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CounterPunch
December
18, 2002
Journalists Are Under Attack
for Telling the Truth
by ROBERT FISK
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 Israeli killings in Jenin
earlier this year--which included a goodly few war crimes (the
crushing to death of a man in a wheelchair, for example)--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"--about as wrongheaded
a remark as you can get--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--"Anthrax",
"Cowardice", "Evil", "Freedom",
Fundamentalism", "Justice", "Terrorism",
Vital Interests" and--my favourite--"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.
Yesterday's
Features
M. Shahid Alam
A Day that
Changed America
Mike Leon
Lou Dobbs
and Henry Kissinger: True Love At Last
Jennifer Harbury
My Family
is Under Attack:
Retaliation in Guatemala
Joe Quandt
The Lion
on His Den:
an Interview with Iraqi Dissident Ghazwan Al-Mukhti
Rep. Ron Paul
What Does Regime Change Really Mean?
Robert Fisk
A Middle East Peace Process without the Peace
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December 10,
2002
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