Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #673, 11/24/13

To:            Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:        Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj:         Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #673, 11/24/13
 
 
This Week In The NY Times: A Gesture of Disrespect Reminiscent of One in the Inq
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Both CAMERA and HonestReporting protested this week the New York Times’ accompanying its story on an Arab youth stabbing a young Israeli soldier to death as he slept on a civilian bus in Israel with a photo of relatives visiting the murderer’s mother.
 
Noting that the NY Times article, headlined “Attack on Israeli Worsens Tensions With Palestinians,” focused mostly on “settlements,” HonestReporting called the NY Times article cum photo “a graphic illustration of all that is wrong with the newspaper’s Israel coverage.” An appended HonestReporting update quoted the NY Times Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, that she and the paper’s international photo editor “agree it was not the best choice,” that “it should have at least been paired with a picture of the victim.” To this, HonestReporting responded: “This represents a disgraceful and false moral equivalence. Why should the murderer of Eden Atias be given equal moral value to Atias himself?” Why, indeed?
 
Last week’s BSMW #672 commented that the Inq, which headlined its brief AP squib on this murder “Israel: Teen Held in Soldier’s Slaying,” could instead have headlined the crux of the news story: “Palestinian Arab Fatally Stabs Sleeping Israeli.”
 
But the New York Times’ accompaniment of a news article on a Palestinian Arab’s murder of a sleeping Israeli with a photo of the very-much-alive Palestinian Arab’s mother is reminiscent of a similar choice made some years ago by our beloved hometown Inq. Indeed, the similarities go beyond photo selection. Here’s BSMW #258, 12/11/05:
 
This Week In The Inq: Sanitizing Terror Just In A Day’s Work For The Inq
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QUOTE “[A] huge blast was set off about 11:30 AM local time [just outside a crowded shopping mall in Netanya, Israel, this week] and left bodies scattered outside the mall. The glass and marble façade of the structure was shattered in places and stained with swirls of blood as far as 60 feet from the site of the explosion. Body parts were found as far as 300 feet away.” UNQUOTE
 
At least 5 people were killed and more than 30 people were injured. The perpetrator had been spotted and prevented from entering the crowded mall by a security guard [killed] and policewoman [hospitalized], or the toll would have been worse.
 
Now, how would you expect a mainstream American city newspaper, especially one so focused on Israel that it maintains its own staff reporter in Israel in residence, to report it? How about
 
— [a] fairly close to page 1, in an extensive news article that
 
— [b] led with the above-quoted graphic description of the devastation of people and property the intentional huge blast wreaked;
 
— [c] called the huge blast the act of terror that exploding a bomb at a shopping mall crowded with shoppers including children and infants in strollers unequivocally is, including in Israel;
 
— [d] cited alongside its quote of Abbas that “The Palestinian Authority will have no tolerance for such actions,” the PA’s “road map” obligation of “dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure”;
 
— [e] and cited alongside its quote of Abbas that “Those who are responsible should be hunted down by the Palestinian police” any clues that the media had as to where the perpetrators to be “hunted down” might possibly be; and
 
— [f] accompanied that article with a photograph showing the terrorist bombing’s intentional destruction and carnage.
 
Now, here’s how that huge blast by a terrorist’s shopping mall bomb was in fact reported This Week In The Inq (Inq, Tuesday, 12/6/05, Washington Post):
 
[a] As for article placement, in an all of 10-paragraph article on Page 16.
 
[b] As for placement within the article of the above-quoted description of the devastation and carnage, that was in paragraph 3. The article’s lead began: “Netanya, Israel: Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz ordered the military yesterday to intensify operations against [the perpetrating] Islamic Jihad . . . .” Beyond beginning with Israel and stating merely that “at least five Israelis” were killed and “more than 30 people were wounded,” including the mall security guard and policewoman, the Inq’s article said Nothing about the innocent civilians murdered and maimed. But it did memorialize the “suicide” bomber by name, age, “West Bank” home town and occupation (“factory worker”).
 
[c] As for calling the credit-claiming bombers of an Israeli shopping mall the terrorists they unequivocally are, furthest thing from the Inquirer’s mind. The headline labeled the credit-claimers’ minion a “suicide” bomber (“Suicide Bomber Kills 5 Israelis”), paragraph one as an Islamic Jihad “operative,” and paragraph two as an “attacker.” The sub-headline likewise ducked applying the T-word to the “suicide” bomber’s credit-claiming dispatchers. Without even connecting [the credit-claiming] Islamic Jihad to the bombing, the sub-head stated: “More than 30 were hurt at a crowded mall. Israel vowed to intensify the fight against Islamic Jihad.”

[d] Fans of the mainstream media’s mostly misquotations of the “road map” were not disappointed. Far from following its direct quotation of Abbas’ vow that “The Palestinian Authority will have no tolerance for such actions” with a direct quotation of the Palestinian Authority’s express obligation under the “road map” of “dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure,” the Inq’s article turned this express road map obligation of the Palestinians into a hoop that He-Who-Must-Always-Be-Blamed demands Abbas must jump through on the road TO the road map: “Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has demanded that Abbas disarm the Palestinian groups [Can you not just hear Sharon lovingly mouthing the words “Palestinian groups”?] as a prerequisite for progress on the U.S.-backed road map to peace.”
 
