Story By Rima Abdelkader, NEW YORK, (Arabisto.com)

The New York Times, often called the national newspaper of record and viewed as a highly reputable and dependable source for news internationally, has become immersed in a maelstrom of controversy over its exclusion of the Fourth Geneva Convention in its reportage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Howard Friel, co-author of “The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy,” who precipitated this discussion, questioned whether Israel’s historical and continuing settlement of East Jerusalem and the West Bank should not be referred to within The New York Times’ reportage as a major violation of international law, rather than consistently ignored, as is generally the case.  He argued this point during a debate with The Times Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner, sponsored by the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association last week, on The Times’ coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its influence on other news media and on public discourse.

Controversy, after all, is not foreign to The Times.  Ethan Bronner, in response, said, “We fail a lot.  The Times is not very flawless.”  It had experienced the Jayson Blair affair and even charges of liberal bias by one of its own public editors for its inadequate coverage of the current administration leading up to the Iraqi war.  BUT, now, there is heavy criticism of its reportage of the I-P conflict, leaving readers asking: Is the New York Times providing us with a completely unfiltered view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

In response to Friel, Ethan Bronner said, “We are a business and not a not for profit organization”.  “We have a NY thingy for sports teams,” he said, but explained that the New York Times “aims for impartiality” with regard to U.S. foreign policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The exclusion of the Fourth Geneva Convention in The Times’ coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the main focus of the debate.

In Friel’s PowerPoint presentation, he referenced Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”  Friel said that there has been no U.N. Charter in any editorial of the New York Times and believed, “the New York Times ignores the Fourth Geneva Convention”.

Friel also focused on The Times’ language.  What is the difference between a Palestinian terrorist versus a Palestinian militant, an Israeli settlement versus an Israeli colony, a security barrier versus an apartheid wall, disputed territories versus occupied territories?  A national newspaper’s decision to choose one over the other in this debate will certainly shape public discourse, Friel said.

In one slide, Friel stated that the New York Times mentions “Israel’s Right to Exist” in 136 news articles, 13 editorials, 37 letters to the editor, and 10 op-eds.  Whereas, the New York Times, he said, only mentioned “Palestinian Self-Determination” in 10 articles where the ratio was 13 to 1 favoring Israel, in 10 letters to the editor where there was a 3.7 to 1 ratio favoring Israel, and in 8 op-eds.

With respect to violence, Friel said that “most Israeli violence goes unreported” and that “the New York Times’ coverage of violence is not impartial”.  According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, he said, from September 29, 2000 to November 30, 2006 during the time of the Second Palestinian Intifada, 4,032 Palestinians had been killed along with 1,017 Israelis, and 808 Palestinian children have been killed along with 119 Israeli children.  In the First Intifada, from December 1987 to September 2000, according to the same source, he said, 1,491 Palestinians along with 186 Israelis had been killed including Palestinian and Israeli children.  During that time, he said, according to B’Tselem, 304 Palestinian children and 4 Israeli children had been killed.  Friel then persisted to ask, “Who is committing the preponderance of violence?”  Friel answered, that “little to no Palestinian violence goes unreported,” whereas, “most Israeli violence goes unreported”.

“You’re not alone in your frustration,” Bronner responded.  Many American Jews, he said, also express their frustration to the New York Times for the same reportage.  Bronner corrected Friel on The Times’ description of a Palestinian militant.  The Times, he said, does not refer to them as a “terrorist”.

Still, Friel maintained that “The New York Times’ Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not impartial”.  In principle, he said, the New York Times gives the news impartially, but, in action, it does not.  They are impartial when it comes to covering City Hall, Albany and the Elections, Friel said, but have “lower levels of impartiality” to U.S. Foreign policy versus the United Nations Charter and Israeli policies versus Palestinian rights.  

Ethan Bronner, emphatically replied, “We are not an international legal forum” and that “The 4^th Geneva Convention is not important.”  He explained, “It is boring to discuss the International Law context.”  He held that the “UNGA has voted on a lot of nonsense” and that “international law is too aspirational.”

Walid El-Gabry, president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association and former Financial Times journalist responded to Bronner, “We see it (the Fourth Geneva Convention) as context”.

“Journalism is not an exact science, it is about storytelling,” Bronner responded to the audience.  “We are a flawed and human enterprise,” he rationalized.

One audience member told Bronner, “We read the New York Times for information, not for entertainment” to which Bronner responded, “That is an element of journalism”.

In reaction to Friel and some audience members, Bronner said that the New York Times is adapting to the times.  They are pushing for more Arab/Muslim workers and even have an Arabic class for the employees.  Audience members, in response, said, change has to happen with the coverage and the inclusion of the Fourth Geneva Convention would be a start.

 

By Rebecca Harrison

BRITISH graffiti artist Banksy is trying to bring cheer and boost tourism in Bethlehem this Christmas with a series of subversive murals in the town revered as Jesus’s birthplace.

The elusive street artist has painted six provocative new images — including a dove of peace strapped with a bulletproof vest and a young girl with pigtails frisking an Israeli soldier — on buildings around the West Bank town. 

Banksy, who has achieved cult status for his edgy satirical images, has also converted a fast food shop opposite Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity into an art gallery showing work by artists from the Palestinian territories and abroad.

The artist’s images have fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars in auctions and his customers include Hollywood siren Angelina Jolie. But Banksy keeps his real identity secret and almost never gives interviews. Other artists exhibiting in Bethlehem said they hoped the show would draw attention to life in the occupied West Bank and help forge links between local and international artists.

“It’s important for people to come to Bethlehem and actually see what’s happening rather than just doing the usual art collector thing and making a deal over the phone,” British artist Peter Kennard told Reuters.

Bethlehem residents say military checkpoints and Israel’s West Bank barrier, which cuts into Palestinian land, is stifling tourism and damaging Bethlehem’s economy.

Banksy made headlines in 2005 by painting a series of playful images on the Palestinian side of the barrier, which Israel says it built to keep out suicide bombers.

The new images are more eye-catching. Pilgrims arriving in Bethlehem for Christmas will see a huge mural of a dove on the side of a house riddled with bullet holes. The dove faces an Israeli military watchtower and is wearing a bullet-proof vest.

Around the corner, one of Banksy’s trademark stencilled rats is pictured poised with a catapult aimed at another watchtower while at the exhibition, he is showing a sculpture of a Christmas cherub with a rock piercing its stomach and blood frothing from the wound.

All pieces at the exhibition will be sold to the highest bidder and the proceeds donated to local charities.

The irony behind one mural of an Israeli soldier asking a donkey for his identity papers was lost on some locals, who found it offensive. But Salem Salman, who runs a souvenir shop opposite thought it was funny, and made a neat political point.

“I like it,” said Salman, who sells Virgin Mary miniatures to pilgrims on daytrips from Jerusalem. “It describes the situation here, the occupation. It shows how the Israeli soldiers treat us like animals.”

Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban

Amidst grand talk about making peace without even mentioning the Israeli occupation of Arab territories, which is the core reason for all kinds of suffering in the Middle East, Israel is devoting time, money and energy to make the world “doubt” the film aired by the television channel France 2, which recorded the determination of Israelis to deprive the Palestinian child, Muhammad al-Durrah of his right to live.

This film shocked the entire world because, for the first time ever, the world saw Israel as it is, an ugly occupying force that kills, transfers and assassinates Palestinians in order to steal their land and water and build its settlements after erasing Palestinian towns and villages.

The campaign to absolve Israel of the killing of Muhammad al-Durrah is an integral part of a concerted effort to present the killing, violence and bloodshed that is taking place in the region as a chaotic state with unknown sources and causes only terrorism, which is used to implicate Arabs and Muslims without any mention of daily Israeli terrorist acts against indigenous, innocent Palestinians.

In all the current rhetoric and conference statements, a determination is expressed to resolve all “outstanding issues”. As if the occupation of a country and the perpetration of massacres against its people for the last sixty years is merely an “outstanding issue” in order not to figure out that the Israeli occupation of Arab territories is the major reason for wars, conflict, instability and lack of security in the Middle East.

But why is there this insistence on sowing the seeds of doubt about the cruel and criminal act of cornering a child for 45 minutes until he was killed in cold blood? It is because this single crime shows the reality of Israel and the crimes it has been perpetrating against the Arabs from the massacres in Deer Yassin and Kfar Qasem to thousands of assassinations of Palestinian men, women and children.

