The Mechanisms of Media Bias in the I/P Conflict

[Chagos]

Jews up until 1948 immigrated into lands they legally bought, as opposed to all colonialism example I know were people immigrated to conquered land.
Moreover, in all colonial examples I know the conqueror initiated and endorsed tho colonies to strengthen their grip on the territory, as opposed to Palestine where the Ottoman and British not only didn't do that - but even limited the Jewish land purchase and immigration.
It's little naive to chose to live in a land that is considered and well known as "the holy land" and not expect mass immigration into it.

Pointing out that colonialism (by its very definition) requires a country to practice it in fields afar, while there never was any sovereign "Zionistan" from which armed forces set out to conquer Palestine in a move to populate it with their own, as a means of exploitation for the benefit of the home country, is a totally futile endeavor with posters like this one.

It's like a maths pupil being taught that two plus two equals four, but stubbornly insisting that the result must be five.

One can safely abandon any hopes of rational debate being possible with such people, the only possible reason to comment on their posts at all resting in listing their constant absurdities.

 

[Evilroddy]

Mithrae:

I have not responded to your posts recently because I am angry that you have hijacked the thread - which is about the mechanisms of media bias in the I/P conflict. Such hijacking is a regular tactic in this forum. However if it's sources you want for very early 20th Century Jewish violence against Arabs then here are some. Thomas Suarez: State of Terror (Chapter 1), Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger: Jewish Terrorism in Israel (Chapter 2), 2009 edition. Bruce Hoffman: Anonymous Soldiers (touches on the issue diffusely throughout the book).

As to your claims about Ashkenazi Jewish immigration, I suggest you do more research into what the term Ashkenazi has meant over the centuries. It has drifted in meaning and has been used to denote Jews of Iranian origin, Khazars (horse nomads) from between the Caspian and Black Sea steppes and Jews of Eastern European and ultimately wider European origin. Many of the early immigrations you claim as Ashkenazi immigrations were of mystic's, their families and their followers of Iranian origin, not European origin. Here is both a cultural and genetic reference to the shifting meanings of Ashkenazi Jewry.

Frontiers | The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish

Recently, the geographical origins of Ashkenazic Jews (AJs) and their native language Yiddish were investigated by applying the Geographic Population Structu...

www.frontiersin.org

For the argument of the settler-colonialism issue please see Illan Pappe's, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which explains and documents the the process in great detail. It was the Aliyas # 1-5 of European Jewry from about 1880 until 1948 which created the conditions for violence between Jews and Arabs, both sides of which abused the others.

I will be going silent now as I don't want to fall afoul of the I/P forum rules and I am quite fed-up with the tactics of thread hijacking, the refusal by some to see events from an objective position and in particular your continued baiting of me to document every little detail of what I say even if it is off topic. If I was going to play the debate game in such a way as you are, I would have buried you in such picayune and pointless demands for references to everything you say long ago, but that just stifles discussion rather than serving it and such tactics muzzle debate; tactics which are too often employed in this forum despite rules against such tactics being used here. (See the I/P rules section).

I'll not be commenting further, unless I feel future posts are addressing the topic of this thread rather than your agenda in this thread.

Be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Chagos]

Mithrae:

I have not responded to your posts recently because I am angry that you have hijacked the thread - which is about the mechanisms of media bias in the I/P conflict. Such hijacking is a regular tactic in this forum. However if it's sources you want for very early 20th Century Jewish violence against Arabs then here are some. Thomas Suarez: State of Terror (Chapter 1), Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger: Jewish Terrorism in Israel (Chapter 2), 2009 edition. Bruce Hoffman: Anonymous Soldiers (touches on the issue diffusely throughout the book).

As to your claims about Ashkenazi Jewish immigration, I suggest you do more research into what the term Ashkenazi has meant over the centuries. It has drifted in meaning and has been used to denote Jews of Iranian origin, Khazars (horse nomads) from between the Caspian and Black Sea steppes and Jews of Eastern European and ultimately wider European origin. Many of the early immigrations you claim as Ashkenazi immigrations were of mystic's, their families and their followers of Iranian origin, not European origin. Here is both a cultural and genetic reference to the shifting meanings of Ashkenazi Jewry.

Frontiers | The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish

Recently, the geographical origins of Ashkenazic Jews (AJs) and their native language Yiddish were investigated by applying the Geographic Population Structu...

www.frontiersin.org

For the argument of the settler-colonialism issue please see Illan Pappe's, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which explains and documents the the process in great detail. It was the Aliyas # 1-5 of European Jewry from about 1880 until 1948 which created the conditions for violence between Jews and Arabs, both sides of which abused the others.

I will be going silent now as I don't want to fall afoul of the I/P forum rules and I am quite fed-up with the tactics of thread hijacking, the refusal by some to see events from an objective position and in particular your continued baiting of me to document every little detail of what I say even if it is off topic. If I was going to play the debate game in such a way as you are, I would have buried you in such picayune and pointless demands for references to everything you say long ago, but that just stifles discussion rather than serving it and such tactics muzzle debate; tactics which are too often employed in this forum despite rules against such tactics being used here. (See the I/P rules section).

I'll not be commenting further, unless I feel future posts are addressing the topic of this thread rather than your agenda in this thread.

Be well.
Evilroddy.

Your indignation over thread hijacking notwithstanding, where you address the origin of both "Ashkenazim" and "Yiddish", the article you cite in support of your thesis is, mildly put, most adventurous.

