[antiwar-van] Journalists Under Fire For Telling The Truth - Independent

[Mid East Solidarity Assn]

Journalists Are Under Fire For Telling The Truth

Robert Fisk, The Independent, 18 December 2002

Journalists are being attacked for telling the truth about the situation
in the Middle East, especially American journalists, writes Robert Fisk in
The Independent. What's wrong and how can it be fixed?

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The Independent
Journalists are under fire for telling the truth
Robert Fisk
18 December 2002

First it was Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel, who
advised the US President to take the "harshest measures possible" against
those who attacked America on 11 September, 2001. 

Let us forget, for a moment, that Fox News's Jerusalem bureau chief is Uri
Dan, a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the author of the
preface of the new edition of Sharon's autobiography, which includes a
revolting account of the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinian
civilians and Sharon's innocence in this slaughter. Then Ted Koppel, one
of America's leading news anchormen, announced that it may be a
journalist's duty not to reveal events until the military want them
revealed in a new war against Iraq. 

Can we go any further in journalistic cowardice? Oh yes, we can. ABC
television announced, a little while ago, that it knew all about the
killing of four al-Qa'ida members by an unmanned "Predator" plane in Yemen
but delayed broadcasting the news for four days "at the request of the
Pentagon." So now at least we know for whom ABC works. 

The Pentagon said that the murdered men and let's not lose sight of the
"murdered" bit, though that's not the word ABC used were between "two to
20" of the top ranks of al-Qa'ida. Really? So were they numbers two,
three, four and five in al-Qa'ida? Or numbers 17,18,19 and 20? Who cares?
The press are onside. Don't ask who is resisting forthcoming US censorship
of the Iraq war. Ask who is first to climb aboard the bandwagon. 

In Canada, the situation is even worse. Canwest, owned by Israel Asper,
owns over 130 newspapers in Canada, including 14 city dailies and one of
the country's largest papers, the National Post. His "journalists" have
attacked colleagues who have deviated from Mr Asper's pro-Israel
editorials. As Index on Censorship reported, Bill Marsden, an
investigative reporter for the Montreal Gazette has been monitoring
Canwest's interference with its own papers. "They do not want any
criticism of Israel," he wrote. "We do not run in our newspaper op-ed
pieces that express criticism of Israel and what it is doing in the Middle
East..." 

But now, "Izzy" Asper has written a gutless and repulsive editorial in the
Post in which he attacks his own journalists, falsely accusing reporters
of "lazy, sloppy or stupid" journalism and being "biased or anti-Semitic". 
These vile slanders are familiar to any reporter trying to do his work on
the ground in the Middle East. They are made even more revolting by
inaccuracies. 

Mr Asper, for example, claims that my colleague Phil Reeves compared the
which included a goodly few war crimes (the crushing to death of a man in
a wheelchair, for example) Israeli killings in Jenin earlier this year to
the "killing fields of Pol Pot". Now Mr Reeves has never mentioned Pol
Pot. But Mr Asper wrongly claims that he did. 

It gets worse. Mr Asper, whose "lazy, sloppy or stupid" allegations
against journalists in reality apply to himself, states in the address to
an Israel Bonds Gala Dinner in Montreal, which formed the basis of his
preposterous article that "in 1917, Britain and the League of Nations
declared, with world approval, that a Jewish state would be established in
Palestine". Now hold on a moment. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 did not
say that a Jewish state would be established. It said that the British
government would "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people." The British refused to use the words
"Jewish state". 

This may not matter much to lazy writers like Mr Aspen. But when it comes
to the League of Nations being involved, we really are into mythology. The
League of Nations was created after the First World War had it existed in
1917, it might have stopped the whole war and Mr Asper is simply wrong
(or, as he might have put it, "lazy, sloppy or stupid") to suggest it
existed in 1917. 

At no point, of course, does Mr Asper tell us about Israeli occupation or
the building of Jewish settlements, for Jews and Jews only, upon Arab
land. He talks about "alleged Palestinian refugees" and then claims that
the corrupt and foolish Yasser Arafat is "one of the world's cruel and
most vicious terrorists for the past 30 years". He concluded his speech to
Israel's supporters in Montreal with the dangerous request that "you, the
public, must take action against the media wrongdoers". 

Wrongdoers? Is this far from President Bush's "evildoers"? What in the
hell is going on here?

I will tell you. Journalists are being attacked for telling the truth, for
trying to tell it how it is. American journalists especially. I urge them
to read a remarkable new book published by the New York University Press
and edited by John Collins and Ross Glover. It's called Collateral
Language and is, in its own words, intended to expose "the tyranny of
political rhetoric". Its chapter titles about as wrongheaded a remark as
you can get "Anthrax", "Cowardice", "Evil", "Freedom", Fundamentalism",
"Justice", my favourite "Terrorism", Vital Interests" and "The War on..."
(fill in the missing country) tell it all.

Meanwhile, rest assured, the journalists are getting onside, to tell you
the story the government wants you to hear. 

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=362545