Did They Remove 'Terror' From the Dictionary?

Terror?

Is that term in the dictionary anymore?

[today's] incident occurred less than a week after a nine-year-old Israeli girl was stabbed as she played in her garden in the West Bank settlement of Psagot, near Ramallah.
Police are treating that attack, on Saturday, as a militant action and are still searching for the perpetrator.
Last month an Israeli soldier was shot dead in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, in what the army believes was a Palestinian sniper attack, although no suspects have been arrested.

-AFP

Control the speak, you control the mind.

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The 'Jew-washing' Dispute Goes On

See my comment over at +972.

And see this Urban Dictionary entry.

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'Ostjuden' Preceded "Jew-Washing"

My comment at Emily Hauser's attempt to confront NGO-Monitor at Open Zion:-

Semantically, the contextual intent of the phrase "jew-washing" has been around for a while.  Long ago, I learned the phrase "ostjuden" which meant, historically, "it's not me [as spoken by the cultured Western and Central European Jew] but it's them [referring to the supposed dirty, smelly and uncouth Jews from Galicia].  In other words, "don't blame me, it's their fault".  As noted: Stefan Zweig’s father was a rich textile manufacturer. He spent his young adulthood among the aesthete glitterati, scarcely aware that he was a Jew; for years he presided over a salon at Salzburg. The critic Joan Acocella remarks on “his willingness to disassociate himself from the poor, despised Ostjuden, who [in the early 20th Century] were pouring into Western Europe in flight from the Russian pogroms.” See her Introduction to the NYRB edition of Beware of Pity xv (2006).

Our liberal Jews who grace this blog and other platforms seek to distance themselves from Jewish nationalism and the use of Jewish power and so play into the hands of the real anti-Semites, cognizantly or otherwise.  Terrible.

And here from this book, that the phrase originated with Nathna Birnbaum as explained:

:
And I found this:

The symbol of East European Jewry was an important tool of German-Jewish self-definition.  Were these so-called Ostjuden foreign or family?  Did they represent a tradition from which German Jews would have to dissociate in order to secure their civic equality as Germans, or were they fellow members of a single Jewish nation?  The stereotypes that German Jews attached to East European Jews reflect their own evolving self-perception and conflicting national aspirations.  The long and difficult path toward emancipation during the nineteenth century led German Jews to reject traditional notions of Jewish nationhood and to refashion themselves as "German citizens of the Mosaic faith."  In their efforts to assimilate, they deliberately adopted German middle-class gentility, politeness, and aesthetic refinement, and contrasted these traits with a crude stereotype of East European Jewish life.  They created a caricature of the ghetto, which signified not only a confined space but also a self-segregating worldview.  German Kultur was viewed as the path out of the ghetto of traditional society into the modern nation-state.

Substitute "progressive humanist liberalism" for German Kultur.

_____________

See now this.


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Time for Name Change

The IDF's "Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories" is the unit within Israel's Ministry of Defense that coordinates civilian issues between the Government of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, international organizations, diplomats, and the Palestinian Authority. It is currently headed by Brigadier-General Eitan Dangot.

Yesterday, Dangot was the IDF representative for the laying of the wreath on the grave of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Rosh Betar, Father of the Irgun and the leader of military Zionism [see Rafael's article, "Militarism and the Status if the Israeli Arabs According to Jabotinsky," Haumma, 101, 1990 (Hebrew", for example]. His yahrtzeit is the 29th of Tammuz. He was, as Bernard Avishai summs up: "More important, Jabotinsky was the first military hero of the Zionist revival, the commander of the Jewish Legion, and the theoretician of Jewish militarism".

When his title was announced, my wife shuddered

and I knew why.

In Hebrew, "territories" is shtachim. Now, those territories have names: Judea and Samaria and in IDF parlance, the abbreviation is prounounced 'ayosh' for aizoray yehudah v'shomron. It is quite acceptable.

Moreover, as I once pointed out in a semantic debate with Yossi Sarid on the pages of Jerusalem's KolHazman weekly, in Hebrew usage, a person residing in the territories/shtachim would therefore be called shetchi, which also means plain and simple, with no depth. And we are not at all like that.