Anyone with a working knowledge of German (which I happen to have) will tell you that Yiddish is a mixture of medieval German and Hebrew, the by now outdated German having taken (and still taking) the greater share.

The Hebrew "Ashkenas" is also the term applied to Germany, better said its Rhineland and to Northern France, with non-Jewish records of the 4th century already showing a Jewish presence in both locations, albeit a small one (at that point in time).

East European Jews practically all spoke Yiddish, simply on account of having fled the pogroms of France and Germany in the Middle Ages for seemingly safer havens in (predominantly) Poland and Russia, but "re-importing" the language upon fleeing back to German lands again as a result of increasing pogroms in the "Pale".

The Khazar myth has long since been abandoned as holding any historical significance but still remains even today as one of the corner stones of both anti-semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda.

The issue of Jewish colonialism I have already addressed in various threads and will not be repeating it in this response.

P.S. if I were as prone to not addressing submissions of other posters on account of their holding an agenda that I do not share into, I would not have responded to your above either.

 

[Mithrae]

Mithrae:

I have not responded to your posts recently because I am angry that you have hijacked the thread - which is about the mechanisms of media bias in the I/P conflict. Such hijacking is a regular tactic in this forum.

How frequent is the tactic of professing indignation as a reason for not substantiating one's claims? Calling it "hijacking" when it's a discussion based on your comments - in turn based on the video which you posted in the OP - seems like a bit of a stretch. More to the point, by the time I began pursuing that avenue of discussion it seemed that you yourself had already abandoned any effort at discussing the headline topic: The video's premise was that the dismissal of Emily Wilder was A) unjustified and more importantly B) representative or symptomatic of general tendencies in the media, but as I showed in post #23 it seems more likely that the only thing we're seeing in that video is Bastani's own biased interpretations and speculation:

Try 4m30s into the video in which Bastani highlights the tweet of CNN's Jerusalem correspondent Hadas Gold; a picture of a soldier cake with the words "My baby cousin entered the Israeli army today ". That's it, a barebones statement of fact with a teary face emoji. Bastani chooses to interpret it as "celebrating her sibling [sic] joining the IDF" and goes on to say that "Surely this is by any measure taking sides." Is it, though? It's obviously personal rather than political, and yet even then is entirely objective besides a highly ambiguous emoji. This is a tweet which Bastani had to go back to 2016 to find (though the date is edited out of the video presentation), from a different news organization no less. He then goes on to loftily declare that if a journalist shared a picture of a sibling on a Palestine solidarity march or even just wearing a keffiyeh, "we already know" that they would share a similar fate as Emily Wilder (who in her first 17 days with AP posted no fewer than 11 Israel/Palestine related tweets/retweets, almost all of them highlighting views which were either pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli or critical of news coverage of the issue and none favourable to Israel or opposed to or even mentioning the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas).​

While we might agree that firing Wilder may have been excessive, it seems that it was actually a case of removing some clear bias from the AP organization while the media source you chose to present is pouring its own bias on thick and strong.

However if it's sources you want for very early 20th Century Jewish violence against Arabs then here are some. Thomas Suarez: State of Terror (Chapter 1), Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger: Jewish Terrorism in Israel (Chapter 2), 2009 edition. Bruce Hoffman: Anonymous Soldiers (touches on the issue diffusely throughout the book).

Thankyou. And if we pretend that I don't own those books, could you provide a quote or some specific dates, names, places, numbers of victims and so on in order to confirm your claims online? As you've no doubt noticed, even when mobile posting or the character limit makes fuller referencing difficult most of my posts contain enough specifics like those to make your own confirmation quite easy, unlike vague claims that "by the turn of the 20th Century [Zionists] were actively involved in terrorist activities and paramilitary activities."

I will be going silent now as I don't want to fall afoul of the I/P forum rules and I am quite fed-up with the tactics of thread hijacking, the refusal by some to see events from an objective position and in particular your continued baiting of me to document every little detail of what I say even if it is off topic. If I was going to play the debate game in such a way as you are, I would have buried you in such picayune and pointless demands for references to everything you say long ago, but that just stifles discussion rather than serving it and such tactics muzzle debate

If your idea of reasonable discussion is that everyone is free to make whatever accusations they please against whatever people group they choose and requests for substantiation (after providing contrary evidence and logic no less) are just pointless "baiting," then I agree that you and I aren't very likely to see eye to eye. I certainly didn't mean to cause this kind of upset; much of my experience in online discussions is from religious forums and requests for substantiation are pretty commonplace even in that rather vague set of subjects, so it puzzles me how it could be considered so offensive in a topic much more dependent on actual facts!

 

[bomberfox]

It's naive to think that there can exist an "unbiased", "objective", "clearer and less slanted" media or organization. Everyone is biased.
I agree that the "mainstream media" has a pro-Israel bias relative to your opinions, they also have anti-Israel bias relative to mine.
People should just accept that the "mainstream media" (or any other organization) will always be biased and not treat their reports as accurate description of reality and truth.

If everyone is guilty then is anyone truly guilty? Thats an excuse.

 

[Mithrae]

If everyone is guilty then is anyone truly guilty? Thats an excuse.

