Michael Medved
www.thedailybeast.com
22 May ’11

Renewed by the tensions between Netanyahu and Obama, the media are adopting misleading language in the Israel-Palestinian dispute. Michael Medved on why words can be as powerful as bullets.

Careless language, reflexively recycled from Palestinian propaganda, contributes to contemporary confusion about the stalled Middle East peace process. In the wake of Bibi Netanyahu’s tense sit-down with President Obama, it’s worth examining how certain words and phrases distort the debate.

Major media, for instance, regularly cite Israel’s “creation” in 1948—as if the Jewish state came into existence like an oddball lab experiment—through a sudden, arbitrary top-down process, rather than emerging through gradual, bottom-up development, like every other new nation.

Commentators also frequently mention the “displacement” or “uprooting” of Palestinians, suggesting that the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland resulted in ethnic cleansing of the indigenous inhabitants—rather than recognizing the dramatic increases in the area’s Arab population due to the economic development and improved living standards that the new Jewish immigrants brought with them.

Both these mindless distortions appeared in the same sentence of an Associated Press report about bloody demonstrations on Israel’s borders on the weekend of May 15, described as “a sign of rising tensions on the eve of Palestinian commemoration of their uprooting during Israel’s 1948 creation” (italics added).

In truth, Israel was no more “created” in 1948 than the United States was created in 1776. The patriots who gathered in Philadelphia represented a robust, fully functional society with its own economic, political, educational, and even military institutions. They hardly assembled their new nation out of nothing, but looked back to a courageous history of growth, development, and self-defense that, for the oldest colonies, stretched back more than 150 years.
Read More: http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com/2011/05/medved-media-distort-mideast-debate.html