JAMES NORTH
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Kudos to the anonymous New York Times<\/em> staffers who leaked the paper\u2019s offensive internal guide about the language it won\u2019t permit in its reports on Israel\/Palestine, and more kudos to The Intercept<\/em> for publishing it<\/a>. The shocking revelation should prompt an even broader examination of the biased language that has long been routine in the Times<\/em> and across all U.S. media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s start with The Intercept<\/em>\u2019s scoop. Arguably the worst example of bias is the Times<\/em>\u2019s directive that its reports should \u201cavoid\u201d using the phrase \u201coccupied territory\u201d when describing Palestinian land. I\u2019ve closely monitored the paper\u2019s slanted coverage for more than a decade, and I admit to being stunned by this. Let\u2019s set aside Gaza for the moment, even though international legal experts explain that Israel\u2019s air, sea, and land blockade constituted \u201coccupation\u201d even before October 7. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But what about West Bank Palestine? How can the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0pretend that Israel\u2019s permanent military forces, there since June 1967, do not constitute an \u201coccupation?\u201d Israel\u2019s military and police checkpoints and the fact that Israel\u2019s military law is supreme \u2014 what is this if not an \u201coccupation?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just as offensive is the internal Times<\/em> memo\u2019s instruction that reporters should not use the word Palestine \u201cexcept in very rare cases.\u201d This is another jaw dropper. Several million people call themselves \u201cPalestinians,\u201d and Palestine is represented at the United Nations. The United States claims that it still favors a two-state solution; how can you describe the second state without saying \u201cPalestine?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Times<\/em> also told its staff not to use the expression \u201crefugee camps\u201d to describe certain areas in Gaza. The paper justifies this linguistic censorship by arguing, \u201cWhile termed refugee camps, the refugee centers in Gaza are developed and densely populated neighborhoods dating to the 1948 war.\u201d In short, the paper says, before October 7 Gazans were no longer living in tent cities \u2014 (as they are again in Rafah and elsewhere in the territory since Israel destroyed entire neighborhoods) \u2014 so you can\u2019t say \u201ccamps.\u201d But this isn\u2019t the point. Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank do consider themselves refugees; many families still have the keys to the homes they or their ancestors were forced from in 1948. An honest newspaper would report this once in a while instead of shutting down discussion by dictating vocabulary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This bombshell from The Intercept<\/em> comes after months of growing criticism of the New York Times over its coverage of Gaza and Palestine more broadly. One New York Times <\/em>reporter has been removed from the paper after her anti-Palestinian bias came to light <\/a>after she played a role in one of the paper\u2019s most glaring reporting scandals since October 7. The Times<\/em> coverage from Gaza has been astonishingly dishonest, going so far as to blame Palestinian aid seekers for their own deaths<\/a> when attacked by Israeli forces. This malpractice hasn\u2019t been isolated to Gaza, as the paper has failed in its reporting of the West Bank<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Intercept<\/em> revelations are extraordinarily valuable. But some U.S. mainstream bias is so comprehensive and has gone on for so long that it is still passing unnoticed. Let\u2019s take the fact that the 670,000 Jewish Israelis who have moved permanently into occupied West Bank Palestine since 1967 are universally called \u201csettlers,\u201d instead of \u201ccolonists,\u201d and the places where they now live are called \u201csettlements.\u201d The Times<\/em> memo didn\u2019t even have to order this usage; it just happens automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whoever first chose the word \u201csettlers\u201d back in the 1970s deserves a gold medal for dishonest euphemism. \u201cSettlers\u201d gives the impression of hardy pioneers who are entering a land that is nearly empty, a more up-to-date version of the original Zionist expression: \u201ca people without land for a land without people.\u201d The truth is, of course, different; West Bank Palestine is characterized by Israeli military checkpoints, segregated roads for Jews only \u2014 and, in recent months, murderous pogroms carried out by settlers\/colonists with the complicity of the Israeli army. You regularly read accounts by people who say that a single visit to the occupied West Bank was so shocking that they had to revise their previous views.<\/p>\n\n\n\n George Orwell did not only explain that dishonest and euphemistic language can hide important truths. He went further \u2014 arguing convincingly that what he called \u201cNewspeak\u201d could actually prevent you from even thinking accurately. Just imagine how American opinions about Israel\/Palestine would start changing if the Israeli \u201ccolonists\u201d were named accurately, even just part of the time. JAMES NORTH Kudos to the anonymous New York Times staffers who leaked the paper\u2019s offensive internal guide about the language it won\u2019t permit in its reports on Israel\/Palestine, and more kudos to The Intercept for publishing it. The shocking revelation should prompt an even broader examination of the biased language that has long been routine in the Times and across all U.S. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":10417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172,307,185],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-172","category-main-news","category-palestinian-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10419,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10416\/revisions\/10419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
(Source: Mondoweiss)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"