In "The mother of all mistranslations," Melanie Phillips identifies some particularly egregious anti-Israel bias from the BBC:
Ye gods. The BBC has put out this story:Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’Israeli leaders are warning of an imminent conflagration in Gaza after Palestinian militants aimed rockets at the southern city of Ashkelon. The deputy defence minister said the stepped-up rocket fire would trigger what he called a ‘bigger holocaust’ in the Hamas-controlled coastal strip.
This reported remark by deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai caused widespread shock and absolute horror. For an Israeli minister to use the word ‘holocaust’ to describe a limited war of Israeli self-defence, when for Jews of all people the ‘Holocaust’ means one thing: genocide — and this at a time when the calumny of the ‘Jews as Nazis’ is rampant around the world, putting Israel and the Jewish people at risk — was simply beyond belief.
It was indeed without any credibility — because Vilnai never said it. It was an appalling mistranslation by Reuters, the source of the BBC story. Vilnai said:
‘The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger “shoah” because we will use all our might to defend ourselves'.Reuters translated the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ as ‘holocaust’. But ‘shoah’ merely means disaster. In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance. The word ‘Hashoah’ alone means ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘retzach am’ means ‘genocide’. The well-known Hebrew construction used by Vilnai used merely means ‘bringing disaster on themselves’.
As a subsequent Reuter’s story reported,Vilnai's spokesman said: ‘Mr. Vilnai was meaning “disaster”. He did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide.’ Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Arye Mekel, added: ‘Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai used the Hebrew phrase that included the term 'shoah' in Hebrew in the sense of a disaster or a catastrophe, and not in the sense of a holocaust.’But this grotesque mistranslation has given Hamas a propaganda gift which they lost no time exploiting:
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said of Vilnai's comments: ‘We are facing new Nazis who want to kill and burn the Palestinian people.’At a time when the rockets continue to rain down on the southern Negev and Israel is being forced to contemplate stepping up its incursions into Gaza because of the truly genocidal assault upon its citizens by Hamas, such a mistranslation is more than an unfortunate slip. In the present explosive atmosphere, it can lead directly to an enormous escalation of violence by the Palestinians.
Indeed.
[i]In the present explosive atmosphere, it can lead directly to an enormous escalation of violence by the Palestinians.[i/]
Like they need an excuse.
Yes, I noticed this as well.
The BBC also uses the phrase "Occupied Territories" and a host of other value-laden expressions to describe the "plight of the Palestinans". In the recent reporting (if you can call it that) there seems to be an assumption that just because only 1 Israeli died and 50/60/70/100/200 "palestinian refugees including 4 children" died that there is an "over-reaction" on the part of Israelis. The israelis are "aggresively responding" to 170 rocket attacks on their territory and are now "threatening an armed incursion" into the Gaza Strip.
The fact that these "rockets", which makes it sound as if the "refugees" are having a Guy Fawkes night party, could have killed dozens of people (and probably will if they are allowed to continue)is pretty harmless really.
The Israelis have also cut off food, medicine, power and oil supplies to the "refugees". This begs the question, why aren't the Egyptians helping them or for that matter the rest of the muslims. With oil prices being so high they have got a few bob too spare.
I usually turn off the BBC "news" because it is peurile - or in this case dangerously biased.
They disgust me.
An article about an article - the "Ha" in HaShoah -- that is useful and, no doubt for some, a necessary clarification.
"HaShoah" is not run-of-the-mill shoah. The same kind of thing can be found in every country or culture. Mere capitalization will do it. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, but lords of the realm are a dime a dozen. And while we all, like President Truman, can take (or leave) a daily constitutional, we won't let anyone tell us we can take or leave parts of the Constitution.
Par for the BBC course, even if Lyse Doucet has been moved to Pakistan, and Orla Guerin to South Africa, and Barbara Plett (who wept over Arafat) moved to...where is it? Afghanistan? The BBC is still scarcely distinguishable from an Arab outlet -- one of the slightly more plausible ones, based in London -- in its coverage of Israel and the attempts of that permanentlly beleaguered country to defend itself (defend itself through military means alone, for Israel's leaders are incapable of making its case, beginning with a correct analysis of what Israel faces -- a permanent, Lesser Jihad, its goals shared by the Slow Jihadists of Fatah and the Fast Jihadists of Hamas who differ not in ultimate goals, but only in timing and tactics).
