Thursday, December 31, 2009

Reuters latest "FACTBOX" riddled with inaccuracies, propaganda


Yes, it's time for another FALLACYBOX "FACTBOX" from Reuters which fancies anything it writes under this presumptuous banner will go unchallenged.  This time, the topic is Israel-Palestinian peace talks which Reuters asserts have been "stalled since a three-week Gaza war in which 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed".  Reuters is suggesting here that the war (and by implication Israel) is to blame for the failure (or suspension) of negotiations between the parties and injects one of its many boilerplate references to the disparate number of casualties to drive home its point.  

In reality of course, peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians were effectively dead months prior to the war following PA President Abbas' rejection of Israeli PM Olmert's offer of 97 percent of the "West Bank" (also, Judea and Samaria) and the right of return for thousands of Palestinians to Israel because in Abbas' words, "the [negotiating] gaps were wide".  

The Palestinians also wanted the Quartet to issue a formal statement that a Palestinian state be "set up on 1967-occupied lands with East Jerusalem as its capital" and to "present this statement to the new U.S. administration to pursue the peace process from there", which of course, did not occur.

Reuters then writes:
Peace talks never resumed after the war Israel said it launched to stop rocket fire by militants from the Islamist Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Here, Reuters attempts to disparage the obvious casus belli for the war by framing it as "Israel said" while substituting their own sanitized term "militants" for Israel's clearly stated reference to "terrorists". 

While Reuters labors to report Israel's objectives in simple declarative fashion, the agency has no similar difficulty conveying putative Palestinian goals: 
At issue in the dispute is a Palestinian quest for statehood in territory Israel captured in a 1967 war, with a capital in Jerusalem...
Following 40+ years of Palestinian rejectionism on this point, including the most recent rejection by Abbas noted above, one would think Reuters would be somewhat more circumspect in reporting this as fact.

Reuters continues:
[Jerusalem] a city Israel sees as its capital and has widened to include east Jerusalem and West Bank land, moves never recognized internationally.
This is a bit like saying the UK has widened London to include Buckingham Palace.  The eastern portion of Jerusalem encompasses the Old City of Jerusalem and thus, is Jerusalem.

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