I think Valaisee is insightfully acknowledging the hostile media effect, "a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view.[1] Partisans from opposite sides of an issue will tend to find the same coverage to be biased against them.[2]"

I think the problem of 'bias' in Israel/Palestine coverage is compounded by the extent and depth of context which could be drawn on for particular events. For example the OP video made claims about the need for some kind of context regarding "what some describe as a settler-colonialist ideology which sought to displace the land's indigenous Arab inhabitants" yet, as this discussion is showing in spades, discussing that context actually seems to dramatically increase the scope for selection of which information to highlight, which to downplay and how to interpret purpose or intentions through the lens of history. According to Bastani, restricting coverage to the barebones facts of a given week or year means that the media "insists on seeing the conflict as one between two equals stuck in a 'cycle of violence'"... but the alternative of providing fuller context (which some programs obviously do, to some extent, just not the nightly news) would ideally require the program to address or at least outline sticky questions such as: Do the Palestinian leaders of a given year really want to make a two-state deal? Do the Israeli leaders? How much land/wealth/pride/security would the people of each side sacrifice for peace? Why is hostility and militancy relatively commonplace in both societies? What are the root causes of the conflict? How legitimate is the UNSC and how absolute are the strictures of international law?

Obviously the selections of information to be presented within limited airtime make addressing such questions far more of a minefield of potential biases - and especially perception of bias by partisan viewers - than merely reporting current barebones facts. Bastani would presumably be even more up in arms over 'context' portraying a centuries-long trend of migration to Palestine consisting mostly of refugees and law-abiding folk moving to an ancestral and cultural homeland far below its population capacity, becoming the victims of nationalist (and eventually Nazi-sympathizing) nativist violence escalating over time but eventually, after the horrors of the Holocaust and complete rejection against any kind of UN partition plan, managing to organize enough to repel the extermination efforts of local groups and surrounding countries and form the only stable modern democracy in the region. So it may be that his concern is not so much the lack of context in coverage, but simply the fact that coverage (with context or without it) doesn't favour his perspective enough. An excellent example of the 'hostile media effect,' in short.

 

[Evilroddy]

Your indignation over thread hijacking notwithstanding, where you address the origin of both "Ashkenazim" and "Yiddish", the article you cite in support of your thesis is, mildly put, most adventurous.

Anyone with a working knowledge of German (which I happen to have) will tell you that Yiddish is a mixture of medieval German and Hebrew, the by now outdated German having taken (and still taking) the greater share.

The Hebrew "Ashkenas" is also the term applied to Germany, better said its Rhineland and to Northern France, with non-Jewish records of the 4th century already showing a Jewish presence in both locations, albeit a small one (at that point in time).

East European Jews practically all spoke Yiddish, simply on account of having fled the pogroms of France and Germany in the Middle Ages for seemingly safer havens in (predominantly) Poland and Russia, but "re-importing" the language upon fleeing back to German lands again as a result of increasing pogroms in the "Pale".

The Khazar myth has long since been abandoned as holding any historical significance but still remains even today as one of the corner stones of both anti-semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda.

The issue of Jewish colonialism I have already addressed in various threads and will not be repeating it in this response.

P.S. if I were as prone to not addressing submissions of other posters on account of their holding an agenda that I do not share into, I would not have responded to your above either.

Chagos:

Your post is correct. However the term Ashkenazi was used in previous centuries to mean Iranian Jews and this was the case prior to the 11th12th centuries CE. Therefore referring to Ashkenazi immigration into the Levant before the 11th Century CE means referring to Iranian immigration with very few exceptions. There was one immigration from France which I can recall and there may have been a few others from Europe but these were small scale immigrations. Ironicly it was Sephardic immigrations from the freshly fallen Visogothic Spain after the conquest by Musa al-din and his hybrid Berber-Arab armies which was the major source of immigrating Jews into the Levant in the early Middle Ages. Later the Spanish Reconquesta spurred more ommigration in the 14th and 15th centuries.

One has only to look at the names of the leaders of the immigrations cited in two posts by another poster to see that just about all of them are of Iranian origin. These Ashkenazim are not Yiddish speaking European Jewry at all. That identity would be yet to come. The meaning of Ashkenazi has drifted over the millennia and if one does not know this, then errors can crop up.

The Article which I cited was chosen because it explains the genetics as well as the linguistic pedigree of the appropriated English term Ashkenazi. There are plenty of other scholarly articles which I can cite based solely on linguistic evidence.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[bomberfox]

I think Valaisee is insightfully acknowledging the hostile media effect, "a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view.[1] Partisans from opposite sides of an issue will tend to find the same coverage to be biased against them.[2]"

I think the problem of 'bias' in Israel/Palestine coverage is compounded by the extent and depth of context which could be drawn on for particular events. For example the OP video made claims about the need for some kind of context regarding "what some describe as a settler-colonialist ideology which sought to displace the land's indigenous Arab inhabitants" yet, as this discussion is showing in spades, discussing that context actually seems to dramatically increase the scope for selection of which information to highlight, which to downplay and how to interpret purpose or intentions through the lens of history. According to Bastani, restricting coverage to the barebones facts of a given week or year means that the media "insists on seeing the conflict as one between two equals stuck in a 'cycle of violence'"... but the alternative of providing fuller context (which some programs obviously do, to some extent, just not the nightly news) would ideally require the program to address or at least outline sticky questions such as: Do the Palestinian leaders of a given year really want to make a two-state deal? Do the Israeli leaders? How much land/wealth/pride/security would the people of each side sacrifice for peace? Why is hostility and militancy relatively commonplace in both societies? What are the root causes of the conflict? How legitimate is the UNSC and how absolute are the strictures of international law?

