Twisting Words About Attacks in Israel

                                                                                                             published at Jews Down Under

Common words and phrases are losing their meaning in reference to the terror wave in Israel. These obfuscations often start with political leaders and then are spread by media. A good guide to whether you are getting an unbiased report will be to notice if key words still keep their common meanings, or if, instead, odd usage directs readers and viewers toward minimizing or even justifying terrorism against Israelis.

Light or moderate wounds:  normally describes the level of injuries someone has sustained.

Referring to Israelis, now suggests that the danger was minimal.

Every day for the past two weeks, in some cases nearly every hour, Jewish Israelis have been the victims of stabbing or shooting attacks. Or of cars purposely rammed into people standing at bus stops.

Every one of these attacks is an attempted murder. This is true even when the victim manages to fight off the terrorist or stumbles away with only light or moderate wounds. All of the victims of terror who are injured and taken to hospitals are alive only because the terrorist failed at his or her goal of killing Jews.

The terms, "attempted murder" or "terrorist attack" do not seem to be applied to attempted murders and terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Jews.

Alleged:  normally indicates some possibility that there was no attack or that the individual apprehended was not an attacker.

Regarding terror against Israelis, now indicates that what we are seeing did not happen.

Dozens of people witness these events, and often the perpetrator has explicitly stated his or her intention to murder Jews. Although Jews have in fact been attacked, and the perpetrator has been stopped in the act of attacking, the word, "alleged" is included apparently to raise doubt about what really occurred. The effort to suggest that no security response is needed shows up even when there is video that allows viewers (and reporters) to see the terrorist in action.

Executed: Normally means that someone was summarily killed.

Now describes an attacker who was wounded by Israeli security and is at this moment alive and being interviewed.  Can also be used to suggest that live ammunition is inappropriate for use by Israeli security under any circumstances.

An Arab woman is shouting and wielding a knife at a bus station; she refuses to put down the knife after repeated requests by security who start clearing the area of civilians. She keeps the knife in her hand raised over her head and eventually an officer stops her by firing at her leg. She is rushed to an Israeli hospital and this is described as "an execution."

A young teen goes on a stabbing spree and is shot at in the process. He is rushed to the hospital where he is sitting up eating lunch and being interviewed. He says that he set out to kill Jews while Mahmoud Abbas gives a televised speech declaring that the boy was "executed." 

Resulting deaths: Normally refers to the number of people who have been killed by terrorists.

Now does not distinguish between victims and their murderers.

Rumors: The common term for unsubstantiated claims.

Now presented as justification for any kind of terrorism against Israelis.

For months, the false rumor rumor has been spread by Palestinian leaders, Muslim Imams, and Palestinian Authority teachers, that Jews will be allowed to pray at the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. Even the US State department said this and then had to issue a retraction. The "status quo" agreement the State of Israel made with Jordan in 1967 has never changed and isn't changing. News articles do not describe (or show curiosity about) this unusual arrangement but suggest that a rumor is simply a reason to take up guns or knives or cinder blocks and start trying to kill Israelis.

No one was harmed: Normally means that a harmful situation was diffused or stopped before anyone was hurt.

The now familiar, revised meaning suggests that attacks against Israelis are only harmful if a civilian is killed.

Long before the current round of Palestinian terror, the Hamas government of Gaza had been firing rockets into Israel. The press rarely mentions these rockets until there is an Israeli response. Every rocket fired into Israel is intended to harm civilians, and does harm them by terrorizing anyone in the area, by traumatizing families who have seconds to find a bomb shelter, as well as by injuring children and adults.

In the current terror wave, there is not even the 15 to 60 second siren warning. Only the sirens of ambulances.

Distorting the News of Jerusalem Terror

                                                                                                                  published at Honest Reporting

Inaccurate and distorting one-liners easily can be corrected. After complaints, CNN edited and apologized for both the completely false headline, “Deadly attack on Jerusalem mosque” and the disturbingly misleading, “4 Israelis, Two Palestinians dead in Jerusalem.” 

But, the systemic distortions through which media view Israel are much harder to change.

In a moment of impatience and candor, a BBC reporter interrupted Knesset Member Naftali Bennett’s short interview about the horrific slaughter that morning of Rabbis Moshe Twersky, Avrahm Goldberg, Arye Kopinsky, and Kalman Levine while they were praying in their Jerusalem synagogue: “We don’t want to actually see that picture, if you could take that down.”

