;.cHaberman
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MEDIA BIAS
TO:    David bar-Ilan, Eye on Media, Jlem Post
FROM:  Steve Amdur, Kibbutz Haon, Jordan Valley, 15170 Israel.
       Telephone:  972-6-757572; FAX:  972-6-757554
DATE:       
RE:    NY Times Weekly Review 12/12/93 (Haberman)
REF:
CC:   David Bedein, Israel Resource, Bet Agron; 02-247803; 257303 
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SUMMARY:  A verbose turkey who don't seem to like us much.
          Hack-work, by potentially dangerous as propaganda.

Title: "And Hatred Begat What is Called Peace"          

A Timely piece of flatulant platitudes; but with a few defects.        
1)  Florid style with no content:
"As they stand nervously on the edge of the future, Israelis andPalestinians cannot shake [off, as in intifada?  hands with, as inSept. 13?] the icy grip of the past."
"Tomorrow, Dec. 13, is supposed to be a watershed date.  In thetempestuous territories..."

Ok:  so far we're standing on the edge of an abyss that's awatershed during an icy tempest; and it ain't even the Ides ofMarch yet.

2)  False equivalence ("plague on both your houses")

"Both peoples have been unable to exorecise the demon of historythat follows them as relentlessly as a night stalker (!)...theyare still doing what they have always done:  distrusting each oth4
er, fearing each other, hating each other, and killing eachother...Eye for eye violence was to be expected, Rabin officialSsay [Really?  And in chorous?] [underline & CAP added]
COMMENT:  Beware Demon Rum Chum.

3)  Re-setting parameters of argument:  the Jews are sissies

"Well-armed and probably nuclear-capable [gasp!] though they maybe, they act instinctively the way Jews have for centuries ["Begin-- rhymes with Fagin"] not as a confident majority but as abesieged minority, threatened in their hearts by every Palestinianknife and gun..."

COMMENT:  This is a serious move; it tries to redefine theparamaters of debate such that only a conventional militarythreat, not sustained terrorism, can justify Israel's repressionof Palestinian nationalism.

Behind this move is a divergence between Israel and USA values: in Israel, each Israeli life is precious; in the USA, the lowerclasses, especially soldiers, are expendable.  (Eg Hirsh Goodman,writing in the Jlem Post in the old days if memory serves,recalled a USA military officer criticizing Israel for notdeploying an 'infantry shield' which, Goodman noted, consists in"letting your dog-soldiers get their asses shot off before yourisk the artillery")

I won't belabor the classic anti-Semitic phrase in Haberman'sarticle.

4)  `Post-Historical' revision:  minimizing the contemporarysignificance of the Holocaust

"Many others, though, do not say a settler was killed.  All theyknow is that a Jew was killed.  And they remember that Jews havealways been killed, everywhere, with some lumping Arabs togeatehrwith Nazis, even going so far as to call Israel's pre-1967 bordersthe 'Aushwitz borders'"

COMMENT:  This is not Holocaust revisionism (revising downward theabsolute or relative factual or moral significance of theHolocaust); it is subtler, but it leads toward the sameconclusion:  that Israel cannot without criticism and limitationinvoke fear of a future Holocaust as rationale for militarism.

This is a serious move; since the acceptance by wealthy westernnations of such moral claims by Israel has an impact on the levelof military aid Israel receives.

One may briefly note a few tricks:  the deliberate irony in thephrase 'All they know' and 'Jews have always been killed', thesetting up a straw man in the phrase 'lumping', the cavalierdisparagement of a serious strategic argument ('even going so far'etc.)

5)	Dismissing out-of-hand fears that withdrawal to or toward the1948 Armistice lines would be strategically suicidal.

Briefly, the implicit argument seems to be:  you've got nukes andall they are is kids with stones and a few guns, so why can't youlet them have a little place of their own -- nations are big, andyou have your own nation now, so stop acting like Jews.

Briefly, the writer goes on to puff up Rabin as a cross between aStoic and a taciturn Yankee (Gary Cooper?) "a man unskilled inholding another's hand [Netanyahu's?] in reassurance", withimplicit dismissal of the strategic fears as personal timiditybased on a Holocaust-survivor fear.

"Still, his [Rabin's] insistence that even the most dangerousPalestinians present no existential threat to Israel, whilelogically correct...is not about to dispel...tribal reactions."
COMMENT:  ('Existential' and 'logical' are misused; but that'sshow biz.)



6)  Distortion of history of Palestinian people in the land ofIsrael.

"They have lived on the land for many generations, but withoutproprietorship, often being treated by Israel as if they do notexist.  `A land without people for a people without land' an oldZionist slogan says.  
COMMENT: In fact, Israel has been quite scrupulous about acceptingArab ownership ('proprietorship') of land.  Having quoted an oldZionist slogan, the writer might have noted the density of Arabpopulation in this land at that time.  
This article is a tendentious string of cliches and stale ideas.
.p
TO:    THE NEW YORKER
FROM:  Steve Amdur, Kibbutz Haon, Jordan Valley, 15170 Israel.
       Telephone:  972-6-757572; FAX:  972-6-757554
DATE:  12/14/93
RE:
REF:   NY Times Weekly Review 12/12/93 (Haberman)
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BLOCK THAT ICY CASCADE

"As they stand nervously on the edge of the future, Israelis andPalestinians cannot shake the icy grip of the past.  Tomorrow,Dec. 13, is supposed to be a watershed date.  In the tempestuousterritories..."                                  
         Clyde Haberman, "And Hatred Begat What is Called Peace"
         NY Times Weekly Review, 12/12/93

.P
MEDIA BIAS
TO:    David bar-Ilan, Eye on Media, Jlem Post
FROM:  Steve Amdur, Kibbutz Haon, Jordan Valley, 15170 Israel.
       Telephone:  972-6-757572; FAX:  972-6-757554
DATE:       
RE:    English TV News 12/14/93 17:30+
REF:
CC:   David Bedein, Israel Resource, Bet Agron; 02-247803; 257303 
------------------------------------------------------------------

I have not in general noticed bias in this program.

After an otherwise reasonably sympathetic coverage of a women'sdemonstration against the Rabin/Arafat accord, the announcersegued to the next feature -- an apolitical peace demonstration inthe Arava by a group of Israeli Boy Scouts finishing up an outing, with the misleading and tendentious phrase [if I recall theprecise words] "and in a demonstration for peace" 

COMMENT:  I may slightly misremember the wording, but the crucialfeature here, which I clearly recall, was the emphasis on the word'for'; with the tendentious implication that demonstration againstthe Rabin/Arafat agreement covered in the immediately preceedingfeature had been 'against peace'; and the misleading implicationthat the Boy Scout 'peace' demonstration reflected support for theRabin-Arafat accord.

That hangs a lot on one elocutionary twist; and I would not assumedeliberate bias; the announcer could have been using a standardelocutionary technique without realizing its politicalimplications in that context; it would be hard to argue otherwiseunless one saw her script for that program and found the word'for' underlined. 

.p
LETTER-TO-THE-EDITOR, JERUSALEM POST
FROM:  Steve Amdur, Haon, 15170; Tel: 06-757572; FAX: 06-757554
RE:
REF:   
DATE:       
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Rabin sounds like Darth Vader in a tub of Alka-Seltzer, but seemslike J. Fred Buzzard, the Underaker Vulture in Pogo Comics, whoalways speaks in a Gothic font.
