To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #679, 1/5/14
This Week In The Inq: It’s Not Just the Dirty Words that Dispense Poison
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The Inq ran three AP Israel articles, and one by the Washington Post, this week in the Inq. You don’t have to be as fanatical as me on combating the media’s loaded lexicon – see Lee’s and my December Algemeiner article, “Media’s Lexicon Poisons Public Perceptions of Israel,” http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/12/24/media%e2%80%99s-lexicon-poisons-public-perceptions-of-israel/, summarized in the (wow) Conf. of Pres. Daily Alert – to find fault with each of these news articles. It’s not just the loaded terms, but partisan judgments purveyed, sometimes subtly, in news’ articles’ just plain words, that poison public perceptions of Israel.
AP in Inq, Monday, 12/30/13, A17: “Rockets Hit Town; Israel Fires Back”
Monday’s Inq AP article led: “Rockets from Lebanon struck northern Israel on Sunday, causing no injuries but sparking an Israeli reprisal shelling in a rare flare-up between the two countries.” The Inq sub-headlined “No injuries were reported in the exchange ….”
What’s wrong with this is that what happened here wasn’t a “flare-up,” an “exchange.” And not a “reprisal.” Rockets fired from Lebanon hit an Israeli town and Israel responded, but not by rocketing a Lebanese town [Webster: “Reprisal – injury done for injury received”; cf “Retaliation – to return like for like, esp. injury for injury”]. Par. 2: “Shortly after, the Israeli military said it responded with artillery fired toward the source of the launch.” So this was not a tit-for-tat targeting of towns or flare-up or exchange with no discernible cause-and-effect.
On the scale of the imbalances of which the AP and Inq are capable, Monday’s article is hardly worth more than a paragraph or two in a most pro-Israel media watch. I’ll stretch it to three. The Inq’s headline, “Rockets Hit Town, Israel Fires Back,” is imbalanced, notwithstanding its recognition that Israel didn’t fire first. It doesn’t say who it was that fired first, it just has inanimate objects doing things (which a recovering-journalist friend of mine says is a no-no). But it sure says who fired back.
Washington Post in Inq, Tuesday, 12/31/13, A6: “Israel Releases 26 More Palestinian Prisoners”
Paragraph 7:
In Ramallah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was ready, for the third time, to welcome home prisoners who are seen as heroes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because their attacks against Jewish Israelis were motivated by resistance to the Israeli occupation.
“Israeli occupation” is not a fact, but an Israeli-contested Washington Post & Inq judgment of Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and heart of Jerusalem. A couple BSMW’s back, I said “Bravo!” to Israeli cabinet minister Bennett’s response a CNN anchor who told him “occupation is an international term, Mr. Bennett” – “I know and I don’t accept it.” And Bibi at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting this week (Algemeiner, this morning, “Netanyahu Says Arab Incitement at Root of Conflict; ‘We are Not Foreigners in Hebron or Bet El’”):
“We have seen [incitement] examples in recent days. Opposition to recognizing the Jewish state and our right to be here is continuing,” Netanyahu said. “We are not foreigners in Jerusalem, Beit El or Hebron. I reiterate that in my view, this is the root of both the conflict and the incitement, the non-recognition of this basic fact.”
AP in Inq Friday, 1/3/14, A5: “Tall Task as Kerry Back in Mideast”
Friday’s Inq AP article combatively led:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted his Palestinian partner in peacemaking efforts Thursday, accusing him of embracing terrorists ‘as heroes,’ clouding the start of Secretary of State John Kerry’s 10th trip to the region to negotiate a peace deal he says is “not mission impossible.”
As for Israel’s Palestinian partner in peacemaking efforts embracing Israeli-released murderers as heroes, here’s again the Washington Post this week in the Inq: “In Ramallah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was ready, for the third time, to welcome home prisoners who are seen as heroes in the West Bank and Gaza . . . .” [emphasis added]
Indeed, this very Friday article, for all its blasting of Bibi for “clouding” the peace process by “accusing” [emphasis added] Abbas of “embracing terrorists ‘as heroes’” up in its lede, added in paragraph 6:
As with earlier releases, the prisoners received heroes’ welcomes upon their return to the West Bank and Gaza, with officials and jubilant relatives lining up to greet them. At his headquarters in Ramallah, Abbas waited to meet the men in the middle of the night, and he pledged not to sign any peace deal until all prisoners were released. [emphasis added]
The outrage here is the AP not blasting Israel’s peace partner for clouding the peace process by its middle-of-the-night welcoming home of Israel-released terrorists who brutally murdered Israeli civilians as heroes, but blasting Israel for clouding the peace process by complaining about it.
