Update December 18, 2022 new audio link to Citizen Radio guest appearance by Max Blumenthal and 2 links regarding Iron Dome rocket defense system almost cut in 2011. Update January 1, 2023 links added to 'Caught in the Crossfire" article and a transcript and a video presentation of the "Armed and Dangerous" report. Update January 8, 2023 March 2012 link added with same info Ronald Sheinson distracted from with militant or terrorist word choice complaint.
Seizing on one word or phrase in an article or broadcast article as part of confusing 'fighting media bias' with suppressing influence, unwanted to the 'media bias fighter,' on subsequent events the article or broadcast article may have, has at least a 10 year history. Focus on one word or phrase can distract people from one subject, not favorable to one's conflict narrative, to another subject more favorable to one's conflict narrative. See the previous post of 5 tactics to make the 'case for Israel' where I discussed changing the subject.
A good article to look up to understand reporters' perspectives on the criticism they receive from both Israeli and Palestinian, but mostly Israeli righty/hawk/hardliner/hasbara ambassador/Likudnik and coalition party perspectives, is "Caught in the Crossfire" by Barbara Matusow.
One example from the article shows the extent to which honestreporting. com took their advocacy.
Take the case of a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial that called both PLO leader Yassir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "pigheaded and destructive." In a communiqué urging readers to complain to the Inquirer, HonestReporting.com omitted the reference to Arafat to make the editorial sound like a one-sided attack on Sharon.
The focus on one word or phrase can serve the purpose of distracting attention from another subject of the article that the person crying 'anti-Israel media bias' doesn't want the article's reading audience to 'take away' from, or comprehend, after reading the article.
In the March 24, 2012 Washington Post on the Free for All page Ronald Sheinson of Silver Spring wrote the following letter in response to an article named within the letter.
The writer and editors of the article "Israel and militants in Gaza call cease-fire" (March 14, World) didn't seem to know that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is officially designated a terrorist organization by many countries, not the least of which is the United States. Why does The Post repeatedly call terrorists who shoot rockets at civilian population centers the almost justifying name of "militants"?
There may be more than one side of any story, but they are not necessarily morally equivalent.
The letter's insistence on use of the word "terrorist" not "militant" matches the dislike of the 'cycle of violence' narrative expressed by Michael Weinstein the executive director of honestreporting. com as quoted in the Barbara Matusow article.
Lately, though, Weinstein says, he sees more of what he calls "cycle of violence" coverage. "In this view, you have two people locked in a vicious battle in which neither side is justified. There's no right or wrong. Just two people killing each other and two piles of bodies. This leads to the moral equivalence problem, where a terrorist blowing up a bus in Jerusalem and an Israeli Defense Force strike against terrorist leaders are the same thing."
Focusing on single words distracts from the root causes of what could cause a person to take part in the terrorist tactic in blowing up a bus or shooting rockets. As of April 2012, one root cause is the internationally illegal blockade of Gaza, claimed by Israel's far-right Likudnik and Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is our home) coalition government as a security measure that also has effects that destroyed the Gaza economy that is dependent on exporting raw agricultural products for finished goods. If a person had a job they would tell the terror group 'recruiter' 'no, I can't find explosives for the rocket or the belt I need to be back at my job.'
See the film "Paradise Now" for a depiction of the personal internal struggles between trying to 'make do' with one's current life or to try to improve one's life and to what extent, violent or nonviolent tactics, one acts. Also see the film "Miral" particularly the courtroom scenes where the title character was drawn off the 'keep your nose clean' and 'head down' path into the terror tactic. Here is a link to an interview with the director at a UN screening in 2011. "Miral" was based on a book by the girlfriend of director Julian Schnabel.
I was able to find the article from March 14, 2012 "Israel and militants in Gaza call cease-fire" [full text copied]
JERUSALEM - Israel and militants based in the Gaza Strip agreed to a truce Tuesday, ending a four-day cross-border battle whose intensity and resolution highlighted shifting regional dynamics.
The cease-fire was brokered by Egypt, which has served as a negotiator between Israelis and Palestinian militants in the past. Though the terms of the truce remained unclear, it halted Israeli airstrikes on Monday night, and by Tuesday afternoon what had been a constant barrage of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel had slowed dramatically.
Both Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militant movement that rules Gaza but did not participate directly in the fighting, had seemed disinclined to let the clashes trigger all-out war.
Egypt continues to play a central role in Israeli-Palestinian relations even as it undergoes its own turbulent transition following the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and the ascendance of Islamist parties. Analysts said both Israel and Hamas are seeking to buoy relations with Egypt - Hamas because it senses opportunity in the rise of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Israel because it wants to maintain its long-standing but shaky peace treaty with Cairo.
"The national security interest of Egypt is always in our calculations," Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defense official, told reporters in a conference call.