The lesson learnt by Israel from killing Muhammad al-Durrah is to make sure that cameras do not reach the scene of the crime. The Israelis killed the British journalist James Miller because he was making a docu-film about Israeli and Palestinian children. It also killed Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall in order to deter international peace activists from reaching the scenes of Israeli crimes perpetrated against Palestinians.

In this context so many camera men and journalists were targets of Israeli bullets and missiles, or they were shunned completely as Israel did when it carried out massacres in the Palestinian town of Jenin. This in itself shows that the camera today is an important weapon in the ongoing war because great efforts are exerted to bury the facts and manufacture false concepts and images about reality.

During the week that the Annapolis meeting was convened, Israel killed over 20 young Palestinian men whose names did not reach the news headlines. As if a crime that is not documented and aired is a crime that did not take place. This is the logic of today and this is why the stories of Palestine’s children should be documented and should reach all corners of the globe.

The story of each child killed by Israel should be related and shown exactly in the same way as the story of Muhammad al-Durrah. The only difference between Muhammad al-Durrah and the 951 Palestinian children killed by Israel is that the camera of France 2 television did, by chance, document the terrible act of Muhammad al-Durrah’s killing whereas the others are killed away from the camera lenses.

There is no room to mention a few of the Palestinian children killed by Israel from Zena Miri (8-years-old), Mahmoud al-Kifafi (killed September 20, 2007), Yarah Soumari (killed October 27, 2007) to Abeer al Aramin (10-years-old) who was killed on her school’s doorstep in the village of Ainatha, north of Jerusalem. What would young Huda Ghalia say of all this as her entire family was wiped out on Gaza beach as they enjoyed a day out? On a Saturday in the middle of January 2005, an Aljazeera camera documented Israel’s killing of three Palestinian children in cold-blood near Salah al-Din gate.

The irony is that the Israelis always complain about anyone who doubts their past suffering and they lobbied and issued laws in France, the US and other countries to punish anyone who even asks about the numbers of their victims. Yet they are leading major campaigns to raise doubts about crimes that they perpetrated and that are documented on camera.

The best answer the Arabs should give to such campaigns is to publish all the documentations of Israeli crimes against Palestinian people since 1947. In such a case Israel will not only have to apologize to the Palestinians and the world but also to compensate the Palestinians for what was committed against them, instead of inviting the world to doubt real, unquestionable and documented events.

*Published in London-based ASHARQ ALAWSAT on December 4, 2007. Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban is Minister of Expatriates in Syria, and writer and professor at Damascus University since 1985.

CAIRO (Reuters) – Professors at the American University in Cairo call them “September 11 kids.” In the heart of Egypt’s capital the university with its arabesque buildings and gardens of palm trees is a new hot spot for Americans studying abroad.

Drawn by curiosity about the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center in 2001, hundreds of American students are venturing to the Middle East, eager to learn Arabic, study Islam and cut through media stereotypes as they prepare for careers in intelligence or diplomacy.

The number of American students at the University, known as AUC, has about tripled since 2002 and reached a record of more than 400 this year.

“They come from all persuasions and all ages,” said Kim Jackson, AUC associate vice president for international student affairs. “We have students from the U.S. Naval and Air Force academies and we have a couple of guys in the Marines.”

AUC is one of the region’s most popular destinations but other language institutes in the most populous Arab country, whose government is friendly to the United States, are also benefiting from an influx of students.

At Cairo’s Fajr Center for the Arabic Language, the intake doubled to about 400 after the September 11 attacks and had another boost from the Iraq war.

“They hear about someone in Iraq or Palestine putting a bomb on themselves and they want to know what’s going on,” said Fajr’s president, Waleed el-Gohary. “People want to discover for themselves.”

Natasha George, a 38-year old Texan, decided to study at AUC in Cairo after her brother Michael deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Air Force.

“I wanted to understand how we got into a position where we were invading a country with no real reason,” she said. “I wanted to get a first-hand look and I didn’t trust the information that the U.S. media was reporting.”

“NOT SCARY”

Many students say they came to the Middle East to try to understand the widespread anger in the region over U.S. policies. Most say the Arab world does not resemble the violent place they say the U.S. media often portrays.

“It’s funny how it’s different. It’s just not a scary place at all,” said University of Illinois student Anne Shivers, whose worried older brother offered her $400 not to come to Cairo.

“I’ve explained it to my parents but they still don’t believe me,” she added.

Kenneth Weakley, a 22-year-old student at Baylor University in Texas, said he was inspired to come to AUC to study Arabic after taking classes from a professor who had served with U.S. Air Force intelligence in the region.

“The news and the headlines all have to do with the Middle East and I wanted to get on the bandwagon,” he told Reuters at a cafe near traffic-clogged Midan el-Tahrir, or Liberation Square, a stone’s throw from the River Nile.

“I wanted to be introduced to Islam and know the people on a for-real basis, not based on the headlines.”

Interest in Arabic has surged in the United States since the September 11 attacks, when nearly 3,000 people died after young Muslim men from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries flew hijacked planes into buildings in New York and Washington.

U.S. President George W. Bush has proposed spending $114 million to expand teaching of languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and Farsi.

After unrest in Lebanon dimmed the appeal of the American University of Beirut, Arabic programs in Cairo are meeting demand from the United States, Canada, and European countries.

GOOD PEOPLE

The intake in AUC’s year-abroad program, the vast majority of them Americans, jumped from 134 in 2002 to 404 in 2007, the AUC’s Jackson said.

Most students sign up for classes on Arabic language, Middle East politics and Islamic history.

“9/11 is a big push factor,” said Jackson, an American. “The (United States) as a whole has learned that we need to get serious about learning about other cultures and languages in general.”

Niambi Young, a graduate student at Tufts University in Boston, already has a job lined up with the U.S. Department of State. A Fulbright scholar, she is studying Arabic at AUC and hip-hop in the Arab world.

“I’ve explained it to my parents but they still don’t believe me,” she added.

Kenneth Weakley, a 22-year-old student at Baylor University in Texas, said he was inspired to come to AUC to study Arabic after taking classes from a professor who had served with U.S. Air Force intelligence in the region.

“The news and the headlines all have to do with the Middle East and I wanted to get on the bandwagon,” he told Reuters at a cafe near traffic-clogged Midan el-Tahrir, or Liberation Square, a stone’s throw from the River Nile.

“I wanted to be introduced to Islam and know the people on a for-real basis, not based on the headlines.”

Interest in Arabic has surged in the United States since the September 11 attacks, when nearly 3,000 people died after young Muslim men from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries flew hijacked planes into buildings in New York and Washington.

U.S. President George W. Bush has proposed spending $114 million to expand teaching of languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and Farsi.

After unrest in Lebanon dimmed the appeal of the American University of Beirut, Arabic programs in Cairo are meeting demand from the United States, Canada, and European countries.

GOOD PEOPLE

The intake in AUC’s year-abroad program, the vast majority of them Americans, jumped from 134 in 2002 to 404 in 2007, the AUC’s Jackson said.

Most students sign up for classes on Arabic language, Middle East politics and Islamic history.

“9/11 is a big push factor,” said Jackson, an American. “The (United States) as a whole has learned that we need to get serious about learning about other cultures and languages in general.”

Niambi Young, a graduate student at Tufts University in Boston, already has a job lined up with the U.S. Department of State. A Fulbright scholar, she is studying Arabic at AUC and hip-hop in the Arab world.

Many students also cite a gap in knowledge of the Arab world among U.S. government employees. A U.S. government study in 2006 found that about a third of U.S. public diplomacy positions in countries with large Muslim populations are filled by officers without sufficient language abilities.

“We’re not doing the job in public diplomacy that we should be,” said Michael Ruthenberg-Marshall, a junior majoring in international politics at Georgetown University and studying Arabic at AUC.

Weakley, the Baylor student originally from Kentucky, said he would try to reverse some stereotypes about the Arab world when he returns to Texas.

“People think everyone here is a terrorist or they hate you because you are Christian,” he said. “That’s not the case. When I get back I am going to tell my friends that these are good people.”

(Editing by Sara Ledwith)

Copyright 2007 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved.