[e] And finally, well, almost finally, impeccably-balanced observer of the mainstream media for, lo, these past 258 weeks, that we are, we must painfully point out that the American mainstream media, for all its patriotic furtherance of the World-Wide-War-On-Terror, withheld this week from Palestinian Authority President Abbas information the media had that would have materially abetted fulfillment of his vow quoted in Tuesday’s article (par. 8) that “Those who are responsible” for the Netanya bombing “should be hunted down by the Palestinian police.” The media knew when it quoted this Abbas vow the exact whereabouts of “those who are responsible,” of those to be “hunted down.” Par. 10: Islamic Jihad was holding “a NEWS CONFERENCE in Gaza City.”
 
[f] Now, finally, not being ourselves journalists, it might occur to our mere-readers’ minds that an appropriate photo accompanying a report of a “huge blast” that “left bodies scattered outside” the site, its “glass and marble façade . . . shattered in places and stained with swirls of blood as far as 60 feet from the site of the explosion” and “body parts . . . found as far as 300 feet away” would be a shot of the scene. Not This Week In The Inq. Caption of the sole photo: “A youth who says his brother blew himself up in the Israeli city of Netanya stands at the family house in the West Bank village of Illar.” For those who’ve read the “Tea Leaves and Photo Captions” chapter of the Divination textbook at Hogwarts: see if you can divine a message in this photo caption for Jews.
 
Well, perhaps, I was a tad more of a sarcastic media-watcher in my (so-to-speak) youth.

 
This Week: A Clear Contrast on What the Fight Against Media Bias Is About
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The classic example of “begging the question” is phrasing the question “Are you still beating your wife?” The host of a public [as in partly U.S. government-funded] radio program, “Radio Times,” pondered aloud this week in interviewing an Israeli about how long the “occupation” will continue.
 
In stark contrast this week, Israel’s Economy Minister, Naftali Bennett, confronted CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who referred in an interview with him to “occupied territories,” with the response “One cannot occupy his own home.” When the CNN anchor countered, “It’s an international term, Mr. Bennett,” he answered, “I know, and I don’t accept it.” Bravo.
 
A BSMW constant has been that the deepest damage done by mainstream Western media misportrayal of Israel resides in the misleading language in which reporting on Israel is told, that the first and most important thing we must do is cleanse from our own mouths the very terms designed to delegitimize us.
 
Lee and I have now given twenty-some of our Powerpoint talks, including one to a synagogue mens’ club this past week, based on our Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z book, in which we show, e.g., from the terms used in the United Nations’ own Palestine partition resolution, that these Jewish homeland delegitimizing slurs – “West Bank … East Jerusalem … the Palestinians,” etc. – weren’t written in stone 3,300 years ago, but are post-Israel independence creations. (The U.N. referenced “the Jewish State” and “the Arab [not ‘Palestinian’] State”; called Judea and Samaria “the hill country of Samaria and Judea,” not “the West Bank”; and expressed hope for cooperation between Palestine’s Jews and Arabs, “the two Palestinian peoples.”)
 
If I seem an unrealistic wild-eyed fanatic to those of even Israel supporters who tell me “The battle over the term, e.g., ‘West Bank’ has been lost, so give it up,” there’s a realism attached to my fanaticism. I said “bravo” above to Bennett’s reply, “I know, and I don’t accept it,” to Amanpour’s “occupied territories” is an “international term, Mr. Bennett.” We say in our Powerpoint talk that what matters most is not what Israel’s enemies and the mainstream Western media [which, ok, will never change] call the Jewish homeland’s Judea and Samaria hill country heartland , but what WE call it.
 
In the end, re realism, it’s one thing for Diaspora kibitzers like Lee and me, and even terminology researcher-analyst Mike Perloff and Israeli Levy Commission Report adoption-activist Arlene Kushner, to advocate Jews jettisoning the delegitimizng terms. But what counts is –
 
*** when an Israeli cabinet minister tells CNN, as Economy Minister Bennett did this week, “I don’t accept,” e.g., “occupied territories.”

*** when, on the same day a couple weeks ago (carried in BSMW #670) that the Washington Post wrote “Jews live in a dozen East Jerusalem settlements,” the Jerusalem Post called proposed additions to those same Jewish Jerusalem neighborhoods “residential units beyond the 1949 armistice line.”
 
*** when Israel’s Prime Minister at the podium of the United Nations in September 2012 responded to the Iranian charge that Israel has no “Middle East roots”:
 
… The Jewish people have lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years. Even after most of our people were exiled from it, Jews continued to live in the land of Israel throughout the ages….
 
And so I think that we grassroots pro-Israel media watchers have some growing cause for optimism that both leaders and media institutions seen as representing Israel and the Jewish people are not acquiescing in the delegitimizing lexicon through which the Western media poisons Western perceptions of the Jewish homeland of Israel.
 
Regards,
Jerry