The AP and Inq have done this before – howl not about Israel’s peace partner perpetrating a peace-process impediment, but about Israel having the temerity, chutzpah, anatomy to complain about it.
*** The Inq headlined its 11/4/10 (A2) AP article: “Israel To Monitor Palestinian ‘Incitement’,” with “Incitement” in quotation-marks to portray it as merely an Israeli claim, and sub-headlined it: “Palestinians Accused Netanyahu of Trying To Divert Attention from the Impasse in Talks.” [emphasis added] The article’s text portrayed Israel’s “announcement” that it planned to monitor the incitement [which it neglected to state that the Road-Map called on Palestinian Arabs to cease], not the incitement itself, as having “further strained” the “increasingly tense” atmosphere following breakdown of peace talks.
*** Indeed, at one peace-process juncture, Israel, per the AP and Inq, couldn’t even state out-loud its own long-standing position with an American diplomat in the neighborhood without the AP and Inq blaming it for “clouding” the peace process.
The lede of an article (A.P., 4/23/10, Inq., A13) claimed:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday rejected U.S. calls to halt construction in disputed East Jerusalem, clouding a new peace mission by Washington’s Mideast envoy.
Acknowledged in paragraph 4, however, was that this so-called “Thursday rejection” was not new: “Netanyahu was repeating his longstanding position.” But the A.P. reported as fact its judgment that it was “the timing of the statement” by Netanyahu – his reiteration of his longstanding position shortly after envoy George Mitchell had arrived – that “threatened to undermine Mitchell’s latest efforts to restart peace talks.”
And, the AP wasn’t quite done on Friday. It said that Abbas “has pledged his commitment to a two-state solution.” Perhaps, as long as neither of the two states is Jewish, in direct conflict with San Remo, the Mandate, the Partition resolution (“the Jewish State” and “the Arab State”) and the common U.S.-Israel definition of “two-states” as “two states for two peoples,” one of them Jewish.
AP in Inq, Saturday, 1/4/14, A4: “Kerry’s Push for Peace in Mideast Hits Some Bumps”
Yesterday’s Inq AP article stated:
The West Bank’s Jordan Valley is a strategic area along the border with Jordan that Israeli hard-liners including members of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, say must be annexed by Israel for its own security.
In a Times of Israel article this week, “Kerry Versus Rabin on Israel’s Security,” Dr. Kenneth Levin quoted Kerry-respected and not regarded as hard-line Rabin’s last statement to the Knesset before being assassinated:
The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.
And these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:
A. First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev — as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.
B. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term. [emphasis added]
C. Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was the ‘Green Line,’ prior to the Six Day War.
D. The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria…”
If you search “Rabin Jordan Valley” in the Daily Alert Archive, you’ll find references to other non-hard-line Israelis regarding the Jordan Valley as essential to Israel’s security, including “Ehud Barak Stressed Need for IDF Troops in Jordan Valley.” And don’t forget that it was the liberal Eban who coined the expression “Auschwitz lines.”
Media Bias-Fighting Outlook for 2014
On the dark side, the media is not going to change, and the misperceptions it purveys through both its loaded lexicon and misportrayals – Israeli response against rocketers of Israeli town as Israeli “reprisal”; Israeli presence in Judea, Samaria and heart of Jerusalem as “occupation”; not P.A. welcoming as “heroes” terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians, but Israeli complaint of that welcome, as “clouding” the peace process; only “hard-liners” see need for Israeli presence in Jordan Valley – like those This Week In The Inq will continue wrongfully to poison Western publics’ perceptions of Israel. And not just the public’s perceptions, but – witness the Swarthmore scholars’ perceptions – our own.
On the brighter side, I see today a greater appreciation of the Jewish people’s need to make – in the face of mainstream Western media disdain for it – the Jewish homeland case. “We are not foreigners in Hebron and Beit El,” not “settlers” in Jerusalem. Arlene Kushner is 100% right that “we need to talk about our rights until an obtuse public begins to absorb the reality of those rights.” If the public understands that the media, which has done incalculable incurable damage to Israel’s image in Europe and propagates the Arab narrative in the U.S., is voicing the totally and genuinely contested terminology and perspectives of one side, the public will see the media for what it is. And that will be a major achievement in making the Jewish homeland case.
Regards,
Jerry