Obviously the selections of information to be presented within limited airtime make addressing such questions far more of a minefield of potential biases - and especially perception of bias by partisan viewers - than merely reporting current barebones facts. Bastani would presumably be even more up in arms over 'context' portraying a centuries-long trend of migration to Palestine consisting mostly of refugees and law-abiding folk moving to an ancestral and cultural homeland far below its population capacity, becoming the victims of nationalist (and eventually Nazi-sympathizing) nativist violence escalating over time but eventually, after the horrors of the Holocaust and complete rejection against any kind of UN partition plan, managing to organize enough to repel the extermination efforts of local groups and surrounding countries and form the only stable modern democracy in the region. So it may be that his concern is not so much the lack of context in coverage, but simply the fact that coverage (with context or without it) doesn't favour his perspective enough. An excellent example of the 'hostile media effect,' in short.

Bias is not relative to his perspective though. There are always degrees and his perspective is not the measuring stick anyone should use to measure bias. Thats not what hostile media means. The media in the US is still overwhelmingly pro israel.

 

[Chagos]

Chagos:

Your post is correct. However the term Ashkenazi was used in previous centuries to mean Iranian Jews and this was the case prior to the 11th12th centuries CE. Therefore referring to Ashkenazi immigration into the Levant before the 11th Century CE means referring to Iranian immigration with very few exceptions. There was one immigration from France which I can recall and there may have been a few others from Europe but these were small scale immigrations. Ironicly it was Sephardic immigrations from the freshly fallen Visogothic Spain after the conquest by Musa al-din and his hybrid Berber-Arab armies which was the major source of immigrating Jews into the Levant in the early Middle Ages. Later the Spanish Reconquesta spurred more ommigration in the 14th and 15th centuries.

One has only to look at the names of the leaders of the immigrations cited in two posts by another poster to see that just about all of them are of Iranian origin. These Ashkenazim are not Yiddish speaking European Jewry at all. That identity would be yet to come. The meaning of Ashkenazi has drifted over the millennia and if one does not know this, then errors can crop up.

The Article which I cited was chosen because it explains the genetics as well as the linguistic pedigree of the appropriated English term Ashkenazi. There are plenty of other scholarly articles which I can cite based solely on linguistic evidence.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

With regard to Sephardic emigration from Spain, you may have gotten the dates wrong. The Visigothic kingdom did not fall to Musa al-Din???? (I'm curious as regards the spelling or who in fact that was) but to Tariq ibn-Ziyad and that conquest ended the persecution that Sephardim increasingly suffered under the Visigoths.

Possibly you were referring to the later suppression (all the way to expulsion) of Sephardim under the later invading forces of the Islamic-fundamentalist Almohads?

I addressed specifically the article's claim that Yiddish developed as a Slavic language, and with that claim clearly being total bumpf I'm inclined to view the whole thesis paper with skepticism (kindly put).

Ashkenas (or Ashkenazim, for that matter) is NOT an appropriated English term, it's Hebrew. Just like the (equally Hebrew) term of Safarad refers to Iberia, leading to the monicker of Sephardim being derived from it.

In that latter case also assigning the label to Jews in Western Asia would show a valid point, since those were rarely descended from Iberian Jews but being nevertheless named Sephardim on account of having adopted Sephardic liturgy, laws and customs.

 

[Chagos]

Bias is not relative to his perspective though. There are always degrees and his perspective is not the measuring stick anyone should use to measure bias. Thats not what hostile media means. The media in the US is still overwhelmingly pro israel.

If you cannot acknowledge that perspective is practically always governed by bias, there's no point in arguing the matter any further.

Perspective is personal and looking at it gives clues to its bias.

As we constantly see on here by both advocates of Israeli and Palestinian positions and policies, all the way to even Hamas.

 

[Evilroddy]

With regard to Sephardic emigration from Spain, you may have gotten the dates wrong. The Visigothic kingdom did not fall to Musa al-Din???? (I'm curious as regards the spelling or who in fact that was) but to Tariq ibn-Ziyad and that conquest ended the persecution that Sephardim increasingly suffered under the Visigoths.

Possibly you were referring to the later suppression (all the way to expulsion) of Sephardim under the later invading forces of the Islamic-fundamentalist Almohads?

I addressed specifically the article's claim that Yiddish developed as a Slavic language, and with that claim clearly being total bumpf I'm inclined to view the whole thesis paper with skepticism (kindly put).

Ashkenas (or Ashkenazim, for that matter) is NOT an appropriated English term, it's Hebrew. Just like the (equally Hebrew) term of Safarad refers to Iberia, leading to the monicker of Sephardim being derived from it.

In that latter case also assigning the label to Jews in Western Asia would show a valid point, since those were rarely descended from Iberian Jews but being nevertheless named Sephardim on account of having adopted Sephardic liturgy, laws and customs.

Well whoever beat Roderick of the Visigoths in 710 CE. It's hard to keep all of world history for 5000 years sorted correctly in my age-addled brain. I'll look things up and correct myself if I am wrong but I am busy now.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Chagos]

~................. It's hard to keep all of world history for 5000 years sorted correctly in my age-addled brain.......................~

Acetylcholinesterase-inhibitors are your friend.