THE other day I was watching this movie, The Sum of All Fears. The movie is based on a Tom Clancy novel by the same name. Clancy has long been a darling of Hollywood dream merchants. And if you’ve read any of his breathlessly racy thrillers, you would know why. Here’s a master storyteller who brings to life our worst fears and insecurities. And they appear frighteningly close to reality. After all, that is what all good fiction is supposed to do: reflect life as it is or could be. This is what The Sum of All Fears seems to do too. In the Ben Afleck and Morgan Freeman-starrer, the world comes as close as within 30 seconds to a nuclear holocaust. The action is set in post-Soviet Union world when there’s a weak leader in Kremlin. Some Israeli rogue scientists and closet Nazis from East Germany (what a combination!) use a nuclear weapon that Israel couldn’t use against the Arabs in 1973 war to wreak nuclear havoc on an unsuspecting world. As a footnote, we are told it was Israel’s friends in high places in the US who ‘stole’ the nuke to gift it to the Jewish state after 1967 War with Arabs. The nuke imported into the US and planted in Baltimore goes off when the US president is watching a Super Bowl match with tens of thousands of other Americans.  

The president survives the attack. However, it brings the US and Russia to the brink and the world to a nuclear extinction as Washington accuses Moscow of masterminding the plot. You’ll have to watch the movie to see how our hero, Dr Jack Ryan, saves the day and the world. But there’s another reason why you should watch The Sum of All Fears: To see how the Israeli lobby and Zionists play big powers - in this case America and Russia - against each other, to achieve their own objectives.

This is a classic game the Zionists with their numerous lobby groups like AIPAC have been playing for decades, playing the Christian West and Islamic world against each other, seeking to destroy them both. Using this tactic, they managed to carve the Jewish state in the heart of Muslim world driving its original inhabitants, Palestinians, out. They are playing this game all over again and once again the action is set in the Middle East. They have already manipulated and used George W Bush’s America to destroy Iraq. And they are in the process of doing the same to Iran, using the reigning superpower with all its might and resources.

They forced the US to hit Saddam Hussein’s Iraq even though it had been reduced to a failed state. Its infrastructure had been devastated and its once powerful army was little more than a ceremonial guard with no firepower after the long war with Iran and the first Gulf war with the US. The rest was done by the years of the UN sanctions that drove the country to the brink besides killing hundreds of thousands of innocent children. Yet this helpless country with its desperate people and utterly weakened regime was painted by the Zionist and neocon fanatics as a clear and present danger to the West and the rest of the world.

Our friend Tony Blair – by the way, where is Bush’s poodle? One hasn’t seen much of him since he was appointed the Middle East peacemaker with a handsome pay packet and perks to go with it! – assured us the toothless tiger that Saddam could launch an attack against Britain within 40 minutes. How Israel and its friends did not rest until the Western coalition led by a too willing America bombed Iraq back into the Stone Age is part of history now.

And now the US is stuck in the Mesopotamian quagmire like no other imperial power has ever been in recorded history. The US has already lost more than 4,000 of its soldiers in Iraq with 851 troops dying this year alone. These casualties are nothing compared to what has happened to the Iraqis themselves. According to independent estimates, Iraq might have lost at least one million of its people to this war. But then America’s invaluable gifts like democracy and freedom don’t come cheap. And as Bush would argue, this price is nothing for what the Iraqis have been blessed with in return.

It may be years before the Iraqis and the world are able to determine the true extent of Iraq’s decimation. The country that was once the most developed and advanced in the Arab world is today worse than one of those anarchist banana republics in Africa. And it has lost trillions of dollars in oil revenue and other financial resources over the past four years. But the losses that the US itself has sustained in Iraq are not negligible. America has already poured $466,384,379,030 into the bottomless pit that Iraq has been.

More importantly, this war has had catastrophic effects on the US economy. The once mighty dollar is lying at the feet of upstarts like Indian Rupee and Philippines’ Peso. And with Emirati dirham and other Gulf currencies pegged to the greenback, we are all feeling the pinch big time. And the oil is poised to cross the $100 mark any time now. The global economy, hopelessly dependent as it is on the US economy, is looking at an unfolding crisis that could make the Asian markets crash of 1997 and the Great Depression of 1930s in the US look like a picnic.

Who is responsible for this mess? Don’t look any further than America’s old and trusted friends in the holy land for answers. It was the Israelis, backed by their liaisons in the US establishment and media, who landed America in this mess.

Unfortunately, Bush’s America has drawn no lessons from its utterly humbling and humiliating experience in Iraq. Implausible as it seems and incredibly stuck as they already are in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Americans appear yet again ready and willing for yet another disaster, this time in Iran. And the same forces that egged the US into the blunderland of Mesopotamia are driving the Americans into the minefield that Islamist Iran promises to be. The Israeli involvement in this relentless campaign and grand conspiracy against the Muslim world, cleverly making use of America and its men and women, is not a fantasy of humble hacks like me.

Prof James Petras, an expert on Israeli influence in the US and author of two excellent books on the issue - The Power of Israel in the United States (2006) and Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militarists (2007) - says in a piece in Palestine Chronicle (www.palestinechronicle.com): “Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Zion-Cons (Zionists and Neocons) in the Bush Administration (Ari Fleischer, Paul Wolfowitz, David Frum, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eliott Abrams, Scooter Libby, David Wurmser and others) and key Zionist Congress members like Senator Joseph Lieberman, called for the US to attack Iraq, as part of a series of sequential wars, to include Syria and Iran.”

Petras goes on to argue how Israel and its friends executed the Iraq mission and how they are working on the Iran campaign: “Israel promoted the US attack on Iraq, did all in its power through its US pro-Israel followers to design, propagandise and plan the war. Israeli officials worked on a daily basis with its US agents inside the government, particularly the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans to provide disinformation to justify the military attack.”

Petras is not your typical conspiracy theorist. If you read the history of Iraq war backwards, you’ll know what he’s talking about. In the run up to the Iraq war, the global media was fed lies about Iraq on a daily and hourly basis by the Israeli lobby as well as its fifth columnists in the US. And the self-same trusted friends of America are now gunning for Iran. And once again innocent Americans – and Muslims – will die for a war that is not only totally unjust and unnecessary, it is not even their war.

As Petras argues: “They (Zionists) work hard to send thousands of American soldiers to their death in the Middle East in the interests of Greater Israel. They do not come with black shirts and stiff-arm salutes. The public face (of Zionist lobby) is a clean-shaved, neck-tied, pink-jowled attorney, real estate philanthropist or Ivy League professor. And they tell us to keep quiet or face slander, ostracism in our communities, loss of jobs or worst… (But) there is rising anger and hostility in America against the Zionists, against their arrogant authoritarian communal attacks on our democratic values. Sooner or later there will be a major backlash. The American people will not remember their cries of ‘anti-Semitism’; they will recall their role in sending thousands of American soldiers to their death in the Middle East in the interests of Israel.”

So the Americans and we Muslims have something in common. We are both victims of the Zionist conspiracies. We have known this for quite some time. When will this reality dawn on the Americans?

Aijaz Zaka Syed is a senior editor and columnist of Khaleej Times.

WHAT do an organic farmer from Spain, a union worker activist from Brazil and a human rights scholar living in London have in common? They are all individuals who affect substantive change in their communities and they are also individuals who are overlooked by the corporate media.

The latter has its own lists of ‘experts’ – usually well-groomed males with little involvement in the daily struggles of the unseen and unheard multitudes of the world, yet able to influence their lives (most often detrimentally) from a well-guarded distance.

So how does the business of expertise work? Why are those qualified to address their own affairs so widely ignored by mainstream channels in favour of intellectual middlemen who purport to have some sort of legitimacy over a range of narratives, without any convincing credentials, let alone first-hand experiences?

The phenomenon precedes the advent of network television and satellite news. It is embedded in a Western tradition that was formulated around imperial conquests: for a people to be conquered, they have to be understood in a language that prioritises the interests of the colonialist over the rights of the colonised. The latter’s identity is replaced by verbal and textual reductionism. Thus Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, the Somali leader who strove for twenty years to free his people from British and Italian colonialism was termed ‘Mad Mullah’ by the British. Hassan, of course, was as ‘mad’ as Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and the vigorous leaders of numerous struggles around the world. The list of these individuals is ever expanding, as activists are written off by those in power, those whose ‘sanity’ preaches subscribing to the status quo and the inherent wisdom of the ‘system’.