COGAYASH isn't bad, Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea and Samaria.

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Protecting My Linguistic Honor

My comment on my first use of "goldstoned" as a verb is up at the NYTimes, Roger Cohen's column.

Here.

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My Letter in the Times Literary Supplement

Here:

Seraphim

Sir, – Susan Weingarten, in noting (Letters, September 11) that the first appearance of “seraphim” is in the Book of Isaiah, is quite correct if she is referring solely to angels. The Hebrew word “seraph”, from the root to burn or scorch, however, appears in Deuteronomy 8:15, as being one of the elements faced by the Children of Israel in their forty-year trek through the Desert: “who led thee through the great and dreadful wilderness, wherein were serpents, fiery serpents \[seraph\], and scorpions”. This recalls the incident when, while encompassing the land of Edom, the Children of Israel once again murmured against God’s plan and “the Lord sent seraph serpents against the people. They bit the people and many died”, as recorded in Numbers 21:6.

YISRAEL MEDAD
Shiloh, Mobile Post Efraim 44830, Israel.

Yes, Little Things Do Count

Compatriot Michael Freund has written this week:

...There is still plenty of work to be done in terms of rebranding Israel's image so that it is not constantly associated with war, conflict and turmoil. But it does underline an important point: most of us live in a hasbara bubble, where we are so consumed by the minutiae of each and every event and how it is reported or distorted that we often lose sight of the forest for the trees.

And so, when an unflattering article appears in the Boston Globe, or a derogatory piece is published in The Los Angeles Times, many pro-Israel activists plunge into crisis mode, investing countless hours in trying to rebut something that most people probably never even bothered to read. Since they live and breathe Israel, and follow everything that happens here with meticulous care, they often forget that the details actually matter far less to most people.

Now don't get me wrong - combating specific instances of media bias is important, and eliciting corrections when newspapers err is an essential part of the struggle for truth. But at the end of the day, what really counts is the "big picture," the themes and narratives that take hold in the public's mind when (and even if) they think about the Jewish state. It is there that Israel and its supporters need to devote more of their time and energy.

What is so desperately needed is a comprehensive strategic vision for hasbara, one that clearly articulates a set of objectives for what kind of image Israel can and should project, while spelling out an array of tactics for achieving them. So let's start focusing just a little less on yesterday's Washington Post, and more on how to position Israel and improve her brand name in the future.

While one really can't disagree with the above, one also knows quite well that "the whole is the sum of its parts" and, sometimes, those minutiea are important.

How can one construct media converse on the issue of Jews residing across the Green Line if:

a) the word to describe them is "settlers", and not "residents" or, as I prefer, "revenants"?

b) the term for their home locations is "settlements", and not "communities" or even "residential areas".

c) the Green Line is thought of as an natual legal, international border - when it isn't.

d) most people don't know that Arab terror preceded any building of any Jewish community in some supposed "occupied territory".

e) public opinion hasn't heard of "Judea and Samaria" from an Israeli Prime Minister since the days of Begin and Shamir, 17 years ago.

I could go on, but my point, I trust, is understood.

As someone told me this week, "words are important".

Words are little things but they have a very big influence on public opinion.

Language Note

L'esibizionista is not a Lesbian Zionist.

It's a female exhibitionist in Italian.

Just so that you know.

Something Else Entirely

An S.E.E. post is one that has nothing to do with politics, ideology, Zionism, Israel, antisemitism, media ehtics or whatever else I usually am involved with at this blog.

So, I am at the ATM of Bank Leumi next to the HaMashbir in the center of Jerusalem.

In front of me is a Frenchman, who is talking to another Frenchman in the line next to us.

He walks up to the machine, attempts twice to extract cash and fails. He calls over the other Frenchman, who also fails.

And then, the first Frenchman, realizing that he is not going to succeed at this moment in time to extract cash, utters an expletive.

"Sh*t", he says, in a French accent, that is, the "i" sounding "ee".

And it took all of my self-control to contain my laughter.

Since the age of 15, when I first studied French, I prided myself in uttering the expletive "merde" as a symbol of my high culture show-offiness. And now, at this critical occasion, the Frenchie utters the American term.

Oh, woe!