As opposed to other terrorist attacks this attack did not yet instigate a war of weapons but rather a War of Words.
Israel is demanding an apology from CNN over its coverage of Saturday's terrorist attack in Itamar claiming it was "tendentious and deceptive."
The CNN report stated: "Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a 'terror attack.'" Israeli officials contested the quotation marks around the term terror attack stating that there should be no argument on the fact that this is a terrorist attack.
The report went on to say: "According to a military spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the northern West Bank city of Nablus around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children."
The report rephrased the IDF's official statement that noted forces were searching for a "terrorist" using instead the words "intruder" and "assailant". I myself remember many articles that called a suicide bomber, a freedom fighter.
Why is terminology such a controversial issue? Or as Shakespeare put it "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
To answer this question we should consider another article that hit the wires recently.
In Rome Pope Benedict XVI has made a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ. He deconstructs one particular Biblical account which has the crowd saying, "His blood be on us and on our children" — a phrase frequently cited as evidence of the collective guilt Jews bore and the curse that they carried as a result.
The phrase, from the Gospel of Matthew, has been so inflammatory that director Mel Gibson was reportedly forced to drop it from the subtitles of his 2004 film "The Passion of the Christ," although it remained in the spoken Aramaic.
The reason for Pope Benedict's interest in this debate could be traced to his childhood, when he was forced to join the Hitler Youth. As an adult he has made improving relations with Jews a mission and has visited the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland and Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
Years of blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus along with newer anti-Semitic propaganda may have led to the extermination of Jews in World War II.
Words and terminology motivate people to action. Language has cultural and practical consequences. The Pope understood this. Israel has become aware of this and is now asking the world media as well as global leaders to unequivocally denounce these most recent attack.
One of the workshops we run on our tours is an exercise in the vocabulary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What is the language used in your local media to describe the conflict? How do you reconcile between terms such as apartheid wall and separation fence, terrorist and freedom fighter, targeted killing and assassination?
At the end of the workshop we show a clip and deconstruct the phrasing of each sentence. By choosing our words we choose our moral ground, our social values and our identity – In effect our world is made up of words.
How were the Itamar "killings" reported in your part of the world?
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