Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #686, 2/23/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #686, 2/23/14

This Week In The Inq: Mainstream Media Still Stuck at the 2004 Milepost on the Long, Long Road to Balanced Reporting on Israel
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An AP Israel article this week in the Philly Inquirer (Inq) offers an opportunity to measure how far along the road to balanced reporting on Israel the mainstream Western media has moved over the course of the 686 weeks since this weekly media watch began at the start of January 2001. As you will see, not very far.

2001

Those of you who joined me more recently than 686 weeks ago may not be familiar with the Philly Inquirer’s monumental misstatement of Middle East history that started me off. The Inq’s January 4, 2001, front page news article by its then owner, Knight-Ridder, told readers that under then President Clinton’s plan

Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain . . . . (Inq, Thu, 1/4/01, Knight-Ridder, A1, 16)

Not quite. What happened in 1948 was not “the creation of Israel,” but Arab invasion rejection of the remaining [post-Jordanian lopoff] Palestine Mandate’s partition between its two small, not-all-that-unequal populations of Arabs and Jews. The Arabs [they weren’t exclusively called “The Palestinians” yet] who left did not do so “during the creation of Israel,” but during a multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction. And there were some half-million, encouraged by the invading Arabs, not “nearly four million,” who left. A greater number of indigenous Middle Eastern Jews fled vast Muslim lands, mostly to Israel where they were absorbed.

The most demonstrably false of these distortions was the mathematically incorrect “nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants.” Palestine’s entire population at the time was less than two million, a good third of it Jews. Countering “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants,” repeated, by BSMW’s count, seven times by Knight-Ridder and the AP in the Inq in that month of January 2001 alone, became the first campaign of Brith Sholom Media Watch. I’ve recounted herein the successful result on that count that BSMW, CAMERA and other media-fairness-to-Israel campaigners eventually obtained in 2003 and 2004. (The New York Times, for one, conceded that it had numbered the Arab refugees “imprecisely.”) The remaining distortions, however, remained.

2008

In 2008, these remaining distortions became the focus of Brith Sholom Media Watch’s second campaign. In the spring of that year, in anticipation (well, dread) of the Inq’s looming coverage of Israel’s upcoming 60th independence anniversary commemoration, BSMW sent then Inquirer publisher Tierney a 60-page dossier of Inquirer Israel reporting citations, along with over a hundred fifty readers’ letters, asking the Inq:

[1] Stop calling Israel’s re-attainment of independence “the 1948 creation and founding of Israel,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue;

[2] Stop calling the partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction “the war that followed Israel’s creation,” without the invading Arab states so much as named;

[3] Stop blaming Arabs who left Israel in 1948 “Palestinian refugees from Israel’s creation” or “the war that followed Israel’s creation”; and

[4] Start mentioning equally frequently and prominently that a greater number of indigenously Middle Eastern Jews left vast Muslim lands in that time period, mostly to Israel, where they were absorbed, than Arabs left tiny Israel.

The Inquirer did not favor these callers for coverage change with a direct reply. But its May 8, 2008, front-page article on Israel’s commemoration of its independence, authored by its former Jerusalem bureau chief, Michael Matza, referred to

the United Nations partition vote,

and referenced 1948 as when

Israel gained its independence from the British,

and as

when the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq invaded the land Israel claimed as its home.

It wasn’t until that article’s very tail-end last sentence that Mr. Matza signed off with a signature

the creation of Israel and war that followed.

Still Stuck There in 2014

On Monday this week (Inq, Mon, 2/17/14, A10, AP, “Abbas Signals Flexibility on Palestinian Refugees”), our Inq ran an AP article on Abbas meeting in Ramallah with “young Israelis, mostly affiliated with dovish political parties and coexistence activists,” whom the AP distinguished from “a largely hard-line Israeli leadership.”

In the course of this article, the AP wrote (emphasis added):

The fate of the Palestinian refugees is one of the most emotional issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Limiting the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict’s refugee issue to “the fate of Palestinian refugees” hides from readers that the 1948 war that generated those refugees was not a war between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, but, as were the subsequent wars, an Arab-started war between Israel, on one side, and Palestinian Arabs and invading Arab states on the other, and that that war generated more Jewish than Arab refugees. That Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees, while Arab “hosts” isolate the Arab refugees and generations of descendants in “camps” [now there’s apartheid], including in Palestine itself, does not turn the Arab-Israeli conflict’s two-sided refugee issue into an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s Palestinian refugee issue,” except in the Arab narrative the media propagates.

The AP further wrote (emphasis added):

Israeli leaders have long demanded that the Palestinian leadership publicly renounce the right of return and say refugees should be resettled in a future Palestinian state or offered compensation.

By referring to the Arab-demanded “right of return” as “the right of return,” the AP bestows on that disputed claim the stature of an unquestioned existing right, not of a contested claim. Language like “…publicly renounce the claimed right of return” would have been balanced.

The AP further wrote:

About 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war surrounding Israel’s establishment in 1948.

This is still the same Arab narrative propagated by the mainstream media in the Inq et ilk at the 2003-2004 point at which it finally abandoned “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.” Even 700,000 Arabs who left Israel is too high, Katz argued in Battleground. In any case, they didn’t leave “during the war surrounding Israel’s establishment in 1948,” but during the war for Israel’s destruction started by an invasion by surrounding Arab states which the mainstream media still refuses to name. And it still suppresses that this Arab states’ war against Israel generated Jewish refugees from Arab states.

Where we come out is that except for conceding there weren’t really “millions” of Arabs who left Israel in 1948, the mainstream media is still purveying the Arab narrative it purveyed 686 weeks ago at this millennium’s (and this media watch’s) start, January 2001. Has it affected Western public perception? “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.” Those were the words of the President of the United States to the whole world from Cairo, June 4, 2009.

Regards,
Jerry

PS: Last weekend I sent the following unanswered email to the Inq’s house foreign affairs columnist under the subject line: “Reference to your Kerry article in media watch”:

“Ms. Rubin,

“Attached is our media watch this week, which focused on your “Kerry’s Obsession” column.  We said that you begged the question whether the Jewish people has an historical and legal claim to Judea-Samaria beyond the green line, and that your current and past terminology – 1967 borders, Arab East Jerusalem, etc –  is improper.  If you’d care to respond to our readers, we’ll run it next week.  We invite you to subscribe to our Inq-focused watch.

“Jerry Verlin, Editor”