This system serves not the majority of people living within it, but rather the combined interests of those with the money and those with the weapons: one funds the other’s military adventurism, and the other guarantees unhindered access to cheap supplies, labour and markets. Without Bush’s war in Iraq, Blackwater could not generate over a billion dollars of extra contracts; the relationship is painfully obvious.

Of course, neither Bush nor Blackwater executives are imprudent enough to speak of their real motives, and it would be equally imprudent for us to trust that Blackwater’s ultimate objective is to contribute to the efforts of the US military to ‘protect’ their country and its founding principles. Unfortunately, though the deceptiveness of dominant rhetoric may often be apparent, when repeated numerous times to millions of people worldwide, it eventually gathers force, and even credibility. The process has real and very deadly consequences: Blackwater mercenaries go on killing sprees; endless media airtime is given to its executives and sympathetic ‘experts’ who ‘objectively’ defend their company’s image; a congressional hearing of good cop/bad cop is held whereby one congressman thanks Blackwater for protecting the lives of Americans overseas while another gently reprimands it for not using extra care. Extra care in gunning down innocent people? At this question the story is shelved. By the time Blackwater kills again it is no longer even newsworthy.

Many far from credible ‘experts’ are employed in this way to neutralise and effectually justify violence. Their roles are those of apologists of state and corporate crimes, and as ideologues who tailor information to fit political and economic agendas. They are dangerous because they have the leverage of being presented as impartial observers, even when their very identity should give away their partiality. Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to reinvent himself to US publics as a ‘terrorism expert’, thanks to Fox News. As for the former Israeli Prime Minister’s own crimes while in office, and his close ties to the neoconservatives – the ‘intellectuals’ behind the Iraq war – and his persistent use of anti-peace language – these are unimportant diversions.

According to the corporate media and the selective samples of humanity they endlessly feature and tout for their ‘expertise’, the world is a convenient place that consists of big companies (and no workers, thus no workers’ rights), prison guards (no prisoners, thus no prisoners’ rights), war engineers (no victims, thus no accountability) and celebrities (no ordinary people, thus no widespread and urgent grievances). All those in brackets don’t exist as actual, living and breathing individuals; they only exist as part of skewed narratives, designed carefully by an expert and a think tank. That ‘expert’ need not be there to understand, he needs only to speak in a language that manipulates prejudice. The working women of India fighting globalisation, the lawyers of Pakistan fighting for judicial independence, the teachers of Palestine fighting for survival amid siege and boycott, the millions of uninsured Americans fighting for a doctor’s appointment – these people simply don’t exist as far as corporate media is concerned. Or worse, they exist but don’t matter.

As those justifying violence on the basis of security, justice and democracy work to make the world increasingly unsafe, unjust and undemocratic, there seems an equally increasing need for a new kind of media, one which requires a new kind of ‘expert’.

When I contacted Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Arun Ghandi, Ilan Pappe and many other intellectuals and activists from all over the world, proposing an alternative to ‘expertise’ in the media, I didn’t expect that just a year later the discussion could evolve into JUSTmedia (JustMedia.net). JUSTmedia is the first initiative to be launched by the People Media Project, a global scheme that hopes to offer a different kind of platform for discourse, dialogue and commentary by promoting the voices of people from all walks of life. Supported by intellectuals who refuse to play by the roles of the ‘mainstream’, the idea is to extend a bridge across cultural, language, geographic and political divides to show and extend the possibilities of true democracy and human rights in the media.

They say it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. After much darkness and much cursing, another kind of candle may well be lit, one which only the efforts of ordinary people could keep alight.

Yuval Steinitz, Likud representative and former head of the Knesset’s Security and Foreign Relations Committee, won the admiration of colleagues from both the right and centre when the US Senate adopted his proposal to freeze $200 million of American aid to Egypt because, so Steinitz claims, Egypt does nothing to halt the smuggling of weapons to the Gaza Strip.

Two weeks ago, receiving the congratulations of ministers and Knesset members affiliated with Zionist parties as he strutted through the Knesset canteen he looked like a cat that had just found an inexhaustible reservoir of cream.

Few in Israel doubt that Steinitz is the brains behind the American Senate’s resolution. He sent letters to all 100 Senate members urging them to adopt the proposal, and met large number of them, as well as the heads of various Congress committees, in pursuit of this end. Steinitz claimed in his letter that Egypt turns a blind eye to the smuggling of weapons into Gaza for two reasons — “quiet support of the Palestinian resistance movements, and so as to create a justification for its request to increase the number of Egyptian forces stationed in Sinai, and thus guarantee the re-opening of the Camp David Accords.”

The minister of internal security, Avi Dichter, and the minister of transportation, Shaul Mofaz, lauded Steinitz for what they called his “nationalist effort”. Steinitz is now preparing a new campaign, hoping to convince the American administration to stop providing the Egyptian army with weapons. And as part of the campaign he is revisiting a document published in Haaretz on 4 December in which he claimed “the Egyptian army is increasing its strength and training to prepare for war on Israel”.

Last Sunday’s issue of Haaretz revealed that the Israeli security establishment has embraced Steinitz’s position and rejected an American proposal to increase the number of Egyptian forces stationed in Sinai in order to help stop smuggling operations. The chorus raised against Egypt was finally joined by the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who on Sunday announced that during his meeting with the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier he had pressed the European Union to pressure Egypt to halt smuggling operations. Olmert and Steinitz seem determined to ignore reports in the Israeli press stating that Egypt has uncovered 150 tunnels to date, far more than the number Israel managed when it was present along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

Israeli decision-makers are clearly preoccupied with Egypt’s decision to commence a peaceful nuclear energy programme. Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman launched an intemperate attack following President Hosni Mubarak’s announcement, saying implementation of the plans would “bring a frightful catastrophe to Israel”. In an interview broadcast on Russian language television stations last Friday, Lieberman said Egypt must be prevented from acquiring any weapons or military capability that might change a regional balance of power that is tilted sharply in Israel’s favour.

Lieberman has vowed to include any peaceful nuclear programme in Egypt or other Arab states on the agenda of the next session of the Ministerial Committee for Security Affairs, Israel’s highest strategic decision-making body. His pronouncements provoked journalist Akiva Eldar to comment that Lieberman was scaling the “heights of impertinence”. Eldar wrote that Lieberman had “lost the ability to distinguish between the possible and the impossible,” stressing that Israel was in no position to demand Egypt not to develop a peaceful nuclear programme when Israel is in possession of its own nuclear arsenal.

The Israeli security establishment appears determined to deal with Egypt as if the two countries were at war. Shaftai Shafit, a former head of Mossad, has repeatedly confirmed that Egypt is an “intelligence target”. Although Shafit has yet to comment on Egyptian claims that it has uncovered a spy network working in Israel’s interest, he stressed in an interview given to Israeli radio on 5 October that Israel must always know what is happening in Egypt “so that it is not taken by surprise”.

Israel’s demands on Egypt have reached a ludicrous point, with acting Prime Minister Haim Ramon, like his colleague Lieberman and a large number of ministers and representatives, insisting Cairo resettle Palestinian refugees from around the world in the Sinai.

Israeli antagonism to all things Egyptian is growing. In its 3 October issue, Yediot Aharanot revealed that Israel, together with assorted Jewish organisations, was spearheading a campaign against Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni’s bid to become UNESCO secretary-general on the grounds that he had opposed normalisation between Egyptian and Israeli artists. The paper’s Arab affairs correspondent, Semdar Biri, noted in a satisfied tone that Israel had obtained assurance that Hosni would not be elected to the post. Yet Israeli ministries and institutions refuse to cooperate with Egypt in most fields. Last Monday, Haaretz reported that the Israeli Ministry of Tourism had rejected an offer by British Airways for Egypt and Israel to undertake a joint promotion campaign to encourage British tourists to visit their countries.

Israel also takes the Egyptian president’s refusal to visit Israel as a slight. Eight members of the Knesset’s foreign security committee have so far approached Olmert arguing that he should not only not visit Egypt again but stipulate that any future meeting between Mubarak and any Israeli officials be made conditional on Mubarak officially visiting Israel.

In Israel, every event in Egypt is of interest, no matter how peripheral. One example of this was the extensive coverage in the Israeli media of a session in the People’s Assembly in which Abdel-Aziz Seif El-Nasr, head of the legal department at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, said that under international law the city of Eilat belongs to the Palestinians.

