Here's every word Vick wrote about the massacre:
The murder by knife of three children, including an infant of 3 months, and both parents in a West Bank settlement late Friday night rocked Israel terribly.See? It wasn't so bad - three children survived! What are those Jews getting all hot and bothered about?
...The slaughter did not eradicate the family. Three of the Fogel children survived — two brothers who were asleep in another bedroom, and their 12-year-old sister, who discovered the scene when she arrived home at midnight from a meeting of a youth group. The means of entry into the settlement was apparently a hole cut in the perimeter fence, undetected by civilian guards. But the identity of the attackers remains unknown.
Out of a 922 word story, the actual murders, dealt with only peripherally, take up a mere 97 words. All without a single detail on what actually happened outside the two words "by knife."
By contrast, saying that Israel was consumed with revenge took 87 words.
240 words were about Israel's settlements and how they are the main obstacle to peace.
77 words about the release of gruesome photos of the victims and supposedly tasteless banner ads by victim aid organizations that referred to the attacks.
97 words were written on the "cycle of violence" between Palestinian Arabs who have killed settlers and reprisal attacks by Jews.
And 94 words on the funeral.
I searched Time's site and did not find any other articles that described the murders at all, so it is not as if this story was assuming that the readers knew about the details. These are all the details that Time felt necessary to give. In other words, the settlements and Israeli politicization of the murders are the story; the murders themselves are just a minor detail.
Vick also writes about the smallish, largely ineffective unity protests in the West Bank and Gaza yesterday.
While he didn't fall for the absurd estimate from Ma'an of between 200,000 and 300,000 protesters in Gaza, more accurately saying 10,000, he downplays the Hamas attacks on the protesters with the passive-voice trick:
Scuffles and injuries were reported.However, check out this part:
Part of the problem Tuesday was the number of venues. Gaza had to demonstrate separately — it's separated from the West Bank by miles and Israeli barricades.That's like saying that Canada is separated from Mexico by miles and American checkpoints.
Vick cannot even bring himself to mention that an entire country separates Gaza from the West Bank.
To him, Israel is merely an unjust obstacle stopping Palestinian Arabs from freely traveling to each other.
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Sunday, Mar. 13, 2011
Slaughter of the Fogels: After the West Bank Killings
The murder by knife of three children, including an infant of 3 months, and both parents in a West Bank settlement late Friday night rocked Israel terribly. The news broke on Saturday morning, and the shock was somehow both muted and amplified by the enforced public silence of the Jewish Sabbath. But Shabbat ended at sundown, and freed from the strictures of enforced rest, events lurched forward with something very like vengeance.
First came the condemnations. "This is a despicable murder of an entire innocent family, parents, children and an infant, while they were sleeping in their home on the Sabbath evening," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. "We all know," Netanyahu added, "as those who want to strike at us will know, that the future of the settlements will not be decided by terror." (See the West Bank's emerging middle class.)
A few hours later, however, the Prime Minister made certain that the attack would, in fact, have a direct impact on Israel's West Bank settlements. Before Sunday dawned, his government had approved construction of 500 new homes on Palestinian territory. The homes are to be built on settlement blocs close to the 1967 border, densely packed and often suburban, rather than in the remote hilltop settlements like Itamar, where the Fogel family lived and where friction with neighboring Palestinians is far more common. But it was the first new construction Netanyahu's government has approved, and the clearest effort to transmute the deaths of the Fogels into politics. It would not be the only one.
"This is unfortunately the first time since the formation of the second Netanyahu government that new housing has been approved," said Danny Dayan, who chairs the umbrella group for settlers. "And it's a pity that parents and their children needed to be murdered for it to do so." The group called for many more houses on the West Bank, which many Jews believe is theirs by a promise from God. In Sunday's Cabinet meeting, Interior Minister Eli Yishai suggested a formula: "At least a thousand homes for each person murdered," he said. (See photos of young Palestinians.)
The more than 100 Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land are widely considered illegal under international law. Last month, a U.S. veto ended an attempt in the U.N. Security Council to condemn the policy.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman ordered Israel's U.N. delegation to file a complaint over the Itamar attack. "Israel is expecting to hear a strong condemnation from all democratic states, which in the name of human rights hurry to denounce every movement of a trailer in Judea and Samaria," the biblical name the settlers use for the West Bank.
The government authorized the release of crime-scene photos, and reporters' inboxes filled with JPEGs of the gruesome, evenly lit interior of a house, littered with children's toys and blood. "Terror Has Struck Again" ran an advertisement flashing on the Jerusalem Post website. "While you slept on Friday night, the Fogel family was MURDERED." The ad, which featured photos of the victims stippled with cartoon bullet holes, solicited funds for a nonprofit that helps survivors of terror attacks.
The slaughter did not eradicate the family. Three of the Fogel children survived — two brothers who were asleep in another bedroom, and their 12-year-old sister, who discovered the scene when she arrived home at midnight from a meeting of a youth group. The means of entry into the settlement was apparently a hole cut in the perimeter fence, undetected by civilian guards. But the identity of the attackers remains unknown. Israeli forces have detained some 20 Palestinians from nearby villages, reportedly including relatives of two Palestinians recently killed. (Watch video of Palestinians who are taking a nonviolent approach to the conflict.)
Jewish settlers and Palestinians have clashed many times since Itamar was built in 1984, just outside of Nablus. Three times in 2002, gunmen penetrated the fence and killed settlers, twice with guns, once with a knife. Extremist settlers also attack Palestinians, sometimes in a convoluted payback when the Israeli army moves against the settlers. Five Palestinian cars were set alight on Sunday, according to press reports. "It's an ongoing scene of violence — mutual violence," says Sarit Michaeli, spokesperson for the B'Tselem human-rights organization. "Off the top of my head I can think of 10 very serious incidents."
Terror attacks, however, have become exceedingly rare on the West Bank in recent years. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas preaches nonviolence, and PA security forces coordinate discreetly with Israeli authorities to suppress attacks, often through night raids on private homes. The policy has been effective. Officials indicated no evidence of involvement of any known militant network, such as the military wing of Hamas, in Friday's attack. (Comment on this story.)
But Netanyahu found grounds to blame the Palestinian Authority, repeatedly calling on Abbas to cease "incitement" against Israel, and criticizing his generalized condemnation — "violence will only bring more violence" — as a "stuttered reply." A more junior Palestinian official, Dmitry Dliani of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, was quoted as calling the settlements "a massacre of the entire Palestinian nation" that "destroys the remaining hopes for peace."
Amid it all, the five victims were buried in Jerusalem, as 20,000 people looked on, including a crowd of reporters. Delivering the eulogy of Udi Fogel, whose body was found beside his infant daughter, Udi's elder brother Motti Fogel said, "All of the slogans we hear are trying to efface the simple fact that you're dead, and nothing can efface that. This funeral has to be a private affair. A man dies to himself, to his children. Udi, you are not a national event. Your horrible death mustn't make your life into a pawn."
