By Dr. Aaron Lerner
March 2, 2007
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"[E]ach language has its own terminology and special meanings, and that Ma'an will not stop using terms such as "martyr", "resistance" and equivalent terms, in Arabic."
Response by Ma'an News Agency to an article by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook of Palestinian Media Watch.
Ma'an News Agency is as mainstream Palestinian as they come.
The independent news agency, bankrolled by the governments of Netherlands and Denmark, has taken on an important role as a provider of information about developments on the Palestinian side.
And while its English language website certainly makes no bones about its orientation, it tends to avoid the kind of terminology that makes some of the official PA website sound downright silly. Ma'an calls the Israeli Army by its official English name -- "IDF", for example, while the official PA websites, in contrast, use the Palestinian invention "IOF" (Israeli Occupation Force).
So it came as a surprise to those only following the English Ma'an website when Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook of Palestinian Media Watch prepared a comparison of the English and Arabic Ma'an Websites.
They found that besides terming the murder of Israeli civilians by a suicide bomber an act of "martyrdom" and "resistance", the Arabic language website identified Eilat as being "located in the south of occupied Palestine" and termed Jaffa an "occupied city" - meaning that literally everywhere in Israel is "occupied".
Ma'an's reaction to the criticism is instructive.
They didn't back down.
Instead they essentially argued that, when writing in Arabic, it was proper to use terminology that rejects the validity of Israel's existence in any border and praises the murder of Israeli civilians as part of the ongoing Arab war against the Jewish State.
As Ma'an English news editor, Rashid Shahin, put it, dropping this terminology in their Arabic website would mean reflecting "the Israeli point of view."
The people at Ma'an News Agency aren't radicals. They are the kind of "moderates" that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has in mind when she talks about a Palestinian state. They are the peace loving Palestinians she compares to Reverend Martin Luther King engaged in a peaceful struggle for equality as if Gaza and Nablus are no different than Selma Alabama.
But when Martin Luther King addressed his fellow Blacks, he didn't switch to terminology that embraced and glorified murder while rejecting the rights of those who are not Black.
[Rice's continuous fixation on this false equivalence dangerously distorts the reality of the situation -- the Blacks of America did not try to destroy the U.S. in 1776, nor were Blacks part of a great pan-Black nation stretching from Canada down to Argentina that considered the U.S. to be a temporary foreign entity to be ultimately ejected from the America's altogether.]
There is an important message for policymakers from Ma'an's response.
"Peace" and "reconciliation" aren't a photo-op signing ceremony on the White House Lawn away.
It is going to require considerably more patience than that.
The challenge today for Israel today is not to come up with right wording for an ersatz peace treaty but instead to ensure that the Jewish State continues to thrive despite the reality of the neighborhood.
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