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April 16, 2002
Todd May
US
Should End Aid to Israel
Gabriel Ash
The Oilman, the General
and the Coup that Failed
Ron Jacobs
Wake
Up Some Mornin',
Find Your Own Self Dead:
The Chavez Coup
Brian Wood
Inside Jenin: Rubble and Decomposing
Bodies
Jack McCarthy
Citizen
Coup: The Times,
The Post and the Coup Plotters
Dave Marsh
Hymns: How I Got Through
Last Week
April 15, 2002
Susi Abeles
A
Field Trip to Jenin
Breyten Breytenbach
A Letter to Ariel Sharon:
"You Won't Break Them"
Gregory
Wilpert
CounterCoup
in Venezuela
Kristen Schurr
Amid the Rubble of Nablus
Jordy
Cummings
An
Open Letter to Abe Foxman
Christopher Reilly
The Media, the CIA
and the Chavez Coup
James
T. Phillips
"Homicide"
Bombers
April 14, 2002
William Blum
The CIA and Venezuela
David
Vest
A
Good Old-Fashion "Incursion"
Ralph Nader
General Motors:
Stuck in Reverse
M. Junaid
Alam
From
the Ashes: Palestinian Struggle for Freedom
Sam Bahour
Palestinians and Americans
April 13, 2002
Beth Daoud
Life
in the Ruins of Nablus
Patrick Cockburn
Bulldozing History:
The End Nears for Stalin's
Most Monstrous Hotel
Gregory
Wilpert
The
Coup in Venezuela:
an Eye-Witness Account
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Thoughts on Our War
Against Terrorism
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
April 12, 2002
Nancy Stohlman
Live from East Jerusalem:
International Nonviolence
Brian
J. Foley
Defeating
Evil
Olivier Audeoud
Did the US Break
the Laws of War?
Rep. Ron
Paul
The
Middle East Quagmire
Michael Colby
Republican Porn:
Oiling Up the Caribou
John Chuckman
Tom
Friedman's Fabrications
April 11, 2002
Patrick Cockburn
Battle of St. Petersburg Zoo
Jeff Halper
After
the Invasion:
Now What?
Falk / Krieger
Taming the Nuclear Monster
Steve
Perry
The
Good Life of
Nellie Stone Johnson
Nick Ring
Efficiency and Occupation:
Terrorism vs. Taylorism
Alexander
Cockburn
From
the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
Resources:
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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April 16, 2002
Fisk
on Campus
Fear and Learning in America
By Robert Fisk
The
Independent
Osama bin Laden once told me that Americans did
not understand the Middle East. Last week, in a little shuttle
bus shouldering its way through curtains of rain across the
Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the Des Moines Register
and realised that he might be right. "BIG HOG LOTS CALLED
GREATER THREAT THAN BIN LADEN," announced the headline.
Iowa's 15 million massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure
that the state waterways are polluted. "Large-scale hog
producers are a greater threat to the United States and US democracy
than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert
F Kennedy Junior, president of... a New York environment group...
'We've watched communities and American values shattered by
these bullies,' Kennedy said..." I took out my pocket calculator
and did a little maths. Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000
miles from Afghanistan. Another planet, more like.
I've been travelling to the United States
for years, lecturing at Princeton or Harvard or Brown University,
Rhode Island, or San Francisco, or Madison, Wisconsin. God knows
why. I refuse all payment and take just a business-class round
trip from Beirut because I can't take 14 hours of screaming
babies in each direction. American college students are tough
as nails and bored as cabbages, and in some cities - Washington
is top of the list - I might as well talk in Amharic. If you
don't use phrases like "peace process", "back
on track" or "Israel under siege", there's a
kind of computerised blackout on the faces of the audience.
Total Disk Failure. Why should my latest bout of Americana have
been any different?
Sure, there were the usual oddballs.
There was the old black guy whose first "question"
on the Middle East in a Chicago University lecture theatre was
a long and proud announcement that he hadn't paid taxes to the
IRS since 1948 - a claim so wonderful that I forbore the usual
threat to close down on him. There were the World Trade Centre
conspiracists who insisted that the US government had planted
explosives in the twin towers. There was the silver-haired lady
who wanted to know why God couldn't be made to resolve the hatred
between Israelis and Palestinians. And a Native American Indian
in Los Angeles who ranted on about a Jewish plot to deprive
his people of their land. A bespectacled man with long white
hair in a ponytail shut him up before declaring that the Israeli-Palestinian
war was identical to the American-Mexican war that deprived
his own people of... well, of Los Angeles. I began to calculate
the distance between LA and Jenin. A galaxy perhaps.