 

[Mithrae]

I addressed specifically the article's claim that Yiddish developed as a Slavic language, and with that claim clearly being total bumpf I'm inclined to view the whole thesis paper with skepticism (kindly put).

More to the point, however interesting it may be to consider, even if it were spot on it would still be utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Evilroddy had claimed that the 'Zionist' immigration of Ashkenazi Jews in the late 19th/early 20th century constituted the introduction of an "ethnically different body of Jews" to those who had been present beforehand:

"Sephardic Jews lived in the Levant in small numbers for much of the modern era. However when the Zionist project got started an ever accelerating stream and later deluge of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe moved in. . . . The existence of a small, ethnicly different body of Jews in the Levant has nothing to do with settler-colonialism. These original Sephardim looked on in dismay as the Ashkenazi new-comers disrupted their lives too and made the Sephardim equal targets of Arab hate to the Ashkenazi settlers who were driving the violence."​

Yet as I showed in post #30 there'd been a substantial presence and immigration of Ashkenazi Jews in Palestine long before the advent of Zionism:
- "Throughout the 19th century up to the 1880s, Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe as well as groups of Sephardi Jews from Turkey, Bulgaria, and North Africa immigrated to Palestine"
- Early 19th century, three groups known as the Perushim migrate from Lithuania
- 1777 About 3000 Hasidic Jews from Lithuania migrate
- "In 1700, about 500 to 1,000 European Jewish followers of Judah HeHasid immigrated [from Poland] to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. . . . At the time approximately 200 Ashkenazi Jews and 1,000 Sephardi Jews lived in the city.... The Ottoman authorities held both HeHasid's group and the pre-existing Ashkenazi community collectively responsible and expelled all Ashkenazi Jews from Jerusalem.[196][197]"
- 1286 Meir of Rothenburg imprisoned for trying to lead a large group to Palestine from Germany

Apparently Ashkenazi Jews represented perhaps as much as one-fifth of Palestinian Jews at least as early as the 17th century - even before the subsequent larger waves of eastern European migration - and we have documentation of intentions/tendency for migrations there at least as far back as the 13th. But instead of acknowledging that clearly false dichotomy between 'Zionist' Ashkenazi immigrants and "a small, ethnically different body of Jews in the Levant" - the "original Sephardim" versus the "Ashkenazi new-comers" - what we've seen is several posts' failure to address the point at all, and finally in post #52 false claims that I had designated early Iranian immigrants as Ashkenazi and an article which (even if 100% accurate) has absolutely no bearing on the waves of Ashkenazi immigration from the 13th century onwards. This total irrelevancy being introduced while at the same time complaining about the thread being "hijacked" by scrutiny of the false or unsupported claims of the thread's author!

 

[bomberfox]

If you cannot acknowledge that perspective is practically always governed by bias, there's no point in arguing the matter any further.

Perspective is personal and looking at it gives clues to its bias.

As we constantly see on here by both advocates of Israeli and Palestinian positions and policies, all the way to even Hamas.

There is a degree of bias and a degree of objective reporting. Claiming everyone is biased as a way to dismiss news reporting just makes everything a farce. Its much the same way as the tu quoque fallacy is not helpful. His personal viewpoint is not exactly the meter we all go by in measuring objectivity now is it?

 

[Chagos]

There is a degree of bias and a degree of objective reporting. Claiming everyone is biased as a way to dismiss news reporting just makes everything a farce. Its much the same way as the tu quoque fallacy is not helpful.

Agreed, determining factor being the degree of bias.

 

[Mithrae]

Bias is not relative to his perspective though. There are always degrees and his perspective is not the measuring stick anyone should use to measure bias. Thats not what hostile media means. The media in the US is still overwhelmingly pro israel.

That's certainly his perspective, yes, but as I've highlighted he himself seems to be particularly biased in his interpretation of information, speculation on unknowns and selection of what he presents in his video at all. I agree with your later comment that it's a bit of a farce for him to claim that the media are all biased, particularly when his own bias is so obvious! He (and perhaps you) are simply seeing presentation which doesn't lean as much towards his own perspective as desired, just as Valaisee has pointed out that the very same presentation probably wouldn't lean as much towards his perspective as he'd like. What you see as an "overwhelmingly pro Israel" bias, an Israeli national might see as obviously anti-Israel. I think it's rather insightful for Valaisee to have been the first to recognize that pervasive element of viewers' subjectivity and evaluation, while you appear to be maintaining that your perspective is necessarily the correct one.

Of course if a more neutral source than the OP video were offered which more objectively analyses particular content, we might be able to discuss particular instances of pro- or anti-Israel bias in reporting; instead, what Bastani/Evilroddy have offered is essentially a sweeping conspiracy theory against the 'mainstream media' as a whole, one which seems to fail again and again when its facts are checked. For yet another example, the central tweet of Emily Wilder's which the video highlighted complains about the use of "Israel" but not "Palestine," while a simple Google search for Palestine in apnews.com reveals five pages of results in just the two months preceding Wilder's allegation. A narrative built around falsehoods such as that needn't necessarily be a false narrative overall, but it doesn't exactly bode well!

 

[Valaisee]

There is a degree of bias and a degree of objective reporting. Claiming everyone is biased as a way to dismiss news reporting just makes everything a farce. Its much the same way as the tu quoque fallacy is not helpful. His personal viewpoint is not exactly the meter we all go by in measuring objectivity now is it?

