To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #711, 8/17/14
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Ok, so it’s only Wednesday, but our President’s right that now’s the time for vacation, on which my little branch of the tribe’s three generations are about to depart, so here’s this week’s BSMW, which may need to pass for next week’s as well. In any case, this week it took our Inq only till Monday to furnish pro-Israel Inq watchers fodder for This Week In The Inq. And a Very Deep distortion of history it is.
This Week In The Inq: Critical History Stood on Its Head
My “Pressing Israel” co-author Lee Bender and I had another article posted on Algemeiner this week, “The Media’s Anti-Israel Bias is Beyond All Shame.” You can go to algemeiner.com, click Commentary, then Opinion, and take a look. Leave a comment if you like. Our article’s mostly about the one-sided photos of Gaza, and under-reported facts made public by the IDF. It’s how we ended that article that we wrote over the weekend and sent to Algemeiner on Monday, before seeing Monday’s Inq, to which I would direct your attention. Lee and I ended our article by pleading that we have to go beyond deploring media imbalance and affirmatively make our Jewish homeland case to the Western world:
Western Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel must do more than deplore the despicable double-standard with which the Western media vilifies Israel. We must strongly contest the underlying vast historical misperception, as President Obama unfortunately voiced it at Cairo, of the “Palestinians’ displacement by Israel’s founding.”
Israel wasn’t “founded” in 1948, but has been the Jewish homeland, including through uninterrupted physical presence, for three millennia. We must affirmatively make that Jewish homeland case to the world.
Now, then, Washington Post article (Inq, Monday, 8/11/14, A1, 3, WP, “Israel, Hamas Pause Fighting”) This Week In The Inq:
. . . [The 2002 “Arab Peace Initiative”] was a take-it-or-leave-it deal, entailing concessions too painful for Israel to accept, such as a withdrawal from the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, and “a right of return” for Palestinians who fled when Israel was founded in 1948.
Leave aside for the moment that Judea, Samaria and above-all historic Jerusalem are not “occupied territories.” Focus on the poison embedded in the distorted statement that “Palestinians fled when Israel was founded in 1948.”
Israel was not “founded” in 1948, but attained its independence that year as the land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea, successor to Jewish Yehud and before that the Jewish kingdom of Judah. Without exception, every ruler between the Roman’s final 135 CE defeat of Jewish Judaea and Israel’s re-attainment of homeland independence in 1948 was a foreign invader, and mostly non-Arab at that. What happened in 1948 was a multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, thrown back and then some by Haganah, today’s IDF, the homeland army of homeland Jews. The Palestinian Arabs (Palestinian Jews in those days were called “Palestinian” too) who fled did so at the encouragement of the invading Arab states to temporarily get out of their way and then return to share in the spoils. That’s a little different than “Palestinians fled when Israel was founded in 1948,” the poison purveyed to Western publics this week by the Washington Post and our Inq.
It was this Very canard, denying three thousand years’ Jewish homeland connection, including physical presence, to Israel that started me off, seven hundred and eleven weeks (of fortunately-punctuated by fishing trips to Quebec and beach trips to Cape May Point) ago. Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #1, January 7, 2001, quoting Knight-Ridder that week in the Inq:
WHAT’S BEING WRITTEN
This past week, the philadelphia inquirer told its readers in a Knight Ridder News Service news story that under 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 . . . .” (Thurs., 1/4/01, article on page 1 and 16)
Except that the mainstream media has stopped saying “millions,” has anything changed?
Do we not see today the consequences of years of horrendous mis-reporting on Israel in Europe? Can we sanely keep averting our eyes from it in the United States? Not long ago, columnist Jeffrey Goldberg quoted Obama preparing to challenge Bibi with “If not now, when?” President Obama may be excused from not knowing that our great sage Hillel began that partially Obama-quoted statement with “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”, but we cannot not be so excused. If we could ask Hillel should we ourselves stop using the media-endorsed loaded lexicon of pejorative terms – “East Jerusalem … West Bank … settlers and settlements … Israel’s 1948 creation and founding … Palestinians displaced by Israel’s founding … Israel’s 1967 borders … lands seized by Israel in 1967 … The Palestinians … etc, etc” – is there any doubt that Hillel would respond to us: “And if not Now, When?”
Regards,
Jerry