And there were the little tell-tale stories
that showed just how biased and gutless the American press has
become in the face of America's Israeli lobby groups. "I
wrote a report for a major paper about the Palestinian exodus
of 1948," a Jewish woman told me as we drove through the
smog of downtown LA. "And of course, I mentioned the massacre
of Palestinians at Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang and other
Jewish groups - the massacre that prompted 750,000 Arabs to
flee their homes. Then I look for my story in the paper and
what do I find? The word 'alleged' has been inserted before
the word 'massacre'. I called the paper's ombudsman and told
him the massacre at Deir Yassin was a historical fact. Can
you guess his reply? He said that the editor had written the
word 'alleged' before 'massacre' because that way he thought
he'd avoid lots of critical letters."
By chance, this was the theme of my talks
and lectures: the cowardly, idle, spineless way in which American
journalists are lobotomising their stories from the Middle East,
how the "occupied territories" have become "disputed
territories" in their reports, how Jewish "settlements"
have been transformed into Jewish "neighbourhoods",
how Arab militants are "terrorists" but Israeli militants
only "fanatics" or "extremists", how Ariel
Sharon - the man held "personally responsible" by
Israel's own commissioner's inquiry for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila
massacre of 1,700 Palestinians - could be described in a report
in The New York Times as having the instincts of "a warrior".
How the execution of surviving Palestinian fighters was so often
called "mopping up". How civilians killed by Israeli
soldiers were always "caught in the crossfire". I
demanded to know of my audiences - and I expected the usual
American indignation when I did - how US citizens could accept
the infantile "dead or alive", "with us or against
us", axis-of-evil policies of their President.
And for the first time in more than a
decade of lecturing in the United States, I was shocked. Not
by the passivity of Americans - the all-accepting, patriotic
notion that the President knows best - nor by the dangerous
self-absorption of the United States since 11 September and
the constant, all-consuming fear of criticising Israel. What
shocked me was the extraordinary new American refusal to go
along with the official line, the growing, angry awareness among
Americans that they were being lied to and deceived. At some
of my talks, 60 per cent of the audiences were over 40. In
some cases, perhaps 80 per cent were Americans with no ethnic
or religious roots in the Middle East - "American Americans",
as I cruelly referred to them on one occasion, "white Americans",
as a Palestinian student called them more truculently. For the
first time, it wasn't my lectures they objected to, but the
lectures they received from their President and the lectures
they read in their press about Israel's "war on terror"
and the need always, uncritically, to support everything that
America's little Middle Eastern ally says and does.
There was, for example, the crinkly-faced,
ex-naval officer who approached me after a talk at a United
Methodist church in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. "Sir,
I was an officer on the aircraft carrier John F Kennedy during
the 1973 Middle East war," he began. (I checked him out
later and he was, as my host remarked, "for real".)
"We were stationed off Gibraltar and our job was to refuel
the fighter jets we were sending to Israel after their air force
was shot to bits by the Arabs. Our planes would land with their
USAF and Marine markings partly stripped off and the Star of
David already painted on the side. Does anyone know why we gave
all those planes to the Israelis just like that? When I see
on television our planes and our tanks used to attack Palestinians,
I can understand why people hate Americans."
In the United States, I'm used to lecturing
in half-empty lecture halls. Three years ago, I managed to fill
a Washington auditorium seating 600 with just 32 Americans.
But in Chicago and Iowa and Los Angeles this month, they came
in their hundreds - almost 900 at one venue at the University
of Southern California - and they sat in the aisles and corridors
and outside the doors. It wasn't because Lord Fisk was in town.
Maybe the title of my talk - "September 11: ask who did
it, but for heaven's sake don't ask why" - was provocative.
But for the most part they came, as the question-and-answer
sessions quickly revealed, because they were tired of being
suckered by the television news networks and the right-wing
punditocracy.
Never before have I been asked by Americans:
"How can we make our press report the Middle East fairly?"
or - much more disturbingly - "How can we make our government
reflect our views?" The questions are a trap, of course.
