Friday, December 24, 2010

"Nearly 500,000 Jews live on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war"

The above quote is from a Reuters story written by Mohammed Assadi and Ori Lewis.  We cite it because it is typical of the many propaganda mantras Reuters correspondents embed in their stories to portray Jews in a negative light and advance Palestinian Arab interests.

While it is true that approximately 500,000 Jews live in the eastern portion of Jerusalem and the last unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, in its relentless effort to persuade its audience that Jews are interlopers and colonizers of Arab land, Reuters employs the language of conquest to "explain" how the Jews got to living there.  Per Reuters' vision you see, there happened to have been a war in 1967 fought by Israel -- against whom and for what reasons, we are never told -- that resulted in Israel capturing land purportedly the property of the Palestinian Arabs and the subsequent illegal influx of 500,000 Jewish settlers to the area.

In none of its stories on the matter, does Reuters inform its readers that Jews had settled the same area over three-thousand five hundred years ago; that Jews built Jerusalem as a sovereign and sacred city; that the area was repeatedly invaded and conquered by other tribes and nation-states with many millions of Jews killed and ethnically cleansed; that despite this long and bloody history, Jews maintained a continuous presence on the land for over three millennium culminating in their constituting a majority of the Jerusalem population by 1840; that both the League of Nations and the United Nations granted Jews the right, under international law, to settle anywhere in Palestine west of the Jordan River; that local Arab mobs ruthlessly sought to prevent Jews from exercising this right by perpetrating regular pogroms and massacres against the Jewish community; that the Arab states invaded the nascent state of Israel in 1947 in a declared war of annihilation successfully conquering the remaining portion of Palestine and the Old City of Jerusalem from whence the Jews were once again ethnically cleansed; and that the Jews only once again, recovered their rights and land in the area following that "1967 war" instigated by the Arabs in yet another attempt to eradicate the state of Israel.

Provided with the historical facts rather than peremptory propaganda, Reuters readers would be much better served and able to understand and assess the Middle East conflict in an informed and non-coercive manner.

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