There he goes again...

Jeffrey Heller of Reuters is at it again, adopting the biased, historically inaccurate, and racially-loaded lexicon of Arab invasion forces which ethnically cleansed thousands of Jews from Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Heller writes:

"Some 500,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank, land which Israel captured in a 1967 war and Palestinians seek for a state, and Arab East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed as part of its capital in a move not recognized internationally.

When Heller employs the phrase, "Arab East Jerusalem", he is conveniently choosing to ignore 3,000 years of history during which time Jews have lived in the Old City of Jerusalem ("East Jerusalem"), well over a century of a Jewish majority in the city in modern times, and the situation today where Jews comprise approximately 42% of the population of the eastern portion of the city.

More cynically, Heller is deliberately bifurcating Jerusalem across racial lines which were coerced through invasion and ethnic cleansing. Can one imagine Reuters taking the same editorial stance with respect to say, the ethno-religious conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Would Reuters have had the chutzpah to proclaim "Muslim Sarajevo"?

In formally designating the eastern portion of the city as "Arab East Jerusalem", Reuters is clearly violating its Trust Principles and singling out Jews for special (discriminatory) treatment.

"Arab East Jerusalem"

In previous posts, we have noted Reuters' repeated use of the racially loaded epithet "Arab East Jerusalem" to describe the eastern part of the city of Jerusalem. We have pointed out that it is factually incorrect to refer to the area this way as, 1) there is not today and never has been a distinct city formally recognized as "East Jerusalem", 2) depending on the data source, 42-44% of the population in the eastern part of the city is Jewish, and 3) the Jewish population in this area would today likely be even greater had the Jordanian army not killed or ethnically cleansed many thousands of Jews living in the eastern part of the city when it invaded in 1948. In fact, the phrase "Arab East Jerusalem" originated as a result of that ethnic cleansing to describe the situation on the ground.

Now a disclaimer: we are not big fans of the British Broadcasting Corporation as their reporting on the Middle East Conflict is often as biased or more so than that of Reuters. For example, the BBC too, employs the (capitalized) term "East Jerusalem" in its online stories which we feel is a misnomer for the reasons stated above. It's interesting however, that following a 2006 investigation into the impartiality (or lack thereof) of BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the BBC Governors advised their correspondents to:

Avoid the phrase "Arab East Jerusalem", too, unless you also have space to explain that Israel has annexed the area and claims it as part of its capital. East Jerusalem is sometimes referred as Arab East Jerusalem, partly because it was under Jordanian control between 1949 and 1967.

Thus, even the BBC Governors recognize that the phrase "Arab East Jerusalem" is both artificial and anachronistic -- referring to a period which lasted only 18 years -- and should be omitted from BBC reporting.

Will Reuters own up to its use of an ahistorical and racially loaded misnomer and follow suit?

Reuters: antisemitic or simply asinine?

We're returning to a Reuters AxisMundi post from July because it would be difficult to find a more breathtaking example of both the ignorance and conceit demonstrated by their Middle East correspondents.

In "Insulting the Intelligence", Douglas Hamilton patronizes readers by assuming the role of teacher who is going to demonstrate to his students the "rhetorical tricks" of disingenuousness and the straw man argument. Hamilton's teaching exhibit: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hamilton cites Netanyahu's reply to demands by the Obama administration that Israel halt construction of 20 apartments in eastern Jerusalem as an illustration of these "rhetorical tricks":

“We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and buy (homes) anywhere in Jerusalem... I can only imagine what would happen if someone would suggest Jews could not live in certain neighborhoods of New York, London, Paris or Rome. There would certainly be a great international outcry.”

Hamilton admits that discrimination against Jews, i.e., preventing them from building or living in these Western cities, would indeed be proof of antisemitism but that because Jerusalem is a disputed city claimed also by the Palestinian Arabs, such an injunction is perfectly acceptable. For Hamilton, Netanyahu is employing a straw man, and (because Hamilton presumes Netanyahu accepts his distinction between Jerusalem and London) is further guilty of being "disingenuous".

Of course, it is Hamilton who is actually being disingenuous or simply ignorant of the historical facts. As we replied in the comments section to Hamilton's post, at various times in the past, sovereignty over New York, London, Paris, and Rome was also in dispute. The same holds true with Prague, Toronto, Istanbul, Pittsburgh, and today, Belfast, Gibraltar, and Jerusalem.

Competing claims did not prevent the English, the French, the Czechs, or the Catholics from living or building in their cities while borders were tussled with. Competing claims have not compelled the UK government to block condominium construction for British pensioners in Gibraltar. And competing claims have not prevented Arab governments from spending hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize and encourage Palestinian Arab construction in Jerusalem.

Only the Jews it seems, are to be singled out for special treatment.

"We believe our post is accurate"

That was the definitively equivocal reply of Reuters' AxisMundi Jerusalem editor and Bureau Chief for Israel and the Palestinian territories, Alastair Macdonald, to a reader who had pointed out that Reuters' correspondent Erika Solomon did not have her facts straight when she claimed that Uri Davis was Jewish:

"The elections for Fatah’s sixth conference, which just ended in Bethlehem, had an unusual first: their first Jewish Israeli member elected to the 120-member Revolutionary Council."

Davis may have been born Jewish but as many sources have documented, he converted to Islam shortly before he married a Palestinian woman in 2008.

Rather than do the simple fact-checking one would expect from a Reuters' editor and Bureau Chief (which should have occurred prior to original publication) or correct Solomon's erroneous assertion after being rightly challenged, Macdonald responds equivocally:

"We believe our post is accurate. But for more detail on Davis’s complicated biography, we would direct readers to his Web site at http://www.uridavis.info/."

We would prefer to characterize Davis' website autobiography as obscurantist but nowhere does he claim to be currently Jewish.

Beyond underscoring the editorial sloppiness at Reuters, Solomon's original mis-identification of Davis as Jewish and Macdonald's subsequent refusal to correct the error reflects an obvious attempt to enhance the propaganda value of the story. Clearly, it is more damaging to Israel and more flattering to the Palestinians if Fatah (which is committed to Israel's destruction) has elected an Israeli Jew to represent them rather than a Muslim who -- as Davis himself states -- was Jewish solely by the "accident of his birth".

It is also supremely ironic that while Davis refers to himself as a Palestinian, Fatah considers him a "non-Palestinian" because he is not Arab and was born Jewish. This tells us much about the Palestinian ethos on race and religion.