Brits have been shoving advice at the United States ever since
we lost the War of Independence, and I wasn't going to join
their number. But the fact that these questions could be asked
- usually by middle-aged Americans with no family origins in
the Middle East - suggested a profound change in a hitherto
docile population.
Towards the end of each talk, I apologised
for the remarks I was about to make. I told audiences that the
world did not change on 11 September, that the Lebanese and
Palestinians had lost 17,500 dead during Israel's 1982 invasion
- more than five times the death toll of the international crimes
against humanity of 11 September - but the world did not change
20 yearsago. There were no candles lit then, no memorial services.
And each time I said this, there was a nodding of heads - grey-haired
and balding as well as young - across the room. The smallest
irreverent joke about President Bush was often met with hoots
of laughter. I asked one of my hosts why this happened, why
the audience accepted this from a Briton. "Because we don't
think Bush won the election," she replied.
Of course, it's easy to be fooled. The
first local radio shows illustrated all too well how the Middle
East discourse is handled in America. When Gayane Torosyan opened
WSUI/KSUI for questions in Iowa City, a caller named "Michael"
- a leader of the local Jewish community, I later learnt, though
he did not say this on air - insisted that after the Camp David
talks in 2000, Yasser Arafat had turned to "terrorism"
despite being offered a Palestinian state with a capital in
Jerusalem and 96 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza. Slowly
and deliberately, I had to deconstruct this nonsense. Jerusalem
was to have remained the "eternal and unified capital of
Israel", according to Camp David. Arafat would only have
got what Madeleine Albright called "a sort of sovereignty"
over the Haram al-Sharif mosque area and some Arab streets,
while the Palestinian parliament would have been below the city's
eastern walls at Abu Dis. With the vastly extended and illegal
Jerusalem municipality boundaries deep into the West Bank, Jewish
settlements like Maale Adumim were not up for negotiation; nor
were several other settlements. Nor was the 10-mile Israeli
military buffer zone around the West Bank, nor the settlers'
roads, which would razor through the Palestinian "state".
Arafat was offered about 46 per cent of the 22 per cent of
Palestine that was left. I could imagine the audience of WSUI/KSUI
falling slowly from their seats in boredom.
Yet back at my folksy, wooden-walled
hotel, the proprietor and his wife - P Force volunteers in the
Kennedy era - had listened to every word. "We know what
is going on," he said. "I was a naval officer in the
Gulf back in the Sixties and we only had few ships there then.
In those days, the Shah of Iran was our policeman. Now we've
got all those ships in there and our soldiers in the Arab countries
and we seem to dominate the place." Osama bin Laden, I
said to myself, couldn't put it better.
How odd, I reflected, that American newspapers
can scarcely say even this. The Daily Iowan - there are no fewer
than four dailies in Iowa City, press freedom being represented
by the number of newspapers rather than their depth of coverage
- had none of my hotel landlord's forthrightness. "The
situation in the Middle East is one that many Americans do not
adequately understand," it miserably lamented, "nor
can they be reasonably articulate about it." This rubbish
- that Americans were too dumb to comprehend the Middle East
bloodbath and should therefore keep their mouths shut - was
a pervasive theme in editorials. Even more instructive were
the reports of my own lectures.
The headline, "Fisk: Who really
are the terrorists?" in the Daily Iowan last week at least
caught the gist of my message, and included my own examples
of American press bias in the Middle East, although it failed
on the facts, wrongly reporting that it was the United Nations
(rather than the far more persuasive Israeli Kahan Commission)
which concluded that Sharon was "personally responsible"
for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. The Des Moines Register's
account of one of my talks was intriguing. It concentrated
on my interviews with Osama bin Laden - which I had indeed mentioned
in my lecture - and then referred to my account of how an Afghan
crowd beat me up last December. I had told the American audience
that the Afghans were outraged by US bombing raids that had
just killed their relatives around Kandahar and how important
it had been to include this fact in my own report of the fray
- to give context and reason to the Afghan attack on me. The
Register used my words to describe the attack but then itself
made no mention of the reasons. Long live, I thought, the Iowa
City Press-Citizen, whose own headline - "Middle East reporter
slams media" - got the point.
