A tweetstorm blew up on May 14 over a New York Times statement on Twitter that “Dozens of Palestinians have died in protests as the U.S. prepares to open its Jerusalem Embassy.” It was repeatedly assailed as a shameful use of the “passive” to obscure culpability.
It’s déjà vu for me. One of my earliest posts on Language Log dealt with a report that use of passives showed Reuters to be biased in favor of Israel. And two out of the three “passives” the report cited were not passives.
The tradition continues. Some, like @andybechtel and @BenManson0, pointed out that have died is not passive (have is the perfect tense auxiliary and die is an active intransitive verb). Others wouldn’t listen: @BanTorture insisted: "#HaveDied is the passive voice. Active voice: ‘The Israeli military wilfully blew away peaceful protesters.’”
Neither side has the grammar quite right. @BenManson0 is wrong to call have died a verb (it’s a phrase involving two distinct verbs), but correct in noting that it’s not passive. And although the active sentence that @BanTorture offers is certainly active, it is completely unrelated to the original tweet in both grammar and meaning (the two sentences share not a single word, and neither entails the other).
Herds of people, in a fog of linguistic confusion, spent the day redundantly reiterating (or disputing) outrage at the supposedly immoral attempt by The New York Times to suppress the identity of the killers. “Accuracy is *the entire effing point* of journalism” remarked a tweeter called Alyssa (as if we might not be aware of that). But there was no inaccuracy: The claim that dozens of Palestinians have died is entailed by the proposition that the Israeli military has killed dozens of Palestinians, so it can’t be inaccurate if the latter is true.
On May 16 Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, brought the grammar quibbling to print journalism with a newspaper opinion piece headlined “In America’s news headlines, Palestinians die mysterious deaths.” He quoted the tweet and commented:
Have died? Really? We should note how the passive voice in this tweet hides the one performing the action, which is exactly what passive voice constructions can do. In this tweet, Israel is assigned no responsibility for killing protesters. On the contrary, Palestinians appear, simply and almost mysteriously, to “have died”. ... It’s almost as if bullets just hang in the air, waiting for Palestinians to walk deliberately into them.
But not only is the “passive voice” absent, there is no concealment of agency either: Die takes a grammatical subject denoting “the one performing the action” (the “action” of dying). Saying simply that dozens of deaths had occurred would suppress identification of those dying, but the tweet didn’t do that — it told us who died.
Bayoumi wants Israel to be directly condemned. Inevitably, he ends up quoting George Orwell’s assertion that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” and adds that “nothing will change until we demand more from the purveyors of today’s political language.”
But it is ridiculous to charge the Times with trying to conceal Israeli agency. As Bayoumi himself notes, the print edition used the headline “Israelis Kill Dozens in Gaza” (though he quibbles with even that). Online, a fuller headline was used: “Israel Kills Dozens at Gaza Border as U.S. Embassy Opens in Jerusalem.” Alleging that The New York Times suppresses mention of Israeli agency is not a stance that can be taken seriously.
We should acknowledge the profound ethno-geopolitical complexity of the Middle East situation.
- It is both true that Israel has built hundreds of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and true that Hamas is a listed terrorist organization committed to eliminating the state of Israel through military struggle.
- It is both true that Israeli forces killed a number of unarmed Palestinians on May 13 and true that most of those killed were sworn members of Hamas. (As reported by NBC News and other sources, Salah al-Bardawil, a Hamas official, told the Palestinian news service Baladna TV that 80 percent of the Palestinians killed last Monday were signed-up Hamas members, not random civilians.)
- It is both true that Israel was not invaded (the border fence was never actually breached) and true that repeated violent attacks on the fence were nonetheless made. (A pro-Israel news aggregator lists events up to May 15 here.)
Two mutually hostile armed factions, each with millennia of history in the area, are claiming title to the entire holy land, each believing in a deity who defends their claim. We do no favors to either side in this awful morass by discussing the resultant tragic maelstrom of hostilities via ignorant grammar nitpicking and patently silly attacks on the integrity of The New York Times.