Journalists
are Under Fire for Telling the Truth
By Robert Fisk
The Independent, 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 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 favor 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 favorite– "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.
