Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #729, 12/21/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #729, 12/21/14

This Year in the Fight Against Anti-Israel Media Bias: A Media Watcher’s Reflections

In last week’s #728, I wandered through these weekly media watches for 2014, picking out 16 occurrences of what seem to me substantial instances of Philly Inquirer and its news reporting sources’ anti-Israel media bias. The Inq printed multiple times that the “vast majority” of Gaza casualties were civilians. The vast majority of its Israel-Hamas war photos were of damage in Gaza, to the pointed exclusion of Israeli civilians continually rushing with but seconds’ warning to bomb shelters, crouching with little kids beside cars on the roadside, etc. Even the Inq-selected photos adorning its articles on Israel’s airport being shunned and on many thousands of Israelis fleeing their homes in southern Israel were of “Smoke Rises Over Gaza” ilk.

This almost-end-of-year week, let’s look at events and developments in the world during the year 2014 bearing on your and my long fight against anti-Israel media bias.

#1 – This summer, I was definitively proved wrong in my hope that mainstream media coverage of Hamas-controlled Gaza would be better than it had been of “moderate” Abbas-ruled Gaza

The mainstream Western media had cut the Abbas-ruled PA a lot of slack in allowing terror to emanate from the Gaza part of its domain. E.g. (emphasis added):

*** Inq, 5/7/05, A9, KR Nelson: “Abbas has resisted ISRAELI AND U.S. [really Road Map] pressure to deal forcibly with Hamas, hoping instead to PERSUADE extremists to lay down their weapons and pursue negotiations rather than violence as a means of achieving a Palestinian state.”;
*** Inq, 6/11/05, A2, AP: “ISRAEL [actually the Road Map] has demanded Abbas crack down on the groups that sponsored years of suicide bombings and other attacks against Israelis, but the Palestinian leader has PREFERRED to try to PERSUADE the groups to refrain from violence.”;
*** Inq, 6/21/05, A6, AP: “ISRAEL [really the Road Map] says progress depends on the Palestinian Authority first reining in extremists, and gives Abbas low marks in that area. The Palestinian leader has CHOSEN PERSUASION OVER CONFRONTATION in his bid to sway his main rival, the Islamic group Hamas – a strategy Israel denounces as naïve and destined to fail. . . . Abbas has ruled out such a crackdown, saying it would start a civil war. His policy of using NEGOTIATION AND PERSUASION, rather than force, to stop attacks has achieved mixed results.”

Indeed, the MSM carried this slack to this ludicrous straight-face reporting: The 12/6/05 Inq carried a Washington Post article on an Islamic Jihad Gaza terrorist bombing of a Netanya shopping mall which the article described as 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.” Paragraph 8 quoted Abbas that “those responsible should be hunted down by the Palestinian police.” Paragraph 10 reported that around this time said Islamic Jihad was conducting “a news conference in Gaza City.” [BTW, the Inq’s one photo adorning this article on this so-described in-Israel carnage was “A youth who says his brother blew himself up [and, btw, a few other folks] in the Israeli city of Netanya stands at the family house in the West Bank village of Illar.”]

So when Hamas fully took over Gaza in 2007, I expressed the hope in this media watch that the MSM would look upon Hamas-ruled Gaza less sympathetically. Well, I got my come-uppance this summer – the “vast majority” of Gaza casualties were reported as civilians, all over the media (and the vast majority of Inq Israel-Hamas war photos were of Gaza).

#2 – Two Ex-APniks spilled beans on systemic AP Arab-Israel coverage imbalance

The Tower Magazine ran an article this summer by ex-AP reporter Mark Lavie,

“Why Everything Reported From Gaza is Crazy Twisted,”

“The images coming out of the Gaza Strip are heart-wrenching. They are also part of a deliberate and sophisticated distortion machine. A veteran journalist takes us inside.”

The Jewish Press’ Lori Marcus had an article this week on the significance of ex-AP reporter Mark Lavie’s revelations: “AP has long been criticized as biased against Israel. Lavie provides eyewitness testimony ….”

