The Death That Didn't Matter--to the Inquirer

    A young Israeli woman, Yael Meivar, was driving with her fiancee near the Palestinian Arab town of Kalkilya on the evening of December 31, 1997. Suddenly, the car was raked with automatic gunfire and Meivar was critically wounded. It was a typical Arab terrorist attack; there have been numerous such drive-by shootings at Israeli motorists in recent years. Yet for some reason, the Philadelphia Inquirer had trouble believing that this obvious case of Arab terrorism was indeed a case of Arab terrorism.

    "Woman Shot; Israel Alleges Arab Attack," was the headline in the Inquirer. The choice of wording made it seem as if there was substantial reason to doubt that it was an Arab attack. But what else could it have been? Do Jewish terrorists hide in Arab villages and ambush passing Jewish cars? Do highway robbers riddle passing cars with automatic gunfire, and then not rob their victims? When the Israeli police concluded that this was an Arab terrorist attack, were they merely making an "allegation" that might not be true, as the Inquirer suggested, or were they reaching tre conclusion that any reasonable person would reach, even without the benefit of the police department's investigative experience and skills...?

    The Inquirer's headline was only the beginning of the problem. The article's opening paragraph continued to heap doubt on the idea that it had been a terrorist attack. Here's how the Inquirer reported it: "An Israeli woman was shot and critically wounded early yesterday while traveling in the West Bank in what Israel called a Palestinian 'terrorist attack.'" Those crucial quotation marks, surrounding the phrase terrorist attack, said it all. The Inquirer's message was as clear as it was outrageous: Israel may have called it a "terrorist attack," but that doesn't mean it really was. How can a brutal drive-by shooting of a defenseless Israeli woman not be considered a terrorist attack? Only the Inquirer can answer that question.

    The Inquirer's approach in this case may be related to a broader phenomenon in the American media--fear of the "t-word." The t-word, terrorist, is a word that American journalists have no problem using--that is, unless Palestinian Arabs are the culprits, and Jews are the victims. Then, suddenly, the journalists come up with enough synonyms to fill a thesaurus. The terrorists are transformed into "guerrillas" ... "fighters" ... "attackers" ... "raiders" ... "bombers" ... or just plain "Palestinians." It's as if journalists are consciously trying to avoid making Palestinian Arab killers look bad, by bending over backwards to use softer language.

    A related problem is the way news about Israeli victims of terrorism is often buried in the back pages. In the case of the shooting of Yael Meivar, for example, the Inquirer relegated the story to the bottom of page 18. If Jewish terrorists had ambushed an Arab car and critically wounded an Arab woman passenger, would the Inquirer have put it on page 18? But the saddest part of this story is that when Yael Meivar died of her wounds five days later, the Inquirer did not report the news at all. Not on page 18, not on page 28, not on page 88. Not even in the "news briefs" section. Not a word. It's not that the Inquirer has an obligation to report on every Israeli who is killed by an Arab terrorist. Whether or not to do so is a judgment that its editors have to make, assessing the relative importance of the other news that is competing for space in the newspaper on any given day. But since the Inquirer had considered the original shooting attack to be worth reporting, and since the Inquirer had misled its readers by trying to suggest that it may not have been a terrorist attack at all, didn't the Inquirer have an obligation to tell its readers that the victim had died, and that all evidence in the case pointed towards it being a terrorist attack?