Telling it Like it Isn’t

Robert Fisk

Los Angeles Times
27 December 2005

I first realized the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers. "I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore." Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been. This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" — or even, in some cases, "outposts." Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land — just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory. Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all — so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall. The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely. If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act. And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security barrier" — words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm at the entrance to a private housing complex. For Palestinians to object violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious people. By our use of language, we condemn them. We follow these unwritten rules elsewhere in the region. American journalists frequently used the words of U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency — referring to those who attacked American troops as "rebels" or "terrorists" or "remnants" of the former regime. The language of the second U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently — and grotesquely — by American journalists. American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which the horrors of conflict — the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs — are kept off the screen. Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities" don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography" of death (which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have just killed. Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war. Back in the old days, we used to believe — did we not? — that journalists should "tell it how it is." Read the great journalism of World War II and you'll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to know or preferred a different version. So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit.Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for the London Independent and the author, most recently, of "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East," published last month by Knopf.
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11391.htm

The erosion of free speech

Robert Fisk

The Independent March 11, 2006

You've got to fight. It's the only conclusion I can draw as I see the renewed erosion of our freedom to discuss the Middle East. The most recent example - and the most shameful - is the cowardly decision of the New York Theatre Workshop to cancel the Royal Court's splendid production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. It's the story - in her own words and emails - of the brave young American woman who travelled to Gaza to protect innocent Palestinians and who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer in an attempt to prevent the driver from destroying a Palestinian home. The bulldozer drove over her and then reversed and crushed her a second time. "My back is broken," she said before she died. An American heroine, Rachel earned no brownie points from the Bush administration which bangs on about courage and freedom from oppression every few minutes. Rachel’s was the wrong sort of courage and she was defending the wrong people. But when I read that James Nicola, the New York Theatre Workshop’s “artistic director” – his title really should be in quotation marks – had decided to “postpone” the play “indefinitely” because (reader, hold your breath) “in our production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities (sic) in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas…we had a very edgy situation”, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So let’s confront this tomfoolery. Down in Australia, my old mate Anthony Loewenstein, a journalist and academic, is having an equally vile time. He has completed a critical book on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict for Melbourne University Publishing and Jewish communities in Australia are trying to have it censored out of existence before it appears in August. Last year, Federal Labour MP Michael Danby, who like Loewenstein is Jewish, wrote a letter to the Australian Jewish News demanding that Loewenstein’s publishers should “drop this whole disgusting project”. The book, he said, would be “an attack on the mainstream Australian Jewish community.” Now the powerful New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies has weighed in against Loewenstein and efforts are under way to deprive him of his place on the board of Macquarie University’s Centre for Middle East and North African Studies. A one-off bit of skulduggery on Israel’s behalf? Alas, no. A letter arrived for me last week from Israeli-American Barbara Goldscheider whose novel “Naqba: The Catastrophe: The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict” has just been published. She has been attacked, she told me, “merely because I chose an Arabic title for my novel on the conflict … my brother-in-law has broken his relationship with me before he even read the book … From members of my ‘Orthodox’ Jewish congregation in Bangor (Maine), I received a phone call from an irate ‘friend’ spluttering out: ‘Don’t you know the Arabs want to destroy Israel?’” A talk scheduled to take place last month at a conservative synagogue was cancelled “due to the uproar about my novel”. A Boston professor has mercifully written to Goldscheider with what I regard as bloody good advice. “There’s a vicious campaign out there,” he said. “Don’t cave in.” But what do you do when a publisher – or an “artistic director” – caves in? I found out for myself not long ago when the Military History Society of Ireland asked permission to reprint a paper I had published some years ago on the battle between the Irish Army’s UN battalion in southern Lebanon and Israel’s proxy – and brutal – Lebanese militia, the so-called “South Lebanon Army”, whose psychotic commander was a cashiered Lebanese army major called Saad Haddad. In the paper I mentioned how an Israeli major called Haim extorted money form the inhabitants of the south Lebanon village of Haris and gave the code name of an Israeli agent – “Abu Shawki” – who was present at the murder of two Irish soldiers. I had published there details many times, both in my own newspaper and in my previous book on the Lebanon war, Pity the Nation. Major Haddad died of cancer more than ten years ago. I actually met Haim in the early 1980’s as he emerged from a meeting with the mayor of Haris from whom he demanded money to pay Israel’s cruel militiamen – the UN was also present and recorded his threats – while “Abu Shawki”, whom the Irish police would like to interview, later tried to arrest me in Tyre – and immediately freed me – when I told him I knew he was a witness to the murder of the two Irish soldiers. So what was I supposed to do when I received the following letter from ex-Brigadier General Patrick Purcell of the Irish Army? “Unfortunately we have been forced to withdraw (your) article in view of a letter from our publisher Irish Academic Press. It is clear from our contract that (our) Society would be responsible in the event of libel action.” The enclosed letter from publisher Frank Cass advised that his lawyer had “cautioned” him because I had described Haddad as “psychotic”, named the blackmailing Israeli major and named the Israeli agent present at the two murders. It’s interesting that Mr Cass’s lawyer believes it is possible to libel a man (Haddad) who has been dead for more than a decade, even more so than he should think that publishing a military code name would prompt this rascal to expose his real identity in a court of law. As for Major Haim, he remains on UN files as the man who tried – and apparently succeeded – in forcing the people of southern Lebanon to cough up the cash to pay their own oppressors. And the moral of all this? Well, obviously, don’t contribute articles to the /military History Society of Ireland. But more to the point, I remember what I wrote in this newspaper just over six years ago, that “the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at anyone … who dares to criticise Israel … is fast reaching McCarthyite proportions. The attempt to force the media to obey Israel’s rules is international” And growing, I should now add. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article350569.ece

The Alliance For Free Palestine (AFFP) started as a student organization at the San Diego State University campus in 2003. The goal of the AFFP is to promote the creation of an independent, free and viable Palestinian state with Jerusalem (Al-Quds) as its capital in accordance with international law and the United Nations resolutions, and we demand that the state of Israel abide by all 65 UN resolutions including: 194 “Palestinian Refugees have the right to return to their homes in Israel”, 242 “Israel's occupation of Palestine is Illegal,” 338 “implementation of UN RES 242,” 446 “Israel's settlements in Palestine are Illegal,” 3236 “Palestinian have the right to Self-Determination” and 1397 “Reaffirmation of a Palestinian State,” in addition to the International Court of Justice ruling against the Wall of Apartheid which was rendered on 9 July 2004. We hope that the Palestinian people will finally realize their dreams and aspirations of attaining their goal of a Palestinian state and a homeland on all Palestinian land. No just and comprehensive peace will come about with out ending all the Palestinian anguish and pain that were caused by the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land. A just solution is the only path that will lead to peace, thus, all Israeli presence on Palestinian land should be eliminated and all four million Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes and towns in what is now Israel. We support the Palestinian Intifada and all forms of resistance by the Palestinians against the occupation, whether it is peaceful resistance or armed struggle which is a right endorsed by the UN General Assembly for people living under occupation.