Fellow ex-AP reporter Matti Friedman has written two revealing articles this year, one of which I quoted in a recent BSMW issue, and cited as providing confirmation from a credible inside source that systemic AP anti-Israel imbalance is real.

#3 – Israel Waking Up re Jewish State and Arab Land Jewish Refugees

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the Foreign Press Corps in Israel, January 11, 2004:

The Jewish people was born as a people 4,000 years ago, and as a matter of fact, never left. There were Jews that never left this country. And that one must understand…. For years we talked mostly about security. I think that this approach was a mistake…. I think that Israel made a mistake and I include myself in one of those not to speak about the Jewish rights over this country. It’s painful…. We speak about the history of the Jewish people. And the Jewish people as Jews have existed for 4,000 years and never left this country.

The Israeli government took a major step this year, if belatedly, by giving official recognition to the greater number of indigenously Middle Eastern Jews, mostly absorbed by Israel, who left vast Muslim lands in the wake of the 1948 war than Arabs left tiny Israel. The fundamental significance of this official recognition by Israel is not only that Israel’s absorption of these Jews more than offsets the Arabs’ claimed “right of return,” but that these Middle Eastern Jews and their descendants, a major segment of Israel’s population, establish, along with the ever-present Yishuv, that Israel is not a “European colonialist implant” in an “Arab Middle East.”

Three Inquirer staff writers wrote in 2003 that Israel’s right to be a Jewish state is in issue. It has never been in issue. It is what 3,000-plus years of continuous homeland-claiming Jewish presence, 20th century international documents including San Remo and the Palestine Mandate are all about. Albeit in a truncated form, it is what the U.S. vision of “a two-state solution” as two-states-for-two-peoples is about. That Israel’s prime minister is re-asserting this in 2014 is a positive step in the media war.

#4 – One media struggle participant’s involvement in 2014

Many of you know (because I browbeat you to buy it – www.pavilionpress.com) that I co-authored a book on anti-Israel media bias. In 2014, Lee Bender, my co-author, and I gave a Powerpoint talk, based on our book, to a number of groups. One of those talks in particular stands out for me. Isi Liebler wrote a Jerusalem Post op-ed last Sunday, 12/14/14, in which he wrote that Mort Klein, re-elected this past spring as president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), “succeeded in transforming what had become an almost bankrupt organization into a dynamic political machine.” I had the privilege to be among the Philly ZOA chapter’s delegates to that convention and to vote for Mort’s re-election. A few minutes thereafter, Lee and I had the privilege to give our Powerpoint talk in The House That Mort Built.

This fall, like last fall, the ZOA gave Lee and me a table to offer our book to the thousand-plus attendees of the ZOA’s annual dinner in New York. Last year’s led to our writing about 10 articles this year on Algemeiner, a couple of which were excerpted by the highly regarded commentator Elder of Ziyon, and one of which was excerpted in the very widely read Conference of Presidents’ Daily Alert.

Most of Liebler’s JPost op-ed last Sunday was about this year’s ZOA New York dinner, which Lee and I and some eleven hundred other people gleefully attended. At that dinner, I was privileged to witness three astonishing events on one night. I’ll end with a selfie interview on that.

Q: What was the first astonishing event?

A: The ZOA, inaccurately widely regarded as “right-wing” [Mort says we’re not “right-wing,” just “right”], presented an award that night to the truly pro-Israel, but flaming liberal Professor Alan Dershowitz, late of a lengthy career as a Harvard Law School professor.

Q: What was the second astonishing event?

A: Professor Dershowitz showed up to accept it [saying something about him and us].

Q: What was the third astonishing thing?

A: What Professor Dershowitz did when he got there.

Q: What did he do?

A: He introduced, with high praise, a former student of his, an alumnus of Princeton as well as Harvard, as one of the evening’s main speakers.

Q: And who was this former student whom Professor Dershowitz so introduced?

A: Senator Cruz.

Regards,
Jerry