Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #665, 9/29/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #665, 9/29/13

This Week In the Inq: Bibi “Said Militants” (No, He Didn’t)
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A Washington Post article appearing on Tuesday this week in the Inq (Philly Inquirer, Tue, 9/24/13, A4, WP, “Israel Responds to Killings”) indirectly quoted Israeli Premier Netanyahu’s statement Sunday night on the cold-blooded murders [n.b., the Inq headlined “Killings”] of two Israeli soldiers, one of whom “was fatally shot by a Palestinian sniper” in Hebron, and the other “was lured to a West Bank village” by an Arab co-worker where he was murdered and his body stuffed in a well.

The Inq’s Washington Post article reported that Israel’s P.M.

said Israel will continue to battle against militants who would do it harm [emphasis added]

Often the media doesn’t favor us, alongside its paraphrase of an Israeli official or spokesperson having “said” the media’s term “militants,” with a direct quote of the words that this quote-worthy Israeli actually used. In this instance, however, two inches below having paraphrased Israel’s prime minister as having called the murderers of two Israelis “militants,” the Washington Post quoted Bibi directly:

We will continue to fight terrorism and strike at terrorists [emphasis added]

Perhaps this is the media’s way of contrasting for readers the accepted term for such people versus the term hard-line Israelis use (rather like “Judea & Samaria” being “the Israeli nationalist term” for the politically correct term “West Bank”).

Lee Bender’s and my book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, devotes each letter of the alphabet to one of the ways in which the mainstream Western media distorts its Israel coverage to disparage the Jewish people’s homeland. Here’s the essence of one section:

T

“Terrorists” – What the Media’s “Militants” Actually Are

We begin by conceding that the media’s propensity to mislabel murderers of Israelis as “militants” has become so engrained in Mideast reporting that railing against this media euphemism may seem futile, but then we list a half-dozen contexts in which “media misusage of the plain meaning of English words” is so egregious that it has to be fought.

[1] Where the intended carnage is so heinous that no term but “terror” suffices

[2] Where the perpetrating group openly flaunts attacking civilians

[3] Where the media pointedly excludes Israel from “the world-wide war against terror”

[4] Where the media replaces “terrorists” with “militants” in indirect quotes

[5] Where the media violates its own guidelines for using “terrorists,” and

[6] Where the media calls incontrovertible murderers “suspected militants”

We provide numerous examples of each of these media outrages. So given this week’s Washington Post/Inq misportrayal of Bibi as having “said” “militants,” let’s focus on context number [4], the media replacing “terrorists” with “militants” in indirect quotes. Our book’s examples under [4] include citations of the media paraphrasing terrorism-using Israeli premiers Sharon, Olmert and Netanyahu as having said “militants.” Here’s Pressing Israel on our hometown Inq so mischaracterizing Bibi:

Bibi “Saying Militants”

? On August 21, 2005, Knight-Ridder reporter Nissenbaum, writing as an Inquirer staff-writer, wrote that Netanyahu had “warned” in his pre-Gaza withdrawal cabinet resignation letter protesting Israel’s impending Gaza withdrawal…

that Israel’s move would create a fertile environment for militants [emphasis added throughout],

…perhaps not recalling or caring that just a fortnight earlier, August 9, 2005, she had co-authored with Inquirer Jerusalem Bureau Chief Matza an Inquirer article that had quoted Netanyahu’s cabinet resignation letter directly:

“I am not willing to be part of a process that ignores reality and proceeds to establish an Islamic terror base that will threaten the entire country,” Netanyahu wrote in his resignation letter.

? See also (A.P., 12/20/05, Inq.):

Netanyahu has condemned Sharon’s Gaza pullout, saying the unilateral move encouraged Palestinian militants to wage more attacks against Israel.

Further down in subsection [4] on the media replacing “terrorists” with “militants” in indirect quotes of Israelis, we relate an email exchange I had years ago with an Inqnik long at the heart of his newspaper’s reporting on Israel. It’s not exactly on media replacement of an Israeli’s use of “terrorists” with “militants,” but I think you’ll agree it comes pretty close. Pressing Israel:

“Mickey and Me”

One of this book’s co-authors had an e-mail exchange with Michael Matza, then the Inquirer’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief, regarding whether a Matza-quoted Israeli spokesperson had actually used the term “militants.”

