MID-EAST REALITIES - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - 9/03/2001 Thirty years ago most of the area now known as Gilo was part of the Palestinian town of Beit Jala, next to Bethlehem. Gilo has been built from scratch across the "Green Line" in areas Israel occupied at the time of the 1967 war. In the past three decades Israel has followed a basic and sustained policy of Arab dispossession and Jewish building. It has done so at the barrel of a gun. This is what the military occupation is really all about -- taking from the Arabs and giving to Israeli Jews, many emigrating from abroad. And this is why when it comes to Gilo there is no question that the Palestinians have the right to contest what the Israelis have done and that journalists using the term "illegal settlement" are doing precisely what they are supposed to do, telling others what is really going on with context and historical awareness. As for CNN, the network of Larry King (major promoter of Israeli interests on and off camera) and Wolf Blitzer (formerly of and planted by the Israeli/Jewish lobby in Washington), for all of its pretensions and foreign accents its an American network just like PBS catering to the extraordinary pressures and biases that result in the U.S. usually standing alone with Israel against the rest of the world, not to mention all the American money and arms that make it possible for the Israelis to do what they do...Gilo included.

[The Independent, UK, 3 September 2001] Just as the BBC last month ordered its reporters to use the phrase "targeted killings'' for Israel's assassination of Palestinians, CNN ­ under constant attack from right-wing Jewish pro-settler lobby groups ­ has instructed its journalists to stop referring to Gilo as a "Jewish settlement''. Instead, they must call the settlement, built illegally on occupied Arab land outside Jerusalem, "a Jewish neighbourhood".

Arabs have long protested over CNN's reporting of the Middle East ­ especially its pejorative use of the word "terrorist'' ­ but they are likely to be outraged by this latest "softening" of the station's reporting in Israel's favour. Some of the land on which Gilo is built was taken from the Palestinians of Beit Jala ­ Gilo is Hebrew for Jala ­ but no hint of this historical background will be permitted on CNN. Israeli soldiers in Gilo have been involved in nightly battles with Palestinian gunmen in Beit Jala.

The instruction from CNN's headquarters in Atlanta is straightforward. "We refer to Gilo as 'a Jewish neighbourhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem, built on land occupied by Israel in 1967','' the order states. "We don't refer to it as a settlement.''

This extraordinary climbdown in favour of the Israelis follows months of internal debate in CNN, which has been constantly criticised by CNN Watch, honestreporting.com and other pro-Israeli pressure groups in the United States which monitor all its reports on the Middle East.

Many journalists at CNN headquarters are angered by the new instruction. "There's a feeling by some people here that what we are doing is searching for euphemisms for what is really happening," one of them told The Independent yesterday. "We've managed to eliminate the word 'terrorism' ­ we now talk about 'militants' ­ because we know that the word 'terrorist' is used by one side or another to damage the other side. But now there's pressure on us not to use the word 'settler' in any context ­ but to just refer to the settlers as 'Israelis'."

In the past, CNN used "terrorist" only about Arabs ­ the Israeli settler who murdered 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994 was always called an "extremist" on CNN ­ and at one point described Arab protests at the illegal settlements built by Jews on Palestinian land as "conflicting heritage" claims.

However, by censoring the word "settlement" for Gilo, CNN is perpetrating a lie. Gilo was illegally annexed by Israel after the 1967 war ­ not just "occupied" as CNN wishes its viewers to believe ­ and far from being a "neighbourhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem", it was built on land which Israel ­ again illegally ­ used to extend the boundaries of Jerusalem.

"There has been an intense internal debate over the use of words," the CNN reporter said. "And sometimes we still do use the word 'settlement' about Gilo. In fact, we don't necessarily say all that stuff about 'occupied by Israel in 1967'. But we're having problems. There are many small pro-settler Jewish groups who're trying to win the war of words."

A CNN spokesman in Atlanta said last night: "We have no response to make to you. We don't want to get into a discussion on this ... In fact we'd rather not say anything about this at all."

* Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians in gun battles in the West Bank city of Hebron yesterday, creating a violent backdrop for the arrival of the European Union's foreign policy representative, Javier Solana. He was due to help lay the groundwork for a meeting between the Palestinian President, Yasser Arafat, and Israel's Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, which might be held in Italy at the end of the week.

[AND A COMMENT about this latest CNN "enforcement action" from a Canadian reader]:

Dear CNN:

Since the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, against the Israeli military occupation, almost a year ago, the Zionist-controlled mainstream media has been a shameful platform for whitewashing Israeli belligerence. This by 1) Using euphemisms; 2) Selective reporting (of incidents or pertinent information, including omitting the historical context); 3) Injecting factual errors into the reports (Zionist myths); 4) Implementing lexical apartheid (selective use of repulsive words to describe Palestinians and/or their actions (militants, terrorists, and so forth) while using plausible descriptions for Israelis; and last but not least 5) Forced publishing of pro-Israeli articles. The CNN, has been a pioneer in succumbing to expediential pro-Israeli articles in the USA.

Closer to (my) home, the National Post holds that shameful post. (Senior editors at Aspers’ CanWest publications - owners of two thirds of Canadian media outlets - were ordered in August to run a strongly worded pro-Israeli editorial on Saturday op-ed page.)

Let’s imagine for a millisecond that we would refer to Kuwait as "disputed area" (between Iraq and Kuwait) and, listen to US spokespersons ask both sides to "show restraint" while Sadam does to the Kuwaitis what Israel is doing to the Palestinians now.

But in Israel, it is somehow okay to call what the UN body equally considers occupied territories, the Jewish colonies (again euphemized as settlements), "disputed".

Would the CNN then call Iraq’s new colonies in Kuwait "Iraqi neighborhoods"? Somehow, its okay to refer to the colony of Gilo, for example, in the occupied territories, as "neighborhood".

Iraq declares that Kuwait is its capital. Would the CNN list it as the capital of Iraq with a barely noticeable fine print saying that it is a contentious issue? (What happened when Iraq declared Kuwait as an Iraqi (19th) province?)

Were the Kuwaitis fighting off the occupation labeled as terrorists/militants?

It seems to me that the CNN news reporters also need to start an intifiada against the Zionist dominance. And, it seems for a minute, alas, that the Palestinians cannot gain their freedom before the Americans do.

Regards, Baha Abu-Shaqra

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/9/374.htm