What have you thought about the media coverage [of the 2010 flotilla] so far? I’m struck by the difference in words people use for the people on the flotilla, whether they’re “activists” or “humanitarians.”
I used to be a student of linguistics, and it reminds me of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if I can trouble you with explaining what I mean by that...
...I think the Israeli subconscious hypothesis is that they were dealing with “peace activists,” and in their mind that meant Code Pink grandmothers, and that’s not who was on those boats, or at least that wasn’t the entire population of those boats. Now the Israelis are stressing that these are “Islamists” and “radicals”—it’s the very opposite perspective. Language is so charged and so fraught in the region that every way the flotilla and the Israeli response are characterized fails to encompass exactly who these people were on those ships and the multiplicity of perspectives that are actually involved.
Read more.
Of course, we now know that they were mostly terrorist-sponsored/funded persons (see here; and here and also here; and here; as well as here).
And this is Mondoweis' comment on his Wright's play:
If you want to know anything about what is really going on between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza or elsewhere, do not go to Lawrence Wright’s new play, “The Human Scale.” Like Wright’s New Yorker pieces, it is bookended by the plight of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas—as if somehow that explains the violence of Israel’s December 2008 assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead. [but we know that the shelling of Israeli civilians was the cause] Wright also uses Shalit’s detention to more less blame Hamas for the blockade.
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