Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #732, 1/11/15

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #732, 1/11/15

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Just before midnight, Jerusalem time, last night, the Jerusalem Post posted an editorial, “Words Matter,” condemning as biased against Israel mainstream Western media terms against which I’ve railed in this media watch and in Lee’s and my book, “Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z.” It may not be within our power to get the media to stop using these loaded terms, but what we can accomplish is making clear to publics in the West a stark contrast between the loaded-lexicon-laced media-purveyed Arab narrative and factual history expressed by us. That the Jerusalem Post condemns these Jewish homeland delegitimizing pejoratives – “West Bank … ‘East’ Jerusalem … settlers, etc – may induce more supporters of Israel to cease gratuitously using these terms.

Editorial Last Night in The Jerusalem Post: “Words Matter.” Yes, They Do

Lee and I gave our newly-updated Powerpoint talk this morning to a hundred folks at an area synagogue’s Israel Advocacy group brunch. The part that we didn’t update with last summer’s Israel-Hamas war coverage imbalances and other mainstream media (“MSM”) misreporting on Israel in 2014 is how we begin. We’ve always begun by stating that MSM reporting on Israel is laced with loaded terms denigrating the Jewish people’s homeland connection to Israel, and that Job One in countering anti-Israel media bias is for us to spot and contest these loaded terms. We so began this morning’s presentation, except we added this: Yesterday, a Jerusalem Post editorial, “Words Matter,” called the MSM to task for using these loaded terms.

To a media watch that has railed against the media’s use of these loaded terms all these years, a major newspaper declaring these terms as opinion-purveying pejoratives is significant. And, given that what we can realistically accomplish is to make Western publics aware of a stark contrast between the MSM-purveyed Arab narrative and historical facts expressed by us, that this newspaper is The Jerusalem Post is likewise significant.

“Palestinians, Settlers”: Yesterday’s Jerusalem Post editorial noted that “some terms have evolved in peculiar ways, that “Palestinians” used to refer “to the Jewish population of British Mandatory Palestine, “ that ‘settlers,” the pioneers who established pre-State agricultural settlements,” used to be “national heroes,” but that “today the term settler is used pejoratively to refer to a member of a Jewish community in the so-called West Bank, and is usually associated with the labels of extremism or racism.”

“West Bank”: The Jerusalem Post pulled no punches here, stating that what is “absurd” about the term “West Bank” is that Jordan adopted it in the 1950’s “in an attempt to legitimize its illegal occupation of the region as the result of its aggression in 1948,” that before then, “the British Mandatory authorities commonly referred to the area as Judea and Samaria,” [as had the U.N. in its attempted partition resolution in 1947]. The editorial asks “what happened to Judea and Samaria … the Roman occupiers’ Latinized translation of the biblical Hebrew names Yehuda and Shomron … ignored by the world’s media”?

The “Green Line” [elevated by the MSM to “Israel’s 1967 Borders”]: The editorial then turns to “another non-geographical term that everyone uses, but few understand,” the “Green Line,” which “is not an international border but a line drawn on a map in 1949” to demarcate ending the first Arab war against the nascent State of Israel,” a line that “ceased to exist” in 1967, “when the 19-year-old armistice was shattered by the armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria attacking Israel.” [Just last week, a U.N. Security Council resolution, for which France voted, calling for Israeli withdrawal out of Judea, Samaria and the heart of Jerusalem, failed needing a U.S. veto by one single vote, the abstention of an African state led by a Goodluck Jonathan.]
“East” Jerusalem: The editorial castigates the foreign media for using “another ideology-driven, but geographically impossible term,” that of “East” Jerusalem, including “ironically regarding [Israel’s] capital’s southernmost neighborhood,” Gilo, purchased by Dov Joseph for the Jewish National Fund before 1948. “Gilo was once indeed occupied territory: it was Jordanian-occupied Israeli territory from 1948 to 1967, after which its Israeli sovereignty was restored.”
“Militants”: “[R]eferring to massacres by Islamic State as carried out by militants and not terrorists makes an immoral statement.” [On June 20, 2002, a few days preceding a pro-Israel demonstration in front of the Philly Inquirer’s old Dark Tower on Callowhill Street, at which I had the honor to be one of the three speakers, the Inq headlined the second of two successive days’ Jerusalem public bombings, murdering 25 and maiming 85 civilian bus passengers, as “… And Militants Promise More.”]
Not “Temple Mount”?: Jerusalem Post: “[A]ccuracy in reporting is about to face the test of a new propaganda offensive by the Palestinian Authority. In its ongoing attempt to rewrite history in asserting its claim on Israel’s capital, the PA attempted to persuade the BBC to stop using the term ‘Temple Mount’ to describe the plateau on which the Jewish people’s First and Second Temples were built. Instead, Haram al-Sharif (the Nobel Sanctuary) is preferred, which houses the Dome of the Rock and the Aksa Mosque.” [So nu? AP, 1/17/01, Inq A3 (BSMW #3): “Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak dismissed two main Palestinian demands yesterday – lessening the chances of achieving a peace deal.” Those two demands, not Arab making of which, but Jewish rejection of which, caused “lessening the chances of achieving a peace deal”? [1] “that all Palestinian refugees and their descendants, about four million people, be given the right of return to their former homes in Israel,” and [2] Palestinian sovereignty “over a disputed Jerusalem holy site — Haram al Sharif, known to Jews as Temple Mount.”]

Many years ago, a man named Arthur Koestler wrote a couple most interesting books. One, about Israel’s War of Independence, in which he volunteered, was “Promise And Fulfillment.” The other, about the great cosmologists – Copernicus, Kepler, and others – was called “The Sleepwalkers.” They made these great observations and discoveries, but they didn’t always seem to appreciate the significance of what their observations were telling them. I’ll conclude this week with the photo caption accompanying this sterling Jerusalem Post editorial: “Houses can be seen at the Jewish West Bank settlement of Maale Efrayim in the Jordan Valley.”
Regards,
Jerry