This week on March 11th, Haaretz posted an article titled "Wonder Woman vs. Bibi: Gal Gadot Takes Stand in Row Over Jewish-Arab Equality" by author Itay Stern. The article describes the recent social media exchange between Wonder Woman's leading Israeli actress Gal Gadot and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Gal's personal friend and fellow actress Rotem Sela went on Instagram responded to comments made by the Culture Minister of Israel, Miri Regev. Regev wrote a "warning" about certain Israeli political parties potentially cooperating with Arab political parties. Sela responded essentially saying his comments were ridiculous and there was no need for any sort of warning because she did not believe it mattered that the two parties were of different races. Sela's Instagram post soon became flooded in a wave of polarizing comments and Gadot came to her support by posting a photo herself with the phrase "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and spoke of peace talks between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Several other Israeli female models and actresses chimed in with their support as well. However, the very next day, Netanyahu fired back with a social media post of his own where he stood in front of the Israeli flag and declared that Israel is the state of the Jewish people alone.
This article seems reliable with the information it conveys overall. Since it does not link to the actual social media accounts and posts in question, I decided to look for them myself. From Gal's official Instagram, mysteriously the post in question has gone missing. As if it had, perhaps, been deleted by her social media management team. Various other news articles such as the Washington Post, NBC, and AP News all reported on the incident in question but none of them had any physical evidence such as a screenshot of the post on their pages. However, given that multiple reputable news outlets reported on this, it can be reasonable concluded that it actually occurred. Interestingly, I could not find the post from Netanyahu either. Various news agencies discussed it, but none provided any sort of link or screenshot of the incident. However, again, it can reasonably be concluded that the event in questions actually occurred. Since the event described is very detailed with dates of when each post was made and when each response was posted, I think the reporter did research into this event so as to best report on it. Similarly, whenever Stern wrote about what an individual posted on social media he directly quoted them for what appears to be their full statement, if not most of their statement. This is observed given that Stern did not stop a quotation, leave three ellipsis, and then resume quoting which could potentially allow for a statement to be misunderstood or deliberately altered so as to convey a meaning different that it was intended too.
First, it should be noted and acknowledged that the newspaper company who posted this, Haaretz, tends to have a more liberal viewpoint on sociopolitical issues such as the ones presented by Sela, Gadot, and Netanyahu. This is actually very apparent by the quotes that Stern decided to include toward the end of the article. After quoting Bibi's response, Stern makes the decision to quote the current Israeli Minister of Education Naftali Bennett who responded to PM Netanyahu's comments by essentially saying it was ridiculous of him to focus on the social media comments of celebrities rather than paying attention to the real, physical threat of looming terrorists. Immediately proceeding Stern quotes Ahmad Tibi, a famous Arab Muslim politician in Israel who notes sarcastically that Bibi would be surprised to know that Arabs are people who want to be equal citizens to other people living within Israel. Lastly, Stern quotes Israeli lawyer Ayman Odeh who also supports the initial comments Sela posted. I think that the combination of Stern choosing to include these three specific responses as well as writing them one after the other and choosing to not include what I presume are positive statements supporting Bibi shows that Stern as an author doesn't like Bibi. Not only does he appear to not favor Bibi, he always appears to support the same viewpoint that Sela had where he believes that the Arab citizens of Israel should be allowed to have just as free of a voice in government as the Jewish citizens.
No comments:
Post a Comment