It's not that Iowans have any excuse
to be unaware of the Middle East. In the small town of Davenport,
Israelis have been trained in the systems of the Apache AH-64
attack helicopters used to assassinate Palestinians on Israel's
wanted list. According to one local journalist, several Iowa
companies, including the regional office of Rockwell, have
been involved in military contracts worth millions of dollars
with Israel. CemenTech of Indianola supplies equipment to the
Israeli air force. The day I arrived in Iowa City, John Ashcroft,
the US Attorney General, was telling Iowans that a hundred foreign
nationals "from countries known as home to terrorists"
had been interrogated in the state. Another hundred were likely
to be "interviewed" soon. There was no editorial comment
on this.
So Iowa University classes were absorbing.
One young woman began by announcing that she knew the American
media were biased. When I asked why, she said that "it
has to do with America's support for Israel..." and then,
red-faced, she dried up. Not so the student in Rex Honey's global
studies class. After I had outlined the military trap into which
the Americans had been lured in Afghanistan - the supposed
"victory" followed by further engagements with al-Qa'ida
and then, inevitably, daily battles with Afghan warlords and
sniping attacks on Western troops - he put his hand up. "So
how do we beat them?" he asked. There was a gentle ripple
of laughter through the room. "Why do you want to 'beat'
the Afghans," I asked? "Why not help them build a
new land?" The student came up to me afterwards, hand outstretched.
"I want to thank you, sir, for all you told us," he
said. I had a suspicion he was a military man. Are you planning
to join the army, I asked? "No, sir," he replied.
"I'm going to join the Marines."
I advised him to stay clear of Afghanistan.
In its own way, the American national press was doing the same.
Two days later, the Los Angeles Times, in a remarkable dispatch
from its correspondent David Zucchino, reported on the bitterness
and anger among Afghans whose families had been killed in United
States B-52 bomber raids. The recent American battle in Gardez,
the report said, had left "bitterness in its wake".
If only the same bluntness was applied
to the Palestinian-Israeli war. Alas, no. On the freeway past
Long Beach on Friday, I opened the LA Times to be told that
Israel "mops up [sic] in the West Bank", while the
syndicated columnist Mona Charen was telling readers in other
papers that "98 per cent of Palestinians have not been
living under occupation since Israel pulled out under the Oslo
accords" and that the Israeli Prime Minister at the time,
Ehud Barak, had offered Arafat "97 per cent of the West
Bank and Gaza". This was 1 per cent higher even than the
statistic from "Michael" on WSUI/KSUI radio. Arafat
- "this murderer with the deaths of thousands of Jews and
Arabs on his hands" - was to blame. The issue between Israel
and her neighbours, Charen contended, "is not occupation,
it is not settlements and it certainly is not Israeli brutality
and aggression. It is the Arabs' inability to live peacefully
with others".
Maybe California is organically different
from the rest of the United States, but its journalists as well
as its students seemed a tad smarter than the Midwest of America.
The Orange County Register, a traditionally conservative newspaper
in an area that is now 50 per cent Latino, has been trying to
tell the truth about the Middle East and was carrying a tough
feature by Holger Jensen, which warned that if President Bush
didn't rein in Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister "will
succeed where Osama bin Laden failed: forcing us into a war
of civilisations against 1.2 billion Muslims". When I lunched
with senior editorial staff, they invited three members of the
Orange County Muslim community to join them.
Cocktails with friends of the Methodist
church revealed a sane grasp of the Middle East - one of them
was deeply disturbed by a recent remark by Israel's Internal
Security Minister, Uzi Landau, who had said that "we're
not facing human beings, but rather beasts". A black guest
commended the UN secretary general Kofi Annan's criticism of
Israel. Yet when I flipped on Fox News, there was Benjamin Netanyahu
out-Sharoning Sharon, declaring that Palestinian suicide bombers
would soon be prowling America's streets, meeting Congressmen
to enlist their help in Israel's "war on terror",
even while the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was in Israel.
"Why Israel's Mission Must Continue,"
the New York Times's comment page shouted on Friday. A long
and tedious article on Israel's crusade against "terror"
by an Israeli army colonel, Nitsan Alon, included several of
my favourite cop-out phrases, including the stock reference
to "a large number of civilians" who were - yes -
"caught in the crossfire".
By the time I was addressing the more
bohemian denizens of an art club in Los Angeles, the newspapers
I was attacking were beginning to turn up. Mark Kellner arrived
to report for The Washington Times. "He's going to stitch
up everything you say," a friend remarked. "The Washington
Times is to the right of the Republican Party." We shall
see.