Everyone is biased, but I agree that not equally biased, and not 100% biased. I agree that news should not be dismissed, but consumed critically knowing that there is no such thing as a 100% objective and non-biased media.

 

[bomberfox]

That's certainly his perspective, yes, but as I've highlighted he himself seems to be particularly biased in his interpretation of information, speculation on unknowns and selection of what he presents in his video at all. I agree with your later comment that it's a bit of a farce for him to claim that the media are all biased, particularly when his own bias is so obvious! He (and perhaps you) are simply seeing presentation which doesn't lean as much towards his own perspective as desired, just as Valaisee has pointed out that the very same presentation probably wouldn't lean as much towards his perspective as he'd like. What you see as an "overwhelmingly pro Israel" bias, an Israeli national might see as obviously anti-Israel. I think it's rather insightful for Valaisee to have been the first to recognize that pervasive element of viewers' subjectivity and evaluation, while you appear to be maintaining that your perspective is necessarily the correct one.

Of course if a more neutral source than the OP video were offered which more objectively analyses particular content, we might be able to discuss particular instances of pro- or anti-Israel bias in reporting; instead, what Bastani/Evilroddy have offered is essentially a sweeping conspiracy theory against the 'mainstream media' as a whole, one which seems to fail again and again when its facts are checked. For yet another example, the central tweet of Emily Wilder's which the video highlighted complains about the use of "Israel" but not "Palestine," while a simple Google search for Palestine in apnews.com reveals five pages of results in just the two months preceding Wilder's allegation. A narrative built around falsehoods such as that needn't necessarily be a false narrative overall, but it doesn't exactly bode well!

I made no comment on a particular video but the general premise of the op *shrug*

 

[Evilroddy]

With regard to Sephardic emigration from Spain, you may have gotten the dates wrong. The Visigothic kingdom did not fall to Musa al-Din???? (I'm curious as regards the spelling or who in fact that was) but to Tariq ibn-Ziyad and that conquest ended the persecution that Sephardim increasingly suffered under the Visigoths.

Possibly you were referring to the later suppression (all the way to expulsion) of Sephardim under the later invading forces of the Islamic-fundamentalist Almohads?

I addressed specifically the article's claim that Yiddish developed as a Slavic language, and with that claim clearly being total bumpf I'm inclined to view the whole thesis paper with skepticism (kindly put).

Ashkenas (or Ashkenazim, for that matter) is NOT an appropriated English term, it's Hebrew. Just like the (equally Hebrew) term of Safarad refers to Iberia, leading to the monicker of Sephardim being derived from it.

In that latter case also assigning the label to Jews in Western Asia would show a valid point, since those were rarely descended from Iberian Jews but being nevertheless named Sephardim on account of having adopted Sephardic liturgy, laws and customs.

Chagos:

Tariq ibn Ziyad was the subgenerall of the Umayyad Arab-Berber forces but his commander was Musa ibn Nusayr al din. Tariq landed without orders from Musa and did so first with a force of about 7,000 Arabs and a majority of Berbers in 711 CE. The force was overwhelmingly light cavalry and its purpose was to conduct a major razia (raid) for booty. I was wrong about the date, however. Anyway Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated a very much larger Visigothic army at the Battle of the Guadalete River in 711. After the victory Musa landed with 18,000 more Umayyad Arab-Berber troops in either late 711 or early 712 CE and took over the pacification of much of Visgothic Spain until he and his son (another Musa) got bogged down in the foothills of the Pyrennes and in Galicia. So I was wrong on the date but right about the man. Too many details, dammit!

During the caliphate of the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I, forces led by Tariq ibn Ziyad disembarked in early 711 in Gibraltar at the head of an army consisting of Berbers from north Africa.[1][2] After defeating the Visigothic king Roderic at the decisive Battle of Guadalete, Tariq was reinforced by an Arab force led by his superior wali Musa ibn Nusayr and continued northward. By 717, the combined Arab-Berber force had crossed the Pyreneesinto Septimania. They occupied further territory in Gaul until 759.

From:

Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Chagos]

Chagos:

Tariq ibn Ziyad was the subgenerall of the Umayyad Arab-Berber forces but his commander was Musa ibn Nusayr al din. Tariq landed without orders from Musa and did so first with a force of about 7,000 Arabs and a majority of Berbers in 711 CE. The force was overwhelmingly light cavalry and its purpose was to conduct a major razia (raid) for booty. I was wrong about the date, however. Anyway Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated a very much larger Visigothic army at the Battle of the Guadalete River in 711. After the victory Musa landed with 18,000 more Umayyad Arab-Berber troops in either late 711 or early 712 CE and took over the pacification of much of Visgothic Spain until he and his son (another Musa) got bogged down in the foothills of the Pyrennes and in Galicia. So I was wrong on the date but right about the man. Too many details, dammit!


From:

Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

Ah, that one.

Fair enough but you were not only wrong on the dates but also on the subsequent expulson of Jews from the newly conquered realm, seeing how, under the Cordoba caliphate which followed, Sephardic Jews prospered rather than finding the persecution they had experienced under the Visigoths.

Just saying, it's not any big deal.

 

[Evilroddy]

Ah, that one.

Fair enough but you were not only wrong on the dates but also on the subsequent expulson of Jews from the newly conquered realm, seeing how, under the Cordoba caliphate which followed, Sephardic Jews prospered rather than finding the persecution they had experienced under the Visigoths.