Many Israelis believe that the positions adopted by Cairo reflect not the opinions of Egypt’s political and intellectual elites but the hostility of the Egyptian street towards the US and Israel. Much attention was given in the Israeli media to an opinion poll conducted by Maryland University for the foreign committee of the US House of Representatives covering four Islamic countries, Morocco, Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan. According to the poll, Egyptians were the most hardline in their rejection of any US presence in the Middle East, with 93 per cent of the Egyptians polled expressing sympathy with operations waged against American forces in Iraq. A similar percentage believed the US was actively hostile to Islam.

Amir Oren, a senior Israeli commentator, said of the poll results that, “if this is what the Egyptians feel about America, the feelings they have for Israel are more inimical and extremist”.

Eli Shakid and Tsvi Mazal, both former Israeli ambassadors to Cairo, are currently leading a campaign that seeks to suggest that the extreme views prevalent in the Egyptian street will ultimately place power in the hands of those vehemently opposed to the West. For this reason, they warn, it would be “dangerous to allow any change in the current balance of power between Cairo and Tel Aviv”.

Published in Egypt’s AL-AHRAM WEEKLY, November 15 – 21, 2007 issue.

Part 2:

“On November 9, 1989, there was the fall of the Berlin wall, known as the “wall of shame”,” Amnesty International said in a statement. “Eighteen years later, another wall, the wall of “injustice”, follows. This one is Israeli and divides the Occupied Territories, isolating towns and villages.”

The organisation said the letter addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was signed by more than 130,000 people by mail and over the Internet.

It “calls on him to halt construction of the West Bank wall, including in East Jerusalem, demolish the stretch already built and repair the damage caused,” said the statement, written in Spanish.

As the letter was delivered, activists outside the embassy unfurled a banner reading:

“The West Bank wall is illegal and violates human rights. More than 130,000 people call on Israel to demolish the unjust wall.”
Israel says its massive “security” barrier, made of electric fencing, barbed wire and concrete walls, is needed to stop potential attackers infiltrating the country and Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

But the Palestinians denounce it as an “apartheid wall” aimed at grabbing their land and undermining the viability of their promised state.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding ruling that parts of the 650-kilometre barrier criss-crossing the West Bank are illegal and should be torn down.

“Journalists who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo or advancing their careers do not operate in the public interest. Their purpose is not to inform but to deceive.”

I have been writing political essays for a few years now. I do so as a reluctant enthusiast, not because I wanted to write on these themes; but because, it seemed to me, that professional journalists were not telling the whole story; that significant parts that would allow people to connect the dots and understand what is happening from a historical perspective, was being deliberately omitted from the official version of current events, and from history. As propaganda, the elements that are deliberately left out of media are as important as those that are retained. It is propaganda by omission, as much as by content. What people are not told shapes their world view and influences their behavior, as surely as what they are told. Imposed ignorance and selective knowledge go hand in hand to forge public opinion and to shape cultural identity. These conditions set the stage for belligerent government and aggressive nationalism.

It is not coincidental that professional journalists, those who write for profit in the mainstream media, are the least likely to tell us the truth, the whole truth; whereas, free-lance writers, who operate under a different set of rules and out of the mainstream, are more likely to serve the public interest, and tell us what we need to know in order to be a free people, and good world citizens.

Professional journalists are beholden to a code of ethics and personal conduct that free-lance writers are not. Namely, they are part of a fraternity, a part of the cultural orthodoxy, with an incentive in maintaining the established order. The incentive is always financial and professional, and involves creating the acceptance and trust of those in power, which may, when properly executed, even result in the celebrity status of the journalist.

Journalists who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo or advancing their careers do not operate in the public interest. Their purpose is not to inform but to deceive.

When a major news anchor reports upon the invasion and occupation of sovereign nations, uncritically putting forth pentagon propaganda as justification for the attack, he or she is in essence acting in the manner of a celebrity athlete endorsing a product. The basketball star may endorse Nike sneakers, manufactured by indentured servants in foreign sweatshops; while the news anchor is endorsing war and disaster capitalism projected around the world by Lockheed Martin and the Carlyle Group. Both are prostitutes.

Mainstream corporate journalism is not about speaking truth to power, it is about selling products and perceptions. It is about creating a culture of ignorant consumers incapable of distinguishing between propaganda and news, fact and fiction.

This is marketing and perception management masquerading as unbiased, objective reporting. I call it the big lie.

If the mainstream journalist wants to prosper, if they want to have access to the inner circles of power, they must play the game according to the established rules. They must toe the corporate line, and provide cover for the corporate assault on human freedoms, and the conquest of nature, while keeping hidden agendas concealed from public view. Journalists must be able to sell widely objectionable concepts to the people, packaged in the garments of seductive–often patriotic language, in order to make them palatable.

How many soldiers, outside of those under the private contracts of firms like Blackwater, would voluntarily stake their lives for corporate profits, and the subjugation of a sovereign people, if they knew that is what they are really fighting for, rather than the more popular and desirable goal of freedom or democracy?

Freedom, liberation, and democracy have never been corporate objectives; nor can they ever be the objective of corporate governance. They are only selling points that conceal hidden corporate agendas; the attractive packaging for war, occupation, and privatization, obtained at pubic expense.

If news stories are not believable to the multitudes, if they fail to garner popular support by masking corporate agendas behind deceptive language, the majority of governmental polices and private agendas could not be enacted. If the people knew what was being done in their name, and who is profiting from those policies, there might be widespread opposition and even social upheaval. It would be difficult to field a voluntary military that knows it is fighting for the bottom line of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin, rather than for freedom and democracy, as they are told.

Thus those who would serve in the military as self-ordained patriots are sold a bill of goods. By invading and occupying Iraq, they are, in effect, undermining the very principles they claim to hold sacred, including those set forth in the Constitution and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Likewise, the average US citizen is sold a similar bill of goods in order to garner support for policies they would, presumably, never voluntarily sustain, if they understood them better.

That is the genius of modern capitalism and its impressive marketing apparatus. The results have been breathtaking.

Skillful perception management always precedes empire. Well presented propaganda allows history to be presented as a kind of fairy tale that ignores the horrible things the government has always done in our name, at the behest of corporate America and our wealthiest citizens, which should be too well known to bear reiteration here.

In our capitalist culture, journalism must not be thought of as a reporting of facts, but as marketing propaganda-the selling of ideas that might not otherwise be embraced by those who must carry out hidden agendas, or the people on the receiving end of them. Seen in this way, the US soldier and the Iraqi citizen are both pawns in a rich man’s game: the former as the implementer of unjust war and occupation, the other as the unwilling recipient of them.

The end result for both soldier and Iraqi citizen is tragic: the soldier is told that he or she is protecting their country from foreign threats, something that is patently false; while the innocent Iraqi citizen, defending his or her home from foreign occupation, knows that she or he is not a terrorist, but is treated like one, nevertheless.

Both occupier and the occupied share a common foe, but it is not each other; it is the criminals, aided and abetted by the corporate media, who put them in formal opposition to one another for financial gain.

Our recent history would have been impossible without the consolidation of the media that occurred during the Clinton presidency, and has continued ever since. The entire spectra of mainstream media are now under the control of only four or five corporations. We no longer have reporting on local issues stemming from diverse perspectives rooted in local communities, but a monoculture of state and corporate propaganda that betrays the public trust in its pursuit of corporate profits.

Aided by the president and congress, the public owned airwaves were hijacked and are being used against the people by giant multinational corporations.

The result of this media monoculture, as purveyed by the likes of Judith Miller and Tom Brokaw, and countless others, is tragic. And they represent only the tip of the mainstream iceberg. Think of the horrible and shameless lies, the baseless fear and hate that are continuously voiced by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, and the hateful broadcasts that emanate from Bob Jones University, masquerading as Christian theology.

Corporate media is the vanguard of empire and environmental destruction on a global scale.

Unlike its corporate counterpart, reporting truth requires people of unassailable integrity. It requires a thirst for justice with the strength of character to oppose the powerful undertow of manufactured perception and conformity, and the seductive language created to execute the hidden agendas of corrupt governments. Uncovering truth requires commitment to the people, rather than to profit driven corporate agendas.

Only a handful of professional journalists have attained the kind of stature that makes such reportage possible in the United States. Their names are not at all well known.

