Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #705, 7/6/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #705, 7/6/14

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: We’ve all read this week much more than we’ve wanted to, and I hesitate to add this to the burden. Yet the more disconcerting the news, the more critical becomes the need to demand its reporting with balance. A next Israel-Hamas round may well be in the offing, and putting down municipal rioting, even in democracies, is never pretty.

The Lesson in These Four Murders for Us

Like every other Jew, except maybe six, on the planet, I’ve wanted to believe that the 16-year-old Arab youth had not been murdered by Jews in retaliation [there is an appropriate place for that term that the media so routinely applies to Israel targeting terrorists who’d attacked Israeli civilians] for Arabs’ murder of three Israeli teens. It appears, however, as I write this, that six swiftly Israeli-arrested Israeli Jews may have done it.

Arlene Kushner rightly points out “the difference between the way we Jews have responded to the death of the three boys and the way Arabs are responding here.” She predicts, I think again rightly: “Unfortunately, this difference will not be noted by mainstream media sources.”

But, beyond observing that Jews did not hand out sweets when we learned of this Arab boy’s brutal death, that if these arrested Jews are convicted the Israeli government will not pay them salaries in prison, won’t name parks and sports teams in their honor, etc., there’s a media watchers’ lesson in these murders for us.

The lesson’s not just that the hypocrisy, the Arabs’, media’s and world’s double standard, is so thick you could cut it with a sheet of the paper on which they print the Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s that we Jews have at least passively contributed to anti-Israel hysteria by our long acquiescence in the Western media’s malportrayal of both Jewish Palestine equities and Israel defending itself against Arabs.

This difficult week, I’ll give you one major example of each.

#1: For years, the mainstream Western media pounded “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation, or war that followed Israel’s creation,” a monstrous mathematically-false misrepresentation given that Palestine’s entire population was less than two million, a third of it Jews. It poisoned, perhaps lastingly, who knows how many Westerners’ minds against Israel, and it was only pro-Israel media watchers, not the bulk of American Jewry, who actively stood up against it.

Yes, the media has stopped saying “millions,” but the remainder of the pro-Arab distortion of 1948 events is still there – “Palestinians displaced by the war that followed Israel’s creation,” sans mention

[a] that that war was a UN-partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction;

[b] that Israel historically rightly calls that war its War of Independence, not “of Creation and Founding,” as though artificially and out-of-the blue;

[c] that it was a homeland army of homeland Jews that threw back that invasion (not bad for a place created and founded the day before that multi-nation invasion);

[d] that those invading Arab states encouraged Arabs living in Palestine temporarily to leave until they’d finished off Israel’s Jews; and

[e] that in that war and its wake more Middle Eastern Jews fled vast Arab and other Muslim lands, mostly to Israel, where they were absorbed [Look, Ma, no UNWRA!], than Arabs [whose descendants are still held by their Arab “hosts,” including in Palestine itself by “The Palestinians.”, in “refugee camps”] than Arabs fled tiny Israel.

#2: In the winter of 2008, almost a year preceding Cast Lead, Arabs in Gaza escalated from lobbing what the media called “homemade” rockets at Jews in Israeli Negev villages such as Sderot (which hasn’t stopped), to launching at the Israeli city of Ashkelon what the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement at that time described as “a standard military artillery weapon, equipped with a weapons-grade high explosive fragmentation warhead,” bringing “about a quarter of a million Israeli civilians in constant danger of Hamas attack.”

While civilians in Ashkelon were bemoaning “We’re just like Sderot” [news article quoted in Conf. of Pres. Daily Alert, 2/28/08], and the liberal Israeli paper Haaretz editorialized on the same date: “The dozens of rockets that were fired on Wednesday from Gaza – one of which killed Roni Yihye – have placed the I.D.F. on the threshold of a major raid into the Palestinian territory. Responsibility for the escalation lies entirely with the Palestinian side: the Hamas government,” Israel briefly went into Gaza to stop those rocket attacks.

In a week of headlines that mentioned Hamas, escalation, Grad rockets and Ashkelon not at all, the Philadelphia Inquirer headlined on three days:

*** “Mideast Peace Talks Off; Palestinians suspend discussions; Israel vows to keep up Gaza attacks” (3/3/08, front page);

*** [day after Israel exited Gaza] “Abbas Declines To Set Time for Resuming Talks; He met with Rice, who pushed for the resumption of negotiations broken off over Israel’s incursion into Gaza” (3/5/08, A3); and

*** “Mideast Peace Talks Back on Track, Rice Says in Visit To Region; Abbas had halted them after Israel’s incursion into Gaza” (3/6/08, A2)

Yes, that was some years ago, but are there any grounds whatever to assume that our continued averting of our eyes will result in any more balanced headlining by our hometown monopoly paper next round, which may be “this” round by the time you read this?

The only conceivable basis of a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict has to include Arab recognition that Jews are there as of right and have the right to defend themselves against Arab attackers. What chance is there of that while Western Jews acquiesce in the Western media steadfastly purveying that Arabs were displaced by “Israel’s 1948 creation” and that Israel counter-attacking rocketing of Israeli civilians from Gaza is contextless Israeli “attacks” and “incursions”?

Regards,
Jerry