Just listen to how the BBC World Service is covering Israel's attempts to wipe out rockets and their human launchers in Gaza, which begins with, and virtually ends with, the studied grief of "Palestinians" and of course the youngest most innocent victims that the BBC reporter can find, and then, almost as an afterthought, toward the end, a brief allusion to those rockets landing, hundreds of them, on Sderot, on Ashkelon. A moment's thought might have led a decent reporter to imagine what would be the reaction if hundreds of rockets were to land on an English city. Oh, in fact, we know the reaction, don't we? It is World War II, and those V-2 rockets are landing, and the R.A.F., and American, and Canadian pilots got into their bombers and headed off to fire-bomb whole cities, and didn't -- as the Israelis continue to do -- to take great care to attempt to limit their targets to the military.
One more example of BBC --- with Reuters, the source of this deliberate mistranslation, even worse -- mendacity. With many more examples to come. There is no end to this.
With all due respect, this is a Vilnai screwup from start to finish. While "shoah" does mean "catastrophe" in pre-modern and early-modern Hebrew (it was a favorite of the Hebrew revival poet Shaul Tscharnechovski), ever since the 1950s the word has virtually died out except as "Shoah", i.e. The Holocaust. The first association of any contemporary Hebrew speaker upon hearing "shoah" would be "The Holocaust".
Hebrew has several words meaning "disaster": "ason", "tzara", and the foreign-but-well-adopted "catastrophe". If Vilani - who was never noted for cleverness - chose "shoah", he can only blame himself.
"With all due respect, this is a Vilnai screwup from start to finish."
-- from a posting above
Is it? If the word "shoah" does exist, and had an independent usage -- you mention that the celebrated poet and translastor Tchernichovski favored the word -- is it now permanently out of common use?
Let's see. Do we have an equivalent. We do, indeed we do. And it's the word that is used, precisely, to translate the word "Shoah." We have The Holocaust, and we have ordinary, run-of-the-mill, "holocaust." We still use both. Admittedly, the word "holocaust" has been partly displace, is used less frequently, because of the more frequent use of the phrase "The Holocaust." But it has by no means exited from common usage, and one still reads it, or even hears it.
No doubt someone in Israeli public life who was vigilant in his way with words would have taken pains to avoid using it in its ordinary -- shoah rather than HaShoah -- sense, because such a person would also realize the way in which the vicious enemies of Israel would take that word and run with it, eager to find an example of an Israeli threatening "The Holocaust" when all he was doing, however carelessly, was to use the word for "holocaust."
This did not stop Reuters or the BBC from using the word to mean "The Holocaust" and running gleefully with it -- you know, the Israelis, those "Nazis." It's an Arab theme. Why not give it a boost, someone said to someone else in Bush House, as they smiled to themselves.
Last I looked, the deliberate and very careful targetting of terrorists for assassination, and the effort intended, over the last few days, to do one thing -- stop those who keep raining down rockets on Israeli villages and cities -- was not quite equivalent to what we call The Holocaust. And it does not become "The Holocaust" even if, because of the way in which those who build and rain down those rockets live not on separate bases, but choose deliberately to fire from, and plot and plan and scheme and live within, civilian areas, precisely because they are aware that the Israelis exhibit such superhuman compunction about killing civilians (no other Western army -- and certainly, thank god, not the American army, would subject itself to the kind of hyper-moral principles that the Israelis insit, to their own great harm, in observing, and should long ago have reconsidered, and jettisoned). The deliberate targetting of civilians is one thing; the hitting of some civilians -- and just how "civilian" is that "civilian" population that appears to be foursquare behind the Lesser Jihad and all of its works and days, anyway? -- in an attempt to get at terrorist rocketeers is quite another.
