Column: Western media's euphemisms for Israel's violence

You may have noticed criticism online of the way many, if not most, western media outlets are covering events in Jerusalem.

Many had totally ignored the Sheikh Jarrah evictions until Israeli police began cracking down on Palestinians on Friday night.

And even then, much reporting has been framed as two equal sides "clashing", and downplaying Israel's culpability and its violations of international law.

MEE columnist Belen Fernandez takes a swing at this form of misinformation in her latest piece. Read an extract here and the full piece below:

For the media, it’s all in a day’s "scuffle". There were "scuffles" and "clashes" galore in the Washington Post, on the ABC News website, in the Guardian, at Fox News, and again at the Post.

The BBC, for its part, has dutifully kept its audience updated about “clashes” and “confrontations” - while insisting that, in firing stun grenades and the like, Israeli police have simply been acting “in response” to Palestinian provocations (just as Israel is always acting “in response” when it, like, slaughters thousands of people in Gaza).

A New York Times article published on 7 May on Israeli police "confrontations with Palestinian protesters", meanwhile, noted that “the Israeli Foreign Ministry said the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian terrorists were ‘presenting a real-estate dispute between private parties as a nationalistic cause in order to incite violence in Jerusalem’”.

In actuality, of course, the whole Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" is Sheikh Jarrah writ large: a "real-estate dispute" in which the party that violently usurped the bulk of Palestinian real estate in 1948 - and that continues to illegally occupy the rest - must cast Palestinians as terrorists in order to justify terrorising, killing and expelling them (pardon, “clashing” with them).

Sheikh Jarrah: Clashes, scuffles, conflict - western media's euphemisms for Israel's violence