Anti-semantic

Soccer Dad
16 May '10

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 First, ever since the Oslo agreement was originally made in 1993, Israeli leaders have maintained that they interpret it as permitting construction on existing settlements and Jerusalem.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.)

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