No sensible person regards this as equivalent -- in words or in life -- to the round-up, and mass-killing, with gas, prussic acid, bullets to the heart, hangings, being burned alive in synagogues, starved to death, subjected to medical "experiments," tortured in every conceivable way, six million inoffensive men, women, and children, which is what is meant by the phrase "The Holocaust").
But Reuters did, or tried to. The BBC, following Reuters, did, or tried to.
That is the evil. Vilnai is not to blame. Those who took that word and, ignoring the distinctions between "The Holocaust" and "a holocaust," eagerly exploited his lack of verbal vigilance -- they are to blame, they are full of malice, and menace, and evil. A word, by the way, that should be brought back. Not "the King's Evil." That's a different thing. Just unadorned "evil." It's a word we can't do with out. We've tried, over the past century, to get away from that word, that idea. It hasn't worked out. Bring it back.
'No sensible person regards this as equivalent -- in words or in life -- to the round-up, and mass-killing, with gas, prussic acid, bullets to the heart, hangings, being burned alive in synagogues, starved to death, subjected to medical "experiments," tortured in every conceivable way, six million inoffensive men, women, and children, which is what is meant by the phrase "The Holocaust").
But Reuters did, or tried to. The BBC, following Reuters, did, or tried to.
That is the evil. Vilnai is not to blame. Those who took that word and, ignoring the distinctions between "The Holocaust" and "a holocaust," eagerly exploited his lack of verbal vigilance -- they are to blame, they are full of malice, and menace, and evil. A word, by the way, that should be brought back. Not "the King's Evil." That's a different thing. Just unadorned "evil." It's a word we can't do with out. We've tried, over the past century, to get away from that word, that idea. It hasn't worked out. Bring it back.'
That's right Hugh. You've nailed it. The truth of your words is searing, cutting right to the essence of the vileness and malevolence displayed by the Jew haters passing as anti-Zionists in the MSM. This trivialisation of the horrors of the Holocaust(which you outline with few but devastating words)sends shivers down my spine.
I like how the MSM pretends that shooting rockets from one state into another is nothing. On the contrary Hamas is at war with Israel though all the while they pretend that they are victims.
If they are victims they are victims of the wrong headed leftists who encourage their misbehavior by acting as propagandists for their cause of returning all of Israel to desert uninhabitated wastes.
They are also victims of their genealogy, indoctrinated into the religion of death and hate.
One feels sorry for them, but that does not translate into thinking those who defend themselves against them are not entitled to do so, they are not only entitled it is their duty to protect the citizens, which is the primary function of government.
Hugh, I don't think this is an example of BBC bias. God knows we don't lack for them. The Israeli press took precisely the same view - that this was unspeakable, coming from a ministerial figure.
Tscharnechovki died in the 1940s - before the end of the war and before the word came into its current usage. The use of "Shoah" in Israeli political life is extremely loaded, to the point there's a silly bill on its way to become a law, which will completely forbid the usage of the word in political speech (extreme right and left wingers love the shock value of the word).
I had the misfortune to cover Vilnai as a political reporter. It's a shame, the man certainly had an excellent education - his father was the great historian Ze'ev Vilnai - but it all too often seems his brain is not connected to his mouth.
All too often Israel suffers from bad press on account of bias. This is one of the cases in which the Israeli government has only itself to blame.
It shows to me the lack of perspective and the soft bigotry of low expectations. Hamas is shooting rockets indiscriminately into Israel, an Israeli bigwig says some words that can be easily twisted.
We expect barbarism from the one, but the other is supposed to be so self controlled that even a stray word is greeted with PC tsk tsking.
It is possible to recognize that Vilnai, had he been cleverer, ought to have foreseen the michng mallecho that might result from his use of such a word. But that is different from, and does not take away from, the fact that HaShoah is not the same thing as "shoah" (and I gave analogous examples which, had I devoted more than ten seconds to thinking of them, might have been added to), and that those who pounced with such alacrity, and then pretended that there was any conceivable "Holocaust" being inflicted by the Israelis on the Gazan Arabs, are sinister, are evil.
