Anti-semantic

The NYT’s public editor Clark Hoyt, today navigates “Semantic minefields.” I had little doubt that at least one of those “minefields” would involve the Middle East, and I wasn’t disappointed.

No subject arouses reader passion more consistently than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and The Times navigates a semantic minefield with almost every story on the subject. When Cooper wrote this month about a lunch that Obama had with Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, she said the president was trying to mend fences with American Jews upset at the administration’s stance against construction of “Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.”

Nathan Dodell of Rockville, Md., said it was “tendentious and arrogant” to use the word “settlements” four times in the article when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has explicitly rejected it in relation to East Jerusalem. Obama has used the term himself to refer to construction in East Jerusalem, and Cooper told me, “I called them settlements because that’s the heart of the dispute between the Israelis and the United States: settlement construction in Arab East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want for an eventual Palestinian state.”

But to Dodell, she was taking sides. He asked why she didn’t use a neutral term like “housing construction.”

Hoyt immediately starts with condscension. His “arouses reader passion” is a way of saying, “people who are offended don’t appreciate our professional reporting have an agenda.” But then Cooper’s defense isn’t exactly right.

Barry Rubin recently wrote:

But any freeze on Jerusalem won’t be made too explicit for a number of reasons. First, ever since the Oslo agreement was originally made in 1993, Israeli leaders have maintained that they interpret it as permitting construction on existing settlements and Jerusalem. For 17 years, the PA accepted this position. It never refused to talk on the basis that such construction was happening. Only when President Barack Obama raised the issue in 2009, it became apparent that the PA couldn’t be less militant than the American president.

Israeli construction in Jerusalem has always been accepted as legitimate. It’s Cooper who’s rewriting history. ( Geography too. What the hell is the “Arab East Jerusalem” that Cooper refers anyway? Ramat Shlomo is in the north of Jerusalem.)

Hoyt continues:

Settlement is a charged word in this context, because it suggests something less than permanent on someone else’s land. Israel argues that all of Jerusalem is its undivided capital, a claim not recognized by the United States and most of the world. Articles by Times reporters in Jerusalem do generally use words like “housing” instead of “settlement.” Still, Ethan Bronner, the bureau chief, said it would be unwise to adopt a hard and fast rule, because some areas of the city taken by Israel in 1967 had long been Jewish neighborhoods while others, built more recently, had the feeling of settlements.

Gee talk about using loaded terms. Frankly, I think that a description of Shiloh should be a Jewish city or community not a settlement. But how would Hoyt say his reporters should refer to Gush Etzion (the Etzion Bloc)? After all it was Jewish territory prior to Israel’s War of Independence, so when Jews build there it isn’t exactly built on “someone else’s land.” And remember that the Times has a habit of referring to residents of places in Israel where they don’t think Jews should live as “settlers” as if they were somehow less than people.

I do wonder about Bronner’s response. My guess is that Bronner might be referring to Sheikh Jarrah rather than Ramat Shlomo. It’s a distinction that Hoyt wouldn’t get. (Nor is it one that is justified. I’m just addressing Bronner’s likely intent.)

In general though, the Times has been careful not to refer to Jewish construction in Jerusalem as a settlement and has corrected itself when it has done so. Not every media organization takes such care.

But then there’s another issue. How does the Times refer to Hamas? Here are two recent examples.

Hamas executes 2 accused of aiding Israel:

Israel and Egypt have maintained a strict economic embargo on Gaza. Israel also refuses any direct contact with Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union.

Gaza Rocket Attack Into Israel Kills a Thai Worker

The European Union, like the United States and Israel, classifies Hamas as a terrorist organization, and Lady Ashton — formally Baroness Ashton of Upholland — was not planning to meet with Hamas representatives in Gaza.

Note, Hamas is not a terrorist organization but is “classified” as one. This doesn’t appear in every article about Hamas, but it occurs with some frequency. Hamas, however clearly targets civilians, so by definition it is a terrorist organization. Yet the Times seems to take care not to hedge its description of Hamas on a regular basis. The corresponding language regarding Israel would be to describe Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “classifed as settlements by the Palestinian Authority” and not to use the term “settlements” as a judgment of the paper.

Of course that would assume that bias against Israel was a concern to the New York Times. But I’ve recently shown quantitatively (if not conclusively) that Israel doesn’t get a fair hearing on the Times’s opinion pages. It’s not surprising that it doesn’t get fair treatment in the news section either.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.