Sderot’s “Settlers” Revisited

By Published On: August 4, 2005

As mentioned in an earlier entry, AP’s Ravi Nessman—along with the LA Times and other newspapers which ran Nessman’s story—imprecisely referred to Tuesday’s anti-disengagement demonstrators, who gathered in Sderot from both the territories and Israel, as “thousands of Israeli settlers protesting the upcoming Gaza Strip withdrawal.”

In the opening paragraph of a story in the Aug. 3 Christian Science Monitor, correspondent Joshua Mitnick similarly described the rally-goers uniformly as “settlers”:

In a last-ditch effort to stop the Israeli government from withdrawing from Gaza and portions of the West Bank later this month, tens of thousands of Jewish settlers gathered Tuesday …

Only further on in the story does the reader discover that the tens of thousands of rally-goers whom Mitnick had dismissed as “settlers” also included large numbers of religiously observant Jews who do not live on Israeli settlements:

… the overwhelming majority of protesters hail from settlements in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, or are religiously observant Jews from inside Israel.

Interestingly, nowhere does the journalist explain how he determined that “the overwhelming majority of protesters” were settlers. Did he base this assessment on a scientific poll? He cited none in the article. Did he himself informally poll the demonstrators? Judging by the article’s “Tel Aviv” dateline, no.

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