As for Israelis other than Vilnai, who may indeed be an example of regression to the mean -- "the man certainly had an excellent education - his father was the great historian Ze'ev Vilnai" -- for god's sake, Amos Oz isn't a patch on his uncle the scholar Joseph Klausner, and the embarrassing William Kristol is certainly not a patch on either his father (though his father could make some embarrassing remarks in his own way) or his mother -- well, all kinds of Israelis do not watch their tongues, or mind the meaning of words, never more so than when they parrot that dangerous phrase, and that absurd concept, that of the "Palestinian people." If Vilnai is to be deplored, so is every single Israeli leader, beginning with that Fool of Chelm Shimon Peres and the deplorable Olmert, who have unthinkingly contributed to the continued deep belief in all this nonsense about "two tiny peoples, each needing a state" blah, and blah, and blah. And, of course and, bien entendu, blah.
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said of Vilnai's comments: ‘We are facing new Nazis who want to kill and burn the Palestinian people.’
This is an outrageous lie.
Tens of thousands of of the "Religion of Peace" joined the SS to persecute and kill the Jews and other enemies of the riech. The Grand Mufti of Cairo met with Hitler to discuss the final solution. I see no determination on behalf of the people of israel inflict the same on the Palestians.
They are lying scum and if there is justice in the afterlife I hope they burn in the fires of Auschwitz - that they helped to light.
Because of the coverage of this incident and others, I now place the BBC in the same category as the United League of Nations. Neither can be saved by tweaking here or there, and must be abolished and started fresh, from the ground up.
What always astounds me is the very poor PR response from Israel, whenever Israel is forced to respond to the 'Philistines' provocations, when Israel is forced to take some form of military action to protect its citizens from these Gaza rockets.
But, look at all the media exposure the Hamas militants continually get, *declaring*, that they and their children's fondest wish, is to die as martyrs.
The repeated attacks....
Hamas fire the rockets into Israel.
Israel responds with punitive actions.
The palestinians then cry, "Look the Israelis!!! They are killing us!!!!"
The Israel media response is usually, "We are are very sorry for any civilian casualties. We always try to target militants."
The proper Israeli PR response should be [something like],
"If you *remember* Hamas, are always telling the world they wish to die as martyrs for Allah.
WHAT ARE THEY NOW COMPLAINING ABOUT?
If they try to kill our citizens, and we kill their martyrs in return, what are the palestinians weeping about????
They declare to the whole world that they WANT TO DIE as martyrs.
And if they persist in their efforts to kill Israeli citizens, well, we can help them.
If Hamas and their supporters in Gaza, do not wish to die as martyrs after all, SIMPLE, stop attacking Israel, and her citizens."
Google
palestinians seek martyrdom
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=palestinians+seek+martyrdom&btnG=Search&meta=
ISLAM......a false religion, for a false people.
can you guys help out on this news forum please.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/discussions/posts/list/PALESTINE-59162.page
"always astounds me is the very poor PR response from Israel..."
-- from a posting above
Yes, aren't they something? Of course, once you have decided not to properly identify the nature of the threat you face, and once you eagerly participate in the farce that your enemies have written -- complete with a starring role for "the Palestinian People" -- and you just won't touch a hair on the head of that idiotic script, of course you will fail. And fail. And fail. They win every war, at great cost, and at great cost, lose every round of negotiation and every interim agreement and every treaty. And they still haven't a clue as to how to state their own claims, legal, moral, and historic. And haven't any idea how to enroll their own struggle for survival in the true, and larger narrative, of Islam's Jihad against the entire non-Islamic world, of which Israel is only part, though admittedly the Lesser Jihad against Israel gets more attention, because as open warfare it started earlier, than the Jihads now being conducted within, for example, the countries of Western Europe.
werter5075 said....
"......can you guys help out on this news forum please......."
No.....
That page has too big a 'footprint' [background adv's] for me.
Must be MB's of adv's there!
my poor dialup connection, @ 21 k/s balks at such pages.