At the same time, the truce was delayed because the main militant faction behind the rocket firing, Islamic Jihad, is positioning itself as a rival to Hamas in Gaza. As the conflict escalated, Islamic Jihad suggested that Hamas was failing to defend the coastal enclave.
"It took the Egyptians longer to broker a cease-fire. . . . The Islamic Jihad did not want to abide," said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. Hamas, he said, "is aware that any major military operation by Israel will be devastating to the Palestinian people, as well as Hamas."
The clashes began Friday, after an Israeli airstrike killed the top commander and another member of the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant faction that the Israeli military said was plotting an attack on southern Israel via Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. The poorly policed region is of growing concern to Israel. Gilad, the defense official, called on Egypt to "do the work" to control the Sinai, and he accused Palestinian militants of "trying to complicate our relations with Egypt."
Militants in the coastal strip responded to the two killings with rocket fire, which Israel sought to quash with airstrikes on what it said were rocket-launching squads and weapons factories. The rockets caused no Israeli fatalities, but it suspended life in the country's south.
At least two dozen Palestinians were killed in the airstrikes. Medics in Gaza said that most were militants but that at least four were civilians.
On Tuesday, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees said they would stick to the truce if Israel stopped targeted assassinations of militant leaders, which they said Israel had agreed to. Israeli officials denied that.
"Our message is clear: Quiet will bring quiet," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of the truce Tuesday. "Whoever violates it or even tries to violate it - we will find him."
The conflict gave Israel, which is mulling a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, the opportunity to demonstrate its year-old Iron Dome antimissile system. Currently deployed only in Israel's south, the system intercepted dozens of rockets that targeted population centers, and Israeli officials lauded its performance.
and the Ronald Sheinson letter of March 24, 2012 distracted readers from the subject of the article by way of too much focus on one word of the headline. France 24 reported the same info as the WaPo in March 2012.
The latest round of violence began on Friday after Israel killed Zuhair al-Qaisi, head of the Popular Resistance Committees, prompting militant groups to begin lobbing rockets over the border.
The army said Qaisi had planned a deadly attack in August 2011 and accused him of planning a repeat attack "in the coming days."
The violence prompted international concern, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday condemning the "rocket fire from Gaza by terrorists into southern Israel."
"We call on those responsible to take immediate action to stop these attacks. And we call on both sides, all sides, to make every effort to restore calm," she told the UN Security Council.
And the Middle East Quartet, which groups US, UN, EU and Russian diplomats, also expressed "serious concern for the recent escalation."
The subject of the article was about ending the violence that started after Israel bombed a car carrying two people thought to be planning attacks from the Sinai peninsula. The article was also about how Egypt would continue to honor the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, or not, with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood as a political party, now no longer banned after the fall of Hosni Mubarak's government during the 2011 Arab Spring.
The reality is that Egypt, under its military council governing day to day until Presidential elections after parliamentary elections have happened, has been an honest broker to the extent of mediating negotiations between Israel and Hamas that led to the freeing of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit for 1000 Palestinian prisoners as well as the March 2012 cease-fire.
Israel was able to show the effectiveness of the Iron Dome rocket defense system to stop rockets fired in retaliation for the car bombing. According to Max Blumenthal in an interview, 57 minutes 50 seconds to 1 hour and 30 seconds within the March 15, 2012 podcast that is no longer posted at wearecitizenradio.com, the Trachtenberg Committee had recommended cutting the Iron Dome rocket defense system and redirecting the money to human needs like more affordable housing and food after tent protests in Jerusalem in 2011.
To get past the 'militant' or 'terrorist' terminology distraction of the March 24, 2012 letter that echoed the executive director of honestreporting. com above click here
The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (renamed 2016 US Campaign for Palestinian Rights) had a website, aidtoisrael.org, that showed the cost, in lost funding for human needs, to USA local, state and federal governments that coincidentally has the same message of redirecting military aid to government programs to meet human needs. The US Campaign released a report "Armed and Dangerous: US Weapons to Israel" that explains the political, strategic, economic, legal and human rights rationale for ending US military aid to Israel that coincides with the demands of the tens of thousands of 2011 tent protesters and supporters in Israel. Since the report was released in March 2012 a new 10 year memo of understanding was agreed to in 2016 by the USA and Israel to raise the annual military aid to $3.8 billion per year. Supplemental appropriations were also passed like
the September 2021 HR5323 new money for the Iron Dome rocket defense
system that was almost cut in 2012 by the Manual Trachtenberg commission
recommendation that was ignored. The new Iron Dome system money was passed after the May 2021 Sheikh Jarrah evictions war that Israel escalated in response to Palestinian nonviolent protests demanding equal residency rights in Jerusalem.