More often than not, that responsibility falls on the shoulders of independent journalists and unpaid free-lancers. The professional journalist must answer to his/her boss, and portray the corporation that employs them in a favorable light, even if they are profiting from unprovoked war and occupation. In contrast, the free-lancer is bound only by the constraints of conscience, imagination, and ability.

Occasionally, an astonished responder to one of my more poignant essays will tell me that I should forward the piece to the New York Times: to NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, or even the BBC. I never have.

It would be hard for me to imagine any corporation undermining its own profitability by exposing its hidden agendas, and denouncing itself as a commissioner of murder and mayhem, motivated by insatiable greed and a lust for wealth and power that would astonish even the staunchest mafia don. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen! Snowballs in hell have a better chance.

Its not that free-lancers like me wouldn’t like to get paid for what we do; it’s that our views do not enhance the bottom line of corporate giants and, in many cases, actually undermine them. Thus it behooves the professional journalist and the corporate media to ignore or discredit us as purveyors of truth and seekers of justice.

Soon it will be an act of sedition to speak truth in this country. Yet, truth will continue to exist, despite all attempts to destroy it.

Whether they admit it or not, virtually all of the best known journalists in the US subscribe to the racist and sexist ideologies of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, and they go to great lengths to advance these ideas, by presenting them as something other than what they really are. Sleight of hand is the rule of mainstream journalism, not the exception.

Conversely, by serving the people, free-lance journalists are, of necessity, undermining the corporate agenda. Thus they are treated as enemies of the state, which has become indistinguishable from the corporation itself. We live in a culture where one cannot value truth and carry forth corporate agendas. Truth is the enemy of empire.

This might also explain why so many unembedded journalists have been deliberately killed in Iraq and the Gaza strip by US and Israeli snipers. The world must not know what the occupiers do, or the propaganda veneer may no longer have its intended effect on the consumers of media.

Speaking truth to power, especially corrupt power, is dangerous business– particularly in war zones and fascist states, like the one evolving in the US.

Corporate media is the vanguard of colonialism and imperialist policy. It plays a key role in preparing the public mind for imperialist wars and occupations and their subsequent puppet governments; it also serves the emerging police state at home that erodes our freedoms, until there is nothing left of them.

Yet, occasionally, even in this artificially constructed myth loving culture, truth wins out simply because someone cares enough to tell it like it is, without sugar coating. Truth matters; and that is-and always will be-of primal importance to some people. Let future historical records show that there was opposition to what was being done in our name, that there were people willing to speak truth to power, to stem the evil tide by standing up for justice, cost what it may.

Future historians of the dominant culture are likely to cast these accounts into the memory hole and pretend that they never existed, carrying forth the myth that the people were always united behind the injustice and tyranny of our time. We saw this in Nazi Germany in the buildup to World War Two, and we are seeing it now in the US.

But a culture that does not value truth and justice is not worth preserving. Such cultures will self destruct and implode upon themselves; the world will eventually unite against them and bring them down. All of the military might in the world, all the subterfuge, is not powerful enough to overcome simple truth.

Any individual who values truth more than lies, who keeps truth alive in his or her heart, despite all efforts to dislodge it from its ethical moorings, is more powerful than even the most advanced weapons systems. Truth emerges unscathed from the rubble of fallen empire as immutable as an inviolable law of nature. Nothing can bring it down because it is real.

If we are to evolve into a justice loving people, truth must become our moral foundation, the basis of our existence as a people. Truth and justice are inseparable partners on the road to liberation from tyranny and fascism.

Concord’s greatest citizen, the poet-philosopher, Henry D. Thoreau, summed it up well: “The one great rule of composition…is to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not.” Perhaps more than anything, that simplistic ability to speak plain truth, and in all languages, is what I most admire about Thoreau. There is much to admire and respect in a man who spoke in those terms, and lived by that simple credo.

Truth is simple and uncomplicated, whereas lies and distortions are complex. Truth stands strong and unwavering without artificial support; lies and propaganda require elaborate schemes and constant propping up, the mask of deception.

More of us must learn the language of truth; we must be its faithful guardians, if we are to be valuable citizens in this world, rather than the useful idiots of empire. By holding truth and justice in the highest regard, we demonstrate that another world is not only possible, but highly probable.

As voracious consumers of media, we must be as careful about what we admit into our minds, as the food we put into our bodies. Food can nourish and sustain us, or it can produce disease and decay. And so it is with media.

To date, we have not been very discriminate, and the result is that we have become a culture of the mentally obese, fed on junk media. Our minds, our souls, have been deliberately poisoned; our perceptions twisted and distorted, our humanity abandoned to the quest for profits and power.

We must purge our minds of junk media and replace it with something more nutritious, if we favor health over disease. Peace is not possible without two essential ingredients: truth and justice. Neither is possible in the absence of the other. We must live as if truth still matters.

The huge discrepancy between the Arab and Western media is indeed a very strange one; that, and the perception each has of itself and of the other. A few days ago I attended a lovely dinner that was held in honor of one of the of prominent media moguls in the West, BBC’s World Affairs Editor John Simpson, a veteran who has been in media for over 41 years. Naturally, the conversation mainly revolved around the media coverage of the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war in both the East and West.Complaints, suggestions and examples were exchanged and recounted in succession in an attempt to explain matters and acquire deeper meaning. Another topic that was tackled was how the Western media deals with news and the platform on which it is presented from a standpoint of freedom and rights, while the Arab media still deals with news that it perceives of as ‘extraordinary’ whilst regarding that it is ‘bold’ to tackle it. You often hear expressions such as “what a daring news item” or “How brave he/she is” or the puzzled question, “how did they allow that to be published?”

Being bold, in the general sense of the word, entails going against the grain and beyond the boundaries to the point that could put the subject in a serious risk of severe punishment!

But it is not only the Arab media that is suffering; Western media has become afflicted by the so-called phenomenon of “Murdochism”, which is a trait that signifies the fierce advent of Australian businessman Rupert Murdoch [to the US] who built a biased and transcontinental media empire where capital takes precedence and is more influential and powerful than the journalistic message and the publisher’s honesty.

This new development has led to great pressures on the traditional family ownership of several important publications, as they yielded to the temptation of money and renounced the media objectivity for which they were formerly known. Perhaps the most important examples of such publications are ‘The Washington Post’, the ‘New York Times’, the ‘Guardian’, ‘Le Monde’ and the ‘Independent’.

An accurate review of the general media situation today and the interference of authority in the media, whether financial or political, is reminiscent of the great literary work ‘1984′ by George Orwell. He depicted a new world that was ruled by political hegemony and major authorities dominating over everyone and everything, including the media, which broadcast what needed to be aired and blocked what needed to be concealed.

Today, media is undergoing changes on a number of different levels due to the advancement of technology, the lack of traditional monitoring ‘barrier’, and the transformation of news items into popular commodities – after having once been an exclusively high-standard elite commodity.

This might be simultaneously good and bad news, since the concerned party will only exert a limited control over unlimited published information!

There are books that change people’s consciousness and change history. Some tell a story, like Harriet Beech Stowe’s 1851 “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, which gave a huge impetus to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Others take the form of a political treatise, like Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat”, which gave birth to the Zionist movement. Or they can be scientific in nature, like Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, which changed the way humanity sees itself. And perhaps political satire, too, can shake the world, like “1984″ by George Orwell.

The impact of these books was amplified by their timing. They appeared exactly at the right time, when a large public was ready to absorb their message.

It may well turn out that the book by the two professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”, is just such a book.

It is a dry scientific research report, 355 pages long, backed by 106 further pages containing some thousand references to sources.

It is not a bellicose book. On the contrary, its style is restrained and factual. The authors take great care not to utter a single negative comment on the legitimacy of the Lobby, and indeed bend over backwards to stress their support for the existence and security of Israel. They let the facts speak for themselves. With the skill of experienced masons, they systematically lay brick upon brick, row upon row, leaving no gap in their argumentation.

This wall cannot be torn down by reasoned argument. Nobody has tried, and nobody is going to. Instead, the authors are being smeared and accused of sinister motives. If the book could be ignored altogether, this would have been done – as has happened to other books which have been buried alive.

(Some years ago, there appeared in Russia a large tome by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the world-renowned laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, about Russia and its Jews. This book, called “200 Years Together”, has been completely ignored. As far as I know, it has not been translated into any language, certainly not into Hebrew. I asked several of Israel’s leading intellectuals, and none of them had even heard of the book. Neither does it appear on the list of Amazon.com, which includes all the author’s other works.)