Just saying, it's not any big deal.

Chagos:

Yes, the later Visigoths vigorously persecuted and pogromed the Iberian Sephardic Jews leading to some exoduses to North Africa, Egypt and even the Levant. Under Umayyad rule you are right, things for Iberian Jews were much better including for some Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to the tranquility and opportunity of Umayyad al-Andalus.

But by the 11th Century things changed badly. The Almoravids (al-Muribatun) imposed much more pressure on the dhimmi communities and had a religious zeal which the Umayyads did not. While the chaos of the Taifas (sp?) mini-principalities and the break down of order offered some opportunity to certain Jews, including their own army based in Granada IIRC, these changes generally brought more oppression to many run of the mill Iberian Jews. The 1066* massacre in Granada in which about 4,000 Jews were slaughtered comes to mind. Through the Almoravid Dynasty and the follow-on Almohad Dynasty things got worse. Then as Castile and Aragon rose in power it was the Christan's turn to once again abuse the Jews of Iberia, and abuse they did.

* I am ashamed to say that having read the book "1066 and All That" in fourth form, I made a list and remembered all important events under the heading "All That" which occurred in 1066 in Europe. That's why I remember the Granada Pogrom and its date. Maybe I'll die from a surfeit of eels as punishment?

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[oneworld2]

In the past half a dozen posts, responding initially to Evilroddy's comments, we've been discussing events from before the 1960s. Emphasizing more recent events as your concluding point seems tantamount to saying that merely because the long-term consequences of the violent conflict initiated by Arabs have been bad for Arabs (even worse than for Jews), that somehow retroactively makes the earlier peaceful Jewish migration/refuge-seeking bad too, or their more organized response to violence. No doubt one could likewise find room for criticism of the occupations of Germany and Japan by the Allied powers following WW2 - and finding faults with the treatment of a defeated hostile group surely is important - but it doesn't change the actual events which led to that outcome.

Firstly, everyone is open to criticism of their actions, I have absolutely no issue with that and fully support that line of enquiry. As I have already stated, the origins of all settler colonialist takeovers follow a similar pattern. The reason for the initial " peaceful immigration" , as you put it, is down to the vulnerability of being so vastly outnumbered. That's why there is and has always been that lag of initial settlement to the later settler colonialist takeover. One begat the other and so the two are justifiably linked. That's not trying to " change events", it is an accurate, imo, observation of the colonialist settler histories

You seem to be contradicting yourself, insisting that the 'early' migrations to Palestine were settler colonialism while acknowledging that they only "morphed into" settler colonialism later on.

See above, we see the same/similar patterns in the move from cooperative based settlement due to the vulnerability of insufficient numbers to the shift to overt settler colonialism as the power of numbers tip to favour the colonists. To comment on that truism isn't a " contradiction" , it's just a fact of how settler colonialism progresses with time.

 

[oneworld2]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that 'settler colonialism' requires a colony, "a territory subject to a form of foreign rule." A penal colony... is a colony. A trading or whaling outpost is a colony; though that would fall more under the definition of exploitation colonialism than settler colonialism. The New England Puritans obtained their land patent from the Plymouth Company established by King James. However if it had been an independent settlement of refugees it obviously would not have been a colony; and a settlement subject to the existing local government (eg. the Ottoman Empire) even more obviously is not a colony.

Look at what you are having to do in order to reject the idea that Jewish people have ever, or presumeably will ever, be able to engage in settler colonialism?.Exploitation colonialism fits as easily with settler colonialism in the examples given but you are loathe to see it in such terms and for obvious reasons. Recall that the first Zionists at first sought the backing on Ottoman colonialists before they were granted title to Palestinian territory via British colonialists. They courted the Sultan with offers of debt payment and propaganda in Europe before they courted the Young Turks and subsequently the British. All with the aim of creating an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine. That's an announcement of intention ,with the backing of colonialist powers, to take Palestinian land in order to create their state.

They even set up international Jewish organisations with which to create the structures/means they thought would be required to build the state within a state so as to establish a Jewish state in the land of Palestine. To try and ignore the intention of taking the land for the Jewish state off of the Arabs living there, the courting of colonialists to serve as the backers along with the structural creations required for the envisioned takeover and not see that as settler colonialism , when it ticks all of the boxes has only comedic value imho.

There is also, as yet unmentioned, the racist element to this settler colonialist endeavour that was found in the others and is still supported today , often seen right here in this subforum. That is the idea that the Jews should have their homeland at the expense of the indigenous Arabs simply because they were able to develop it. You can see the same excuses for all of the other settler colonialist examples. We same the same " savage " natives that are not presented as civilized in the I/P conflict as we saw in the propaganda justifications for the other settler colonialist systems. " A land without a people" ? ring any bells?

The facts, or I suppose questions, which you seem to be trying to skirt around here are fairly straightforward, as far as I can tell:
> Who are responsible for starting the cycle of violence? @Evilroddy insists that the Jews were terrorists even from "the turn of the century" but so far seems unable or unwilling to substantiate his claim, whereas you seem to acknowledge (as apparently borne out by the facts and logic) that the early violence between Arabs and Jews was mostly initiated by the group which was more dominant in the area at the time. Note of course that in cases of European colonialism, the technology disparity meant that local peoples were often victims of violence right from the start, such as George Weymouth's abduction of New England indigenous folk (believed to be murder by the locals) fifteen years before the establishment of the Plymouth colony or Columbus' brutality and slavery.

