Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Stylebooking the Arab Conflict with Israel

I found myself reflecting on that Chris Christie/Sheldon Adelson story of "occupied territories" and the apology and stumbled on this Deirdre Edgar story from last May:

The Los Angeles Times has announced new guidelines for covering immigration.  The goal is to "provide relevance and context and to avoid labels."  That means stories will no longer refer to individuals as "illegal immigrants" or "undocumented immigrants," but instead will describe a person's circumstances.

...In a March column, Steve Lopez described [so]...: "... she and her family had moved here a decade ago from the Philippines without papers."

The Associated Press, whose stylebook is followed by most newspapers and is the basis for much of L.A. Times style, announced April 2 that it would move away from labels and no longer use the term "illegal immigrant." 

So, no more "illegal settlements" and no more "illegally occupied territories".  

At the worst, "disputed".





1 comment:

negi said...

Hey, Yisrael, have you ever posted about van Paassen? I read his intro to Jabotinsky's "The Jewish War Front", and looked him up. Apparently he carried the torch for Jabotinsky after he died in the campaign for a Jewish army and wrote a book in 1943 called " The Forgotten Ally" about how Britain never gave credit to the Jewish soldiers fighting in key battles of the Desert War, and how it was exploiting them while letting their people die in Hitler's Europe.

He makes the case that the Jews were an ally from the outset against the Nazis (which means Israel should have a permanent seat on the security council), just like Jabotinsky had sought to have recognized in The Jewish War Front.

In the intro to Jabotinsky's book, Paassen gives a chilling anecdote:

I once asked him in a mood of confidence why he should be so everlastingly kind in receiving me when it was convenient or not, me, a journalist whose voice assuredly did not carry very far in the world of men and events. "I surely cannot do a great deal' I said, " to spread your views and ideas. My heart is yours, but my talents are extremely limited." . . .

Jabotinsky waved his hand impatiently: "It isn't that' he said; "it isn't that at all. I like to look at you while we speak, because your eyes and not mine will see a regenerated Jewish people taking up its national role in the community of peoples, in a truly free Palestine. It is for the reflection of that glory that I look in your eyes. And that reflection is there because you believe!". . .
When he said that I thought back of my Uncle Kees, a Dutch landscape painter who, while strolling with me along a rural road in Brabant thirty years ago, made another prediction to me, this: "You, Pierre, you will see the day when the whole European kettle explodes and the debris comes tumbling down to bury this bourgeois world'

Even as that prediction is being fulfilled before our eyes today, so may Jabotinsky's blessed vision also come to pass!

- Pierre van Paassen (1940)