How The Media Responds To The Itamar Massacre

Based on an email from DG

Israel has decided to build in response to destruction.

The decision is controversial.

The New York Times reports: Israel to Step Up Pace of Construction in West Bank Areas

The announcement, which came from the office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that the government’s ministerial committee on settlements had decided on Saturday night to approve building in Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim, Ariel and Modiin Ilit – all areas of the West Bank that Israel intends to keep under any permanent accord with the Palestinians.

The government emphasized that the plans to build 300 to 500 units constituted “measured construction” within existing settlements, in an apparent effort to minimize international condemnation.

The Palestinian response was predictable

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, condemned the Israeli decision, calling it “wrong, unacceptable and objectionable.”
“The atmosphere this decision creates is not helpful,” he said in a statement published by the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa. “It creates problems, and peace requires courageous decisions.”

The atmosphere created when innocents are slaughtered isn't helpful either. Peace requires "courageous decisions" such as not dehumanizing Jews in your official media.

The Palestinians suspended short-lived negotiations with the Netanyahu government after a partial, 10-month Israeli moratorium on settlement construction expired in September.. They are refusing to return to talks in the absence of a new settlement freeze. And while Israel argues that there is no contradiction between building within the settlement blocs it intends to keep and resuming the peace process, Israel and the Palestinians have never agreed on the size or location of some of the settlement blocs.

Terror regardless of context contradicts peace.

The government announcement came hours before the funerals on Sunday of the five members of the Fogel family, including the parents, two children and an infant, who were stabbed to death by intruders, widely suspected of being Palestinians, while they were asleep.

"Widely suspected?" No, they haven't been caught. But was this really necessary?

Perhaps hoping to preempt international condemnation, Mr. Netanyahu lashed out on Saturday night at countries that have been critical of Israel’s settlement policies.

“I have noticed that several countries that always hasten to the U.N. Security Council in order to condemn Israel, the state of the Jews, for planning a house in some locality, or for laying some tiles somewhere, have been dilatory in sharply condemning the murder of Jewish infants,” he said in a broadcast statement. “I expect them to issue such condemnations immediately, without balances, without understandings, without justifications.”

Why is Netanyahu's perfectly reasonable rebuke to the international community, which is more exercised over Jewish construction than Jewish destruction, "lashing out?"

Joel Greenberg, in the Washington Post was, if anything, worse: Israel to expand West Bank settlements in response to slayings of five in home:

Palestinian officials condemned the Israeli move. The Palestinians have refused to resume suspended negotiations with Israel as long as it continues expanding settlements, asserting that the construction is swallowing up land they seek for a future state.

"Swallowing up?" There's a way to report this without conveying hyperbole.

In Washington, the State Department said it was "deeply concerned'' by the continuing Israeli actions on West Bank settlements. Mark Toner, the department spokesman, called the continued Israeli settlements "illegitimate'' and said they "run counter to efforts to resume direct negotiations'' between Israelis and Palestinians.

This is absurd. The Palestinian refusal to negotiate "runs counter to efforts to resume direct negotiations." If the State Department isn't condemning the Palestinian refusal to negotiate (subsequent to Abbas's refusal to accept an agreement with Olmert) then the State Department is encouraging the Palestinian intransigence.

Those killed were Ruth and Ehud Fogel and three of their children - Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and Hadas, a 3-month-old - all slain in their beds on the Jewish Sabbath.

More specifics about Israeli construction than about the dead. Nothing about blood spattered rooms? Greenberg's losing his touch--compare his description here with what he wrote in In West Bank, a measure of lethal force.

Speaking before the Israeli government's weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu linked the deadly attack to what he called anti-Israeli incitement in Palestinian media, schools and mosques. He said he had urged Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who called to express his condolences, to take "unequivocal action" to halt it.

Commentary in Palestinian newspapers Sunday denounced the attack. An editorial in the daily al-Quds said, "We are against killing children, Jewish or Palestinian, and we condemn such acts." Hafez Barghouti, editor of the government-controlled al-Hayat al-Jadida newspaper, wrote: "Stabbing sleeping children is not a heroic act. It requires a dead heart."

Notice how Netanyahu's comments are balanced out by two quotes. The al-Quds editorial is typical equivocation. The al Hayat al-Jadida statement is better, but still in these days of Palestinian Media Watch what can excuse a reporter for attributing a charge of incitement to Netanyahu, without bringing examples of Palestinian incitement?

Greenberg finds two PA condemnations of the violence. But when it comes to Israeli claims - it's simply something that Netanyahu 'charged'. The media work a lot harder to show that the Palestinians are reasonable or moderate, even when the evidence to the contrary is readily available. It's consistent with the skepticism towards Israeli claims and credulity to Palestinian claims.

Technorati Tag: Fogel and Itamar and Media Bias.