I don't think , ordinarily, that reasonable people would fail to see that Zionism was the chief motor for violent exchanges simply because of what it advocated and what that meant for the indigenous Arabs. Like they would understand Aboriginal resentment for/violence towards British expropropration of their land, or first American violence towards Euro settlement/expropriation of their lands....if it were not for the suffocating hasbara they are subjected to here in the West.

Do you think the first nation American " initiated" the violence with European settlers? or the Aboriginal Australian with the British ? Maori etc etc.............. if not, why the Arab in the face of Zionist takeover?

 

[oneworld2]

> Was that violence justified? I'm not even sure that you're suggesting it was justified, only claiming that it's the same sort of thing people all around the world might do and is therefore somehow "reasonable"... a position which might hold up if and only if we first accept the dubious assumption that the centuries-long ongoing trend of Jewish refugees/migrants moving to Palestine retroactively became "settler-colonialism" due to the later fact of this violent cycle going badly for the nativists.

Once a cycle of violence becomes entrenched, partisans from both sides reckon they can claim 'justification' for every new retaliation against the previous attack. The question of who started it all is pretty much a moot point, really, but nevertheless, for some reason it seems that you and Evilroddy and the video in the OP are determined to place the ultimate blame at the feet of Jewish refugees and lawful, peaceful migrants to an ancestral and cultural homeland far below its population capacity... based on what seems to be some pretty dubious reasoning and labeling.

It all boils down to, do a people have the right to defend themselves from/resist displacement and dispossession by a foreign settler movement ? I believe they do and thus I believe that they were justified in treating Zionism, and everything that meant for them, being imposed on them by British colonialists as an existential threat. You will surely defend Jewish rights to self defence but seem ardently opposed to applying that reciprocity to the Palestinian Arab

Once a cycle of violence becomes entrenched, partisans from both sides reckon they can claim 'justification' for every new retaliation against the previous attack. The question of who started it all is pretty much a moot point, really, but nevertheless, for some reason it seems that you and Evilroddy and the video in the OP are determined to place the ultimate blame at the feet of Jewish refugees and lawful, peaceful migrants to an ancestral and cultural homeland far below its population capacity... based on what seems to be some pretty dubious reasoning and labeling.

I disagree and think that understanding the cycle of violence and the threats posed is crucial, imo, to determine who is the genuine defender and who is the aggressor. For sure, tit for tat violence can serve to obscure these things but essentially the equation has always been that , in the I/P conflict, Zionism was/is the aggressor here in the same way European settler colonialism was the aggressor in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, you appear to have it the other way around because you class Arab reactions to the prospect of their dispossession and displacement as unreasonable at best and I really don't see what underpins that view other than selective bias

 

[Mithrae]

At the risk of invoking further wrath by "hijacking" the thread's most recent distrac topics of medieval ethnonyms and Spanish conquests...

Look at what you are having to do in order to reject the idea that Jewish people have ever, or presumeably will ever, be able to engage in settler colonialism?.Exploitation colonialism fits as easily with settler colonialism in the examples given but you are loathe to see it in such terms and for obvious reasons. Recall that the first Zionists at first sought the backing on Ottoman colonialists before they were granted title to Palestinian territory via British colonialists. They courted the Sultan with offers of debt payment and propaganda in Europe before they courted the Young Turks and subsequently the British. All with the aim of creating an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine. That's an announcement of intention ,with the backing of colonialist powers, to take Palestinian land in order to create their state.

What basis is there for supposing that the region was Palestinian land? Official sovereignty belonged earlier to the Ottoman empire and later to the Allied powers. Only a small fraction of the region's potential was even being utilized; in the 1st century without modern irrigation, agriculture, transport and trade, population estimates range from 1 to 2.5 million people (and nowadays it's over 14 million), while in the 19th century there were only 300 to 500 thousand inhabitants. On what basis can it be asserted that those 500 thousand inhabitants possessed an exclusionary claim against Jewish immigrants seeking refuge in a historical and cultural homeland?

Self-determination for the Palestinian people either separately or in the context of pan-Arab nationalism is and was an important goal, but insisting that it's a zero-sum game and self-determination for Palestinians excludes the possibility of a Jewish state seems if anything even more misguided when applied to half a million Palestinians a century ago as it would be when applied to five million Palestinians today. If there's room for two states with much larger populations now, there was certainly room for a Jewish state a hundred years ago! While there were always some extremist Zionists wanting to take over all of Palestine and in some cases Transjordan too, the more mainstream and official positions of Jewish people and their representative bodies has pretty consistently been more compromising; whether in response to the 1923 Legislative Council (distributing elected seats to 2 Jews and 10 Arabs, boycotted by Arabs), the 1937 Peel Commission (proposing partition with ~20% of Palestine for a Jewish state, equivocally recognized as a starting point for further negotiation by Jews but roundly rejected by Arabs), the 1947 UN Partition Plan (accepted by the Jewish Agency but both Arab League and Arab Higher Commission rejecting any partition prospect), or even during the Arabs' would-be war of extermination in 1948-49 when by all accounts Israel could have continued pushing for more land or even conquered the whole West Bank but instead decided - alternately on the part of ben Gurion and his cabinet - that restraint was the better course.