Ashley Perry compares MSM coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the Russian-Georgian conflict:
Most of the major media organizations have only used the word “occupation” when quoting Saakashvili or others like British Foreign Secretary David Milliband. Agence France Presse in almost every report used the term “occupation” in quotation marks, or claimed that “Tiblisi has labeled them [the Russians] an occupying force.” Many other media organizations follow suit.
Senior British journalist Peter Wilby implies in The Guardian that Saakashvili has used terms like occupation to win a public relations battle. He contends that the Georgian president knows which words pull heartstrings in the West. “Note the use of terms that trigger Western media interest: civilian victims, nuclear, humanitarian, occupation, ethnic cleansing,” Wilby wrote.
There is a sort of irony in the fact that The Guardian, long accused of treating Israel unfairly in its reporting, has an article clearly stating how certain words are utilized to garner sympathy for a particular cause, when all these terms have been used against Israel in the past – and mostly without quotation marks.
But when the MSM describes the Israeli “occupation,” it’s a different story. Perry quotes Dore Gold in the key snippet:
There are many other examples of territories that could denote an occupation but are referred to as “disputed.”
According to Dore Gold, former ambassador to the UN and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, there appears to be a major disparity in the terminology describing conflicts around the globe.
“Of course each situation has its own unique history, but in a variety of other territorial disputes – from northern Cyprus to the Kurile Islands to Abu Musa in the Persian Gulf, which have involved some degree of armed conflict – the term ‘occupied territories’ is not commonly used in international discourse. Thus, the case of the West Bank appears to be a special exception,” Gold wrote.
Georgian PR would benefit more from an Israeli invasion.