In June, 2002, a Matza Inquirer article directly quoted Israeli government spokesperson Ranaan Gissin:

Given the fact that the Palestinian Authority is doing nothing…we have to deploy our forces in such a way that [militants] won’t be able to leave their launching pad.

Co-author Verlin e-mailed Mr. Matza, asking him what was the term Mr. Gissin had actually used for which the Inquirer had substituted “militants” in brackets. Mr. Matza replied:

Dear Mr. Verlin:

The word Mr. Gissin used in his quote was “they.” Because the word “they” would have been unclear, we substituted the word “militants” and placed it in brackets to accurately convey Mr. Gissin’s meaning.

Sincerely,
Michael Matza.

To which co-author Verlin replied:

Dear Mr. Matza:

Thanks very much for your e-mail supplying the word (“they”) actually used by Mr. Gissin. To be perfectly frank, I’d suspected he’d used a different word, also beginning with ‘T’. To that extent, I did you injustice.

However, still to be perfectly frank, I do not think that your putting the word “militants” in brackets did in fact “accurately convey Mr. Gissin’s meaning.”…What you did, Mr. Matza, was to…stuff the media’s word “militants” into a direct quote of an Israeli official, as though he’d have used it. Would Sharon’s spokesman really have used it? If not, it was not Mr. Gissin’s meaning that you accurately conveyed to your readers. Am I wrong?

Jerry Verlin

That ended the e-mail exchange, but that’s how Michael Matza, chief of the Inquirer’s only-such-place-in-the-world Jerusalem Bureau, came by the nom de guerre Mickey Militant.

The likelihood of an Israeli official or government or military spokesperson using the media’s euphemism “militants” for murderers of Israelis is sufficiently improbable and unexpected that the media should use a direct quote, not a media paraphrase, of that Israeli using that term. Think they’d buy that?

An Important Column on Mideast Christians’ Plight Posted This Week on Philly.com:
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Jews are not the only indigenous people whose place is threatened in what some in the media, along with some Muslims, inaccurately describe as “the Islamic Middle East.” An insightful moving column on Mideast Christians’ plight was posted Friday on the Inq’s philly.com website by Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky.

http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/stu_bykofsky/20130927_Turn_the_other_cheek_.html

I commend this article to both BSMW’s Christian and Jewish subscribers, and not just for its media watch-relevance. The author cites that his paper on Monday reported “Dozens Dead in Pakistan, Christians Targeted,” but goes to to summarize Christians’ grave endangerment there, and in Egypt, Bethlehem and elsewhere, and concludes:

The most curious thing to me is the silence of major media, which largely ignores one of the great stories of our generation . . . .

The Inq too ran a similar story on Monday (Inq, Mon, 9/23/13, A7, LA Times, “Bomb Attack Kills 75 at Pakistan Church”), which led that two explosions outside the crowded church “just as Sunday services ended” killed 75 and wounded more than 100, including children, and “overwhelmed” the city’s largest hospital, “where television showed hallways filled with corpses, badly wounded patients and women and children crying over charred bodies of relatives.” The LA Times article called it “one of Pakistan’s worst attacks against Christians in years.” These congregants of one of Peshawer’s oldest churches had been “advised to break up into small groups for their safety as they head out into the street.” The bombs went off as they were doing this.

Minorities shouldn’t have to live in such fear. These Christians having to leave church in small groups for their safety has the same roots as what the Inq’s Trudy Rubin [n.b.] wrote a few years ago about the school marm’s description of the school yard games the little Jewish kids play in their rockets-from-Gaza-battered Jewish homeland town of Sderot: “They shout ‘Color Red! Color Red!,’ and then they go hide.”

But ask yourself this: If a pair of non-Muslim “suicide” [Inq-speak for mass-murder] bombers had blown up a mosque just as Friday afternoon prayers ended, murdering 75 and wounding 100 Muslims, including kids, in one of the worst attacks on Muslims in years, would the Inq have run a 7-paragraph account on page 7? I think not.

Regards,
Jerry