The two professors take the bull by the horns. They deal with a subject which is absolutely taboo in the United States, a subject nobody in his right mind would even mention: the enormous influence of the pro-Israel lobby on American foreign policy.

In a remorselessly systematical way, the book analyzes the Lobby, takes it apart, describes its modus operandi, discloses its financial sources and lays bare its relations with the White House, the two houses of Congress, the leaders of the two major parties and leading media people.

The authors do not call into question the Lobby’s legitimacy. On the contrary, they show that hundreds of lobbies of this kind play an essential role in the American democratic system. The gun and the medical lobbies, for example, are also very powerful political forces. But the pro-Israel lobby has grown out of all proportion. It has unparalleled political power. It can silence all criticism of Israel in Congress and the media, bring about the political demise of anyone who dares to break the taboo, prevent any action that does not conform to the will of the Israeli government.

In its second part, the book shows how the Lobby uses its tremendous power in practice: how it has prevented the exertion of any pressure on Israel to for peace with the Palestinians, how it pushed the US into the invasion of Iraq, how it is now pushing for wars with Iran and Syria, how it supported the Israeli leadership in the recent war in Lebanon and blocked calls for a ceasefire when it didn’t want it.

Each of these assertions is backed up by so much undeniable evidence and quotations from written material (mainly from Israeli sources) that they cannot be ignored.

Most of these disclosures are nothing new for those in Israel who deal with these matters.

I myself could add to the book a whole chapter from personal experience.

In the late 50s, I visited the US for the first time. A major New York radio station invited me for an interview. Later they cautioned me: “You can criticize the President (Dwight D. Eisenhower) and the Secretary of State (John Foster Dulles) to your heart’s content, but please don’t criticize Israeli leaders!” At the last moment the interview was cancelled altogether, and the Iraqi ambassador was invited instead. Criticism was apparently tolerable when it came from an Arab, but absolutely not coming from an Israeli.

In 1970, the respected American “Fellowship of Reconciliation” invited me for a lecture tour of 30 universities, under the auspices of the Hillel rabbis. When I arrived in New York, I was informed that 29 of the lectures had been cancelled. The sole rabbi who did not cancel, Balfour Brickner, showed me a secret communication of the “Anti-Defamation League” that proscribed my lectures. It said: “While Knesset Member Avnery can in no way be considered a traitor, his appearance at this time would be deeply divisive…” In the end, all the lectures took place under the auspices of Christian chaplains.

I especially remember a depressing experience in Baltimore. A good Jew, who had volunteered to host me, was angered by the cancellation of my lecture in this city and obstinately insisted on putting it on. We combed the streets of the Jewish quarters – mile upon mile of signs with Jewish names – and did not find a single hall whose manager would agree to let the lecture by a member of the Israeli Knesset take place. In the end, we did hold the lecture in the basement of the building of my host’s apartment – and functionaries of the Jewish community came to protest.

That year, during Black September, I held a press conference in Washington DC, under the auspices of the Quakers. It seemed to be a huge success. The journalists came straight from a press conference with Prime Minister Golda Meir, and showered me with questions. Almost all the important media were represented – TV networks, radio, the major newspapers. After the planned hour was up, they would not let me go and kept me talking for another hour and a half. But the next day, not a single word appeared in any of the media. Thirty-one years later, in October 2001 I held a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, and exactly the same thing happened: many of the media were there, they held me for another hour – and not a word, not a single word, was published.

In 1968, a very respected American publishing house (Macmillan) brought out a book of mine’ “Israel Without Zionists”, which was later translated into eight other languages. The book described the Israeli-Arab conflict in a very different way and proposed the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel – a revolutionary idea at the time. Not a single review appeared in the American media. I checked in one of the most important book stores in New York and did not find the book. When I asked a salesman, he found it buried under a heap of volumes and put it on top. Half an hour later it was hidden again.

The book dealt with the “Two States for Two peoples” solution long before it became a world-wide consensus, and with my proposal for Israel’s integration in “the Semitic Region”. True, I am an Israeli patriot and was elected to the Knesset by Israeli voters. But I criticized the Israeli government – and that was enough.

The book by the two professors, who criticize the Israeli government from a different angle, cannot be buried anymore. This fact, by itself, speaks volumes.

The book is based on an essay by the two that appeared last year in a British journal, after no American publication dared to touch it. Now a respected American publishing house has released it – an indication that something is moving. The situation has not changed, but it seems that it is now possible at least to talk about it.

Everything depends on timing – and apparently the time is now ripe for such a book, which will shock many good people in America. It is now causing an uproar.

The two professors are, of course, accused of anti-Semitism, racism and hatred of Israel. What Israel? It is the Lobby itself that hates a large part of Israel. In recent years is has shifted even more to the Right. Some of its constituent groups – such as the neo-cons who pushed the US into the Iraq war – are openly connected with the right-wing Likud, and especially with Binyamin Netanyahu. The billionaires who finance the Lobby are the same people who finance the extreme Israeli Right, and most of all the settlers.

The small, determined Jewish groups in the US who support the Israeli peace movements are remorselessly persecuted. Some of them fold after a few years. Members of Israeli peace groups who are sent to America are boycotted and slandered as “self-hating-Jews”.

The political views of the two professors, which are briefly stated at the end of the book, are identical with the stand of the Israeli peace forces: the Two-State Solution, ending the occupation, borders based on the Green Line, and international support for the peace settlement.

If this is anti-Semitism, then we here are all anti-Semites. And only the Christian Zionists – those who openly demand the return of the Jews to this country but secretly prophesy the annihilation of the unconverted Jews at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ – are the true Lovers of Zion.

Even if not a single bad word about the pro-Israel lobby can be uttered in the US, it is far from being a secret society, hatching conspiracies like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. On the contrary, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Federation and the other organizations vociferously boast about their actions and publicly proclaim their incredible successes.

Quite naturally, the diverse components of the Lobby compete with each other – Who has the biggest influence on the White House, Who scares the most senators, Who controls more journalists and commentators,. This competition causes a permanent escalation – because every success by one group spurs the others to redouble their efforts.

This could be very dangerous. A balloon that is inflated to monstrous dimensions can one day burst in the face of American Jews (who, by the way, according to the polls, object to many positions adopted by the Lobby that claims to speak in their name.)

Most of the American public now opposes the Iraq war and considers it a disaster. This majority still does not connect the war with the actions of the pro-Israel lobby. No newspaper and no politician dares to hint at such a connection – yet. But if this taboo is broken, the result may be very dangerous for the Jews and for Israel.

Beneath the surface, a lot of anger directed against the Lobby is accumulating. The presidential candidates, who are compelled to grovel at the feet of AIPAC, the senators and congressmen, who have become slaves of the Lobby, the media people, who are forbidden to write what they really think – all these secretly detest the Lobby. If this anger explodes, it may hurt us, too.

This lobby has become a Golem. And like the Golem in legend, in the end it will bring disaster on its maker.

If I may be permitted to voice some criticism of my own:

When the original article by the two professors appeared, I argued that “the tail is wagging the dog and the dog is wagging the tail”. The tail, of course, is Israel.

The two professors confirm the first part of the equation, but emphatically deny the second. The central thesis of the book is that the pressure of the Lobby causes the United States to act against its own interests (and, in the long run, also against the true interests of Israel.) They do not accept my contention, quoted in the book, that Israel acted in Lebanon as “America’s Rottweiler” (to Hizbullah as “Iran’s Doberman”).

I agree that the US is acting against its true interest (and the true interests of Israel) – but the American leadership does not see it that way. Bush and his people believe – even without the input of the Lobby – that it would be advantageous for the US to establish a permanent American military presence in the middle of this region of huge oil reserves. In my view, this counter-productive act at was one of the main objectives of the war, side by side with the desire to eliminate one of Israel’s most dangerous enemies. Unfortunately, the book deals only very briefly with this issue.

Uri Avnery, an Israeli writer and peace activist, founded the Gush Shalom movement. He had served three terms as an MP at the Knesset.

“The protest wave has calmed down,” some Israeli journalists said Friday of the Burmese military junta’s success in driving thousands of demonstrators off the streets, using excessive violence.

Despite the natural sympathy for the uprisers, several editors chose the word “calm,” which embodies the rulers’ point of view: The norm is “calm,” even if it means constant government violence. The mass protest against the oppression is a disruption of order and calm.