BBC preferred not to “actually see” nor show its viewers a terror victim wrapped in tallit and tefillin lying on a blood splattered floor after two Palestinians had stormed the synagogue, shot people point blank, and hacked at them with axes and knives.

We can’t know what was in the reporter’s mind; we do know from analysis of how Israel is often framed in mainstream American and British media that the reporter most likely was trying to get on with the story.

That is, she did not want or need to see Bennett’s photo since the framework for her story was already in place. The story of the Har Nof terror would be about “tensions boiling” in Jerusalem and “revenge.” 

When terrorists murder Israelis, prestigious news outlets often package the terrorism into familiar and fallacious storylines. Readers’ attention is directed away from the actual violence and toward the features of predictable news frames: in this case into the false analogy of a “cycle” of violence and the image of Israel as the region’s “neighborhood bully.” 

In fact, BBC spells out its guiding misinterpretations in a “background” summary: “Synagogue attack: Months of tension and revenge attacks” that among other errors, simply leaves out Hamas’s rocket firing on Israeli civilians as a catalyst for this summer’s war.

In its gallery of photos of the synagogue massacre, Associated Press does not include a single picture of the devastation itself, though many such photographs were available from Israeli news outlets and across social media. By contrast, BBC and AP did not shy away from graphic imagery during the Gaza war. Indeed, they seemed to seek out casualties, replaying scenes from Gaza endlessly.

These storylines are built from distortions. No matter how much support terrorists receive from Palestinian leaders, other countries, and from the specific groups that sponsor the killing, the perpetrators appear as isolated individuals up against the powerful State of Israel.

And bizarrely, the murder of Jews praying in a synagogue or Israelis waiting at a bus stop is equalized with the resulting deaths of terrorists themselves. The CNN headline, 4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians dead…” alludes to this pattern.

Here is the New York Times:  “It brought to 11 the number of Israelis — including a baby, a soldier and a border police officer — killed in the past month.

“In the same period, Israeli security forces killed a Palestinian citizen of Israel who had approached their car with a knife, setting off days of rioting; shot dead two drivers who plowed their cars into pedestrians in Jerusalem; and killed a suspect in an attempted assassination… “

The phrase, “in the same time period” suggests that there have been killings on both sides. But the deaths of terrorists – here called “drivers,” -- occurred because they were in the act of murdering people at random. The other altercations are included to bolster the cycle storyline.

Like the BBC, the New York Times makes clear their perspective in their own news analysis that includes this unsupported (and unsupportable) claim: “extremists on both sides seem to be acting increasingly beyond the control of Israeli and Palestinian leaders.” 

The fifth Israeli killed at Har Nof was Police Master Sargent Zidan Saif, a member of the Druze community. He died in a shootout with the terrorists while heroically protecting fellow Israelis. Thousands of Druze and Jewish Israelis attended his funeral.  An interfaith gathering was held outside the Har Nof synagogue complex in which Jewish, Christian and Muslim clerics denounced terror in Jerusalem.

There are many other stories in Israel than the ones we have become used to seeing in the press.

                                                                                                comments welcomed at Honest Reporting

Ceasefire Media Fail

How hard is it to tell when a ceasefire is broken?  Aren’t there thousands of eyewitnesses?

In fact, all of the ceasefires have been broken when rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel. 

So why the misleading language?  

“Gaza Attacks Resume as Ceasefire Expires; Truce Talks Up in the Air.” That’s the LA Times on the latest ceasefire. If you read carefully, almost between the lines, you can figure out that Israel did not break the ceasefire.  But it is as if the paper is trying for lack of clarity, casting doubt on the story even as it tells it, and using quote marks around “terror sites,” as if these might be something other than terror sites:

The Israeli army spokesman’s office said in a statement that “terror sites” across Gaza had been targeted following the resumption of Palestinian rocket fire. Hamas disavowed responsibility for the initial volleys of rockets after the cease-fire’s end, with smaller Palestinian factions claiming to have carried out the attacks.

At least two projectiles were intercepted by Israel’s antimissile system, with others falling in open areas in southern Israel.

