Wishing It Were So

Noah Pollak

Contentions/Commentary

06 September 09

Sheera Frenkel is an American who works for the UK Times in its dubious Jerusalem bureau, which has a great deal of trouble distinguishing truth from fiction. Her current piece, linked on Drudge, provides a nice example of how Frenkel and her employer view the sensationalization of the Middle East as one of their main jobs. The report is entitled “US fury as Israel defies settlement freeze call,” and in case the point wasn’t made clear by the title, the piece goes on to declare that

Israeli plans to authorise the construction of hundreds of houses in the occupied West Bank sparked furious protests from American and Palestinian officials yesterday.

“Fury” and “furious protests” from the Obama administration? I hadn’t seen them mentioned anywhere else. The dictionary says that furious means “full of or characterized by extreme anger; raging.” What was the American reaction? Right there, a few paragraphs down in Frenkel’s own story, we read that:

“We regret the reports of Israel’s plans to approve additional settlement construction,” Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said. . . . Another US official said: “In the end America will be forced to do what is necessary to bring the Israelis and the Palestinians back to the negotiation table. But the Netanyahu Government has proven difficult to work with.”

There is regret, and a belief that Netanyahu has been difficult to work with, a feeling about Obama that is surely reciprocated by the Israelis. But who could characterize this as “fury”? Sheera Frenkel, doing her best to contribute to the worst tendencies of the British media, does. She wishes fervently that it were so.

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