This reminds me of Bush's unfortunate use of "crusade", in one of the speeches he made directly after 9/11.
The word continues to rebound to the West from the Muslim world in the form "Crusade", bringing to mind to Knights Templar, beleaguered pilgrims bound for Jerusalem, etc., and is consistantly used in a pejorative way.
The very instant "crusade" sprang from Bush's lips, I cringed. What an idiot! Are his speech writers so good that he thinks he doesn't need to vet the script before he delivers it?
Ah, well... Loose lips and sunken ships...
Now isn't it a kick in the ass that those Hamas bastards, who don't believe in the holocaust, suddenly accept the reality of the holocaust of the word may be used against them - and it was not...
I am laughing my ass off.
I dunno, I'm no professional linguist and my knowledge of Hebrew ended in 8th grade Hebrew school, but there was a movie called Shoah that referred to the Holocaust and holocaust in small case means a burnt offering. I don't think there is anything more than the usual "the poor Paleos are victims" slant to the story
"Israel's leaders are incapable of making its case, beginning with a correct analysis of what Israel faces "
They are probably being wily; for what good would it do them to be candid about what they have known grimly for over 100 years about their Muslim neighbors, when the entire West, besotted with PC MC, wouldn't believe them and continues to hobble their efforts with conditions for unrealistic limitations on their behavior?
Reuters, inaccurate?
On purpose?
Isn't that their motto?
All that news that causes fits.
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said of Vilnai's comments: ‘We are facing new Nazis who want to kill and burn the Palestinian people.’
and Hamas wants a massacre of the people of Israel, as they put it to drive them into the sea. My only comment about these Hamas terrorists, is pot kettle black all based on mistaken belief that once they've occupy the land that land is theirs until the Day of judgment and consecrated as Muslim lands by their cluts god allha
Strange, isn't it, that Hamas, Hezbollah et al can declare any Israeli, or Jew for that matter, fair game, wherever they live, to be fair game, but if they set up their rocket launchers and embed their "militants" among unarmed civilians, and the IDF happens to kill some of those unarmed civilians in the course of taking out a nest of armed persons launching long-range rockets at Israel, who don't wear uniforms, well, that's cause for censure of Israel. 900 rockets, probably manufactured in Iran and with longer ranges than the old Qassams, have been fired at Israel from Gaza since Jan 1/08, but Israel's actions are somehow depicted as "disproportionate". I'd like to lob 900 rockets at each of the countries that have stated this position and see what they do in response.
I have to agree with the idea of Israel's government being in total denial to the history of the Jewish nation and international norms of war.
At one time the ancestral Hebrew homeland streached from the Mesopetamia to the Med. From the southern borders of Turkey to what now is the Suez Canal. In 1922, the Balfour Accords, by international concesus, took 80% if the ancesrtal land from the Jews. Again, in 1948, another 10% of their homeland was taken from the Jews. In response to wars of aggresion against Israel, from 1948 thru today, the Jews have taken back about 1% of their land, purely for defensive reasons. -cont-
History has shown us that EVERY treaty the state of Israel has entered into, with the "palestinian people", ends up with Israel honoring it's obligations and the Arabs won't! It's long past time that Israel (with the international community) call off this continuing farce! The "palestinians" ALREADY have a homeland! In fact it was created in 1922! It's called JORDAN!!! (TransJordan) They are the majority in this country, because it is their rightful homeland. Establish peace NOW, by deporting every "palestinian" back to their homeland! Any Arabs, claiming Egyption roots, can freely emmigrate to Egypt. Live in peace or GET OUT! Israeli-Arabs have already proven this is possible and profitable. Their living standard is higher, per capita, than any Arab nation's people!
The BBC is no more than a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda. It's got to the stage where Israel daren't defend herself from the relentless shower of terrorist rockets raining down on her territory because of the images of wailing Pals that will instantly be transmitted by the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 and other organs. Absolute silence from these outfits about the terror the border towns have had to withstand for months from these animals who launch them from civilian areas and use their own people as human shields.