Since the Iron Dome intercepted two “projectiles,” that is, rockets, there really isn’t a question about who broke the ceasefire. A “smaller faction” of Gaza terrorists rather than the larger faction, Hamas, still clearly means the attacks are coming from Gaza though the headline suggests attacks on Gaza or that the ceasefire expired due to actions from both sides.

Similarly—but more so—The Guardian’s headline, “Israel and Hamas Resume Attacks as ceasefire talks remain deadlocked” suggests that the failure of the talks caused the fighting to “resume” rather than the refusal of Hamas to continue the ceasefire. The Guardian also uses quotes around “terrorist targets” to even greater obfuscation than the LA Times, by not indicating that Hamas places their launchers and rockets in these locations:

Israel's military said it had hit 33 "terrorist targets" since midnight. These included several mosques and houses across the length of Gaza.

And CNN equalizes the ending of the ceasefire with this headline, “Israel Carries Out Strikes on Gaza After Rocket Fire Resumes.” After twenty-four paragraphs detailing the ongoing fighting and Hamas demands, the article does include a quote from Israeli UN Ambassador, Ron Proser responding to UN President, Ban Ki Moon:

"Your statement said that you were disappointed that the parties were unable to agree to an extension of the ceasefire. I couldn't help but notice that you didn't mention one of the parties, which happens to be the party that violated the ceasefire. This party has a name -- they are called Hamas."

When The Neighborhood Bully Fires Back

                                                                                                              photo: Hirek Israelbol                                                                                     

The neighborhood bully just lives to survive

He’s criticized and condemned for being alive

He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin

He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in

He’s the neighborhood bully

                                               -- Bob Dylan, “The Neighborhood Bully”                 

Much of English language media is returning to an old standby: Israel as the neighborhood bully. Sometimes this perspective is stated outright; more often it simply underlies the way stories are presented.

Hamas is usually referred to as a “militant group,” without indicating that it is also the elected government of Gaza. We get the impression of a renegade gang acting outside any official capacity. Working with Hamas is Islamic Jihad; though the two are aligned against Israel they are also in conflict with each other within the larger context of their shared Islamic extremism.

Yet, rarely is “Islamic extremism” mentioned, the widespread phenomenon that greatly overshadows the size of tiny Israel and negates its image as neighborhood bully.

Sometimes Hamas is referred to as a terrorist organization, often by saying Israel “considers” them so, suggesting this is Israeli propaganda.  But Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by many other countries, by the EU, US, Japan, Canada, Egypt and Jordan. And all of the rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel are aimed at civilians, pretty much the definition of terrorism. 

Even the Palestinian ambassador to the UN freely acknowledges that “every missile” from Gaza coming into Israel is “a crime against humanity.”  There have not been a lot of headlines conveying this message. Also a war crime is the launching of rockets from residential areas and endangering one’s own people.

When targeting Hamas fighters and their weapons, the IDF has many methods of warning civilians to leave. They call cellphones, send texts, and distribute leaflets so that people will get out of the way. They have a system of “knock on the roof” as warning and if they see people still in an area they will abort their mission.  During this week the Israeli government helped over 800 foreign nationals who wanted to leave Gaza to do so. 

But there are casualties. It is impossible to call people casualties without stopping right there to say: we should have no wars, ever. Yet, in the world as it is at the moment, in which Israel’s cities are under rocket fire, its government has the responsibility to protect its citizens.

Mention of that responsibility deflates the bully image, as does attributing Israel’s far fewer casualties to its building of bomb shelters, its requirement since the 1980’s that apartments have safe rooms, and its investment in a technology that dissolves incoming rockets in the air before they can do the damage they are intended to do.

Hamas has been firing rockets into Israeli towns for years. In 2008 and 2012 when the rocket firing escalated, and again now, the IDF fired back.  A lot of news coverage begins with Israeli strikes on Gaza as if the neighborhood bully just decided to flex his muscles for no reason.

Reporting that sirens sounded in particular cities or that the Iron Dome stopped rockets over Tel Aviv without ever suggesting that what is transpiring is the attempted murder of families in their homes helps create a familiar storyline in which Israel, because it is the stronger country, is to blame for there being a war at all. 

Bob Dylan wrote “The Neighborhood Bully” about Israel in 1983.

published at Honest Reporting