But if my audiences had been largely
made up of Americans without any Middle East roots, the same
could not be said of Sunday's cocktails at the home of Stanley
Sheinbaum, the philanthropist, art collector and libertarian
- we shall forget the period in which he helped to run the Los
Angeles Police Department - where my little speech was to set
off some verbal hand-grenades. Sheinbaum it was who met Syria's
President Hafez el-Assad at President Jimmy Carter's request,
arranging Assad's extraordinary summit with Carter in Geneva.
"Tell me something good about yourself," he said to
me. Have you heard nothing good from anyone else, I enquired?
"Nope," he said.
But I liked Sheinbaum, a crusty, humorous
man in his eighties who encourages every liberal Jewish American
to have his say about the Middle East. As the lunchtime fog
embraced the rose gardens and villas and swimming pools and
hills of Brentwood, up stepped Rabbi Haim dov Beliak to explain
how he intends to close down the bingo and gambling operations
of one of America's greatest Jewish settlement builders. "Call
me when you get back to Beirut - by all means write about it."
As we scoffed Stanley Sheinbaum's strawberries and sipped his
fine Californian red wine, another rabbi approached. "You're
gonna have some hostile people in your audience," he said.
"Just let 'em hear the truth."
So I did. I talked about the cowardice
of Secretary Powell, who dawdled his way around the Mediterranean
to give Sharon time to finish destroying the Jenin refugee camp.
I talked about the rotting bodies of Jenin and the growing evidence
that back in 1982 Sharon's troops handed the survivors of the
Sabra and Chatila massacre back to their Phalangist tormentors
to be killed. I said that Arafat was never offered 96 per cent
of the West Bank at Camp David. I advised the 100 or so people
in the room to read the Israeli journalist Amira Haas' courageous
reports in Haaretz. I talked about the squalor of the Palestinian
camp. I talked of suicide bombings as "evil" but suggested
that Israel would never have security until it abided by UN
Security Council Resolution 252; that Israel would never have
peace until it abandoned all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan and
East Jerusalem.
"I find it very difficult to ask
you a question, because what you said made me so angry,"
a woman began afterwards. Why did I not realise that the Palestinians
wanted to destroy all of Israel, that the right-of-return would
destroy the state? For an hour I explained the reality I saw
in the Middle East; an all-powerful Israel fighting an old-time
colonial war. I talked about the 1954-62 Algerian war, its brutality
and cruelty, the French army's torture and killings, the Algerians'
slaughter of civilians, the frightening parallels with the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. I talked about the Palestinians who wanted, at the
least, an admission of the injustice their people had suffered
in 1948, adding that there were Palestinians aplenty who realised
that financial compensation would have to suffice for most of
those refugees whose homes were in what is now Israel. I talked
about Sharon and his bloody record in Lebanon. And about the
pressures of the Israeli lobby in America, the fear of being
labelled an anti-Semite, and the feeble reporting of the Middle
East.
A rabbi was the first to tell me afterwards
that the Palestinians were victims, that they should be given
a real state. An old lady asked me for the name of the best
book on the Algerian war. I gave it to her; Alastair Horne's
A Savage War of Peace . A card was pushed into my hand. "Insightful
talk!" the owner had written at the bottom and - hate though
I do the word "insightful" - I couldn't help noticing
that the name on the card was Yigal Arens, the son of one of
Israel's most ruthless right-wing ministers, who had once informed
me - in Beirut, back in 1982 - that Israel would "fight
forever" against Palestinian terror.
On the freeway to LAX afterwards, the
terminals and control tower looming through the Californian
haze, I looked over Saturday's LA Times. A report on page 12
revealed that the BBC's award-winning film on Sharon's involvement
in the Sabra and Chatila massacres had been dropped from a Canadian
film festival after protests from Jewish groups. The organisers
had explained that The Accused "could invite unwanted attention
from interest groups" - whatever that means. But a paragraph
at the end of the report caught my attention. "Sharon,
who was the Israeli defence minister at the time, allegedly
facilitated the assault on the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps..."
There it was again. Allegedly? How many angry letters was that
little lie supposed to avoid? Allegedly indeed.
But on reflection, I didn't think the
Americans I met would be fooled by this. I didn't think my hotel
proprietor would accept "allegedly". Nor the old naval
officer from the John F Kennedy. Nor the listeners to KSUI.
Nor even Stanley Sheinbaum. Yes, Osama bin Laden told me he
thought Americans didn't understand the Middle East. Maybe he
was right then. But not any more.
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