Samaria and Judea,” not by “the West Bank,” which was invented thereafter by Jordan for the same reason the Romans two millennia ago renamed Judaea as Palestine – to disassociate it from Jews.

To you, joiners all in one way or another in seeking balanced Western reporting on our Jewish homeland of Israel, my best wishes for the New Year.

Jerry