Canary Wharf, London, August 24 – A smoldering rivalry between two leading news agencies flared into violence today over the ongoing crisis in the Gaza Strip after each one used a different spelling of the same word to describe the height of a building destroyed in an IAF bombing.
Israeli aircraft directed two high-explosive bombs at an apartment building in Gaza City on Saturday, leveling the structure, which had served as a Hamas command center. The AP reported that the building, with 13 floors, comprised “stories,” employing the American term, while British source Reuters insisted on ‘”storeys.” Reuters also described the target as a “block of flats,” bringing out into the open a longstanding conflict over English orthography and usage. AP responded by rocket attacks on Reuters headquarters, posting a derisive message on the latter organization’s Facebook page.
“This is what we think of your ‘block of flats,'” read the message. “Keep inventing words that don’t exist and you’ll end up like the Palestinians, suffering because their leadership invents a history that doesn’t exist. End of ‘storey.'” The strikes damaged three floors of the structure and injured twenty people.
Reuters retaliated with a volley of ballistic missiles targeting AP headquarters in New York City, but the weapons instead struck a dense flock of pigeons that took flight as the missile approached and detonated prematurely, causing only minor damage to the building and adding a pothole to West 33rd Street, where it blended in with the hundreds of others.
The Associated Press then took eleven US-based Reuters correspondents prisoner and threatened to play recordings of Sarah Palin addresses at them unless the British agency committed to using the “correct” American spelling. Reuters refused, and took seven AP reporters hostage as well. An eighth AP journalist managed to escape, and he informed his superiors that his colleagues were bring tortured with such brutal methods as being insulted in Scots.
Both parties appealed to the international community for assistance, each one claiming to be the aggrieved side. “Our facilities were brutally attacked, unprovoked, by the barbaric Yanks of the Associated Press,” Reuters said in a statement. AP representative Aima Blowhard countered that Reuters had initiated the violence by “committing rhetorical mayhem and viciously mangling the English language in an ill-conceived attempt to assert an obsolete vision of Anglocentric cultural leadership.”
Other news agencies attempted to stay out of the fray, instead focusing on how to blame the fracas on Israel. “The violent consequences of the continuing IDF aggression include this journalistic flareup, which Israel must have foreseen, but disregarded,” said BBC commentator John Snow. “That country’s contempt for foreign journalists is well known. That is the only explanation, since everyone knows Israel has the ability to control every detail of every scenario, so all negative outcomes are necessarily an indication of Israeli misconduct or negligence.”
American news outlets downplayed the events, calling the conflict a “boisterous rivalry,” in the words of CNN analyst Wolf Blitzer. “I don’t see this as indicative of anything fundamental,” he said of the violence. “Any country that insists on inefficiently putting an extra letter u in so many words such as ‘labor’ and ‘favor’ is clearly not to be taken seriously.”
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