The word “calm” was an automatic reflection of how most Israeli Jews and their media see the constant, 40-year Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. This is the norm one thinks of when the Palestinians disrupt the calm.

The oppression of the Palestinian people is intended to perpetuate its banishment from its land and the infringement on its rights there. But on the other side of the regime of oppression is democracy for Jews, even those who oppose the occupation.

Generally, Jewish dissidents are not risking their life, livelihood, freedom or rights. However, the demonstration against the separation fence does involve certain risks – a few hours in detention, soldiers’ fire, tear gas, or a blow from a gun. Therefore, each protester makes his or her own courageous decision to take part in the demonstration. Assisting the Palestinian olive harvest also requires courage, because it could end in an attack by the settlers (while the government’s representatives, the soldiers, stand idly by). And yet there are dozens of anti-oppression activities that do not endanger the hundreds of devoted activists (mostly women) who take part in them.

Potentially, hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis could have taken part in activities against the multi-faceted Israeli oppression – the apartheid laws and orders, military attacks, hidden
information, economic siege, land expropriation, expanding settlements, and more. Not a hair on their head would be touched. These are people who say they support peace, with a Palestinian state beside Israel. But apparently their interpretation of participation in democracy is going to the polls once every few years, and faint protest in their living room.

However, democracy also is displaying civic responsibility, by constantly supervising the political decisions and acts between elections, thus ensuring that democracy’s essence has not been eroded. Those who say they support a two-state solution are ignoring the other facet of the democracy-for-Jews – the military regime that it imposes on the Palestinians. This regime creates faits accomplis all the time, foiling the last chance for a solution (i.e. full withdrawal with slight changes to the June 4, 1967 lines and establishing a Palestinian state).

The Jewish citizens who enjoy their democracy are not personally harmed by its other facet. On the contrary, they gain from it – cheap land and quality housing, additional water sources, a cadre of security professionals in demand worldwide, and thriving defense industries. This is the “calm” that even self-defined peace supporters refrain from disrupting.

In the Soviet empire and racist South Africa – like in today’s Burma (Myanmar) – objecting to oppression involved a high personal price. Therefore, one could understand the objectors who chose not to act. In Israel, because it is a democracy for Jews, all those who sit idle, ignoring what is being done in their name, bear a heavy responsibility.

Chiefs of staff, prime ministers, ministers and generals are not the only ones responsible. Anyone who theoretically objects to oppression, discrimination and expulsion, but does not actively take part in the struggle and in creating a constant popular resistance to topple the apartheid regime we have created here, is responsible.

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/908880.html

When I read the news that a man in Egypt named Sheikh Yussef al Badri had lodged an official complaint with the prosecutor general against eight renowned Egyptian intellectuals and journalists, I couldn’t quite pinpoint who he was. I wasn’t really sure of his identity until I saw his picture alongside the news. For some reason his image left a more memorable impression on me then his name did.

I remembered the frequent times I had seen this preacher on satellite television channels condemning issues related to ‘hesba’ [the hesba doctrine allows people to file suits against those alleged to have violated religious law]. The approach he adopted when arguing his cases made it clear that he would by no means accept the inclusion of the ‘other’; that is, anyone from a different race or culture who follows a different religion.

His arguments concerning women’s issues display a blatant and incomprehensible rigorousness. In fact, he made an attempt to sue an Egyptian minister for issuing a decree to ban female circumcision.

I could never watch any of his televised appearances in their entirety by virtue of his rigidity and harshness, which always results in repelling me from following the rest of the program to its end.

Traits such as these have deepened my repulsion from a model that is embodied by a large group of ‘celebrity’ preachers who specialize in issuing fatwas [religious rulings] via modern means of communication, such as television and the Internet. Such means enable them to disseminate their thoughts and ideas through a large-scale platform.

Sheikh al Badri has a rich history of prosecuting intellectuals, writers and journalists. He has managed to achieve considerable success in raising a number of issues, such as the famous suit he raised a few years ago against writer and university professor Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid. Abu Zeid was forced to divorce his wife based on a judicial decision. [By applying Hesba, on the grounds that his writings included opinions that render him an apostate].

Furthermore, Sheikh al Badri also won a case against prominent Egyptian poet, Abdel Moeti Hegazi, who refused to pay the 20,000 Egyptian Pounds (the equivalent of approximately US $3,500) fine, preferring instead that his home furniture be sold rather than to voluntarily yield to the court ruling.

The media is divided over issues broached in the cases raised by people like Sheikh al Badri. However, this media constitutes an arena for the views of journalists, intellectuals and a considerable segment of society, including Sheikh al Badri, who may also be deemed a victim of these conflicts. Such conflicts and disruptions are a result of the clash between progressive development, which is represented through the means of communication, and views and ideas that remain ensnared in certain positions that are lethal to humanity and culture.

Nowadays, giving these views a large platform only tends to result in exercising control over thoughts, while reducing communication and imposing bans and prohibitions. It is a matter that affects everyone. It is almost as though the media creates its own murderers. Or rather, to be more precise; some types of media are instrumental to figures such as these.

The controversy that results from the showdown between journalists and the intelligentsia on the one hand, and religious figures on the other, only reinforces the inclination harbored by many to exercise self-censorship as well as censorship on a societal level. Although we are living in the age of media and communication, it is almost as though we are stifled by the weight of censorship more than ever before.

Still, Europe survived the Inquisitions before its renaissance. Perhaps we are living a parallel era. What is alarming to contemplate is surviving the dominance of such an inquisition, which then does not transform or pave way for anything else.

Two things have dominated much of my professional and personal life during the 37 years since I graduated from journalism school in the United States: following American college sports and following Middle East politics, society and culture. Reading the U.S. mainstream press, especially in the early spring, I often have a hard time distinguishing between American media coverage of March Madness and Middle East Madness-both defined by intense emotions and extreme confrontation.

Through my professional lifetime of experience working for and with quality American and European journalists, and following their work daily, what I regret most is their tendency to report on the Middle East almost exclusively as an arena of aberration and violence. This is only exacerbated (and at times mystified) by the shattering combination of ignorance and fear of alien cultures and faiths.

It is unfair and inaccurate to generalize too much, of course, but my critique of how this story has been mishandled stands the test of time. For the past half century, reporting about this region has been told primarily through the lens of conflict, extremism and violence; at the same time, the realities of hundreds of millions of ordinary Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, Turks and other small populations, whose daily lives are not defined by warfare or dominated by conflict, have been largely ignored. The prevalent news and imagery convey-and are defined by-emotionalism, exaggerated religiosity, and deep ethnic or religious prejudice, while the underlying human rhythms, prevailing moral norms, and routine cultural and political values of the 300 million or so Arabs are not presented accurately, fully or at all. Between the intemperance and drama of Dubayy, Gaza, Fallujah and Hizbullah, the U.S. news media have very little appetite for stories about Arabs who don’t carry knives, shoot machine guns, launch grenades, or talk on gold-plated cell phones.

It is not surprising, therefore, that what I see from office, home and car windows throughout the Middle East does not match the images I see on U.S. newscasts. The juxtaposition is extreme and deeply frustrating. Reporting by the written press is only slightly better. This circumstance is brought about, in part, by the nature of the news media. I know because for 40 years I, too, have written “newsworthy” leads and headlines. Tension trumps routine yet, for those, like me, who have worked to foster better communication, journalistic coverage, and understanding between Arabs and Americans, this creates two problems:

• Journalists in the West are missing the most important story in the Arab world: the quest by millions of ordinary people to create a better political and socioeconomic order, anchored in decent values, open to the world, pluralistic and tolerant yet asserting indigenous Arab-Islamic values. The wholesale attempt to transform autocracies into democracies and corrupt and often incompetent police states into more satisfying and accountable polities is a saga of epic and often heroic proportions. Most of the U.S. news media refuse to acknowledge or cannot even see this because of a relentless focus on Islamist violence, Israel, Hizbullah, Iran, Syria, terrorism, oil and the American army in Iraq.

• A high price is paid for covering the Arab world primarily in terms of its public and political deviance, rather than its human ordinariness and the rhythms of its many different neighborhoods. This price is denominated in three interlocking and dangerous currencies that create a cycle of disdain and death that serves to define us today: (a.) a one-dimensional and largely negative and usually fear-filled image of the Arab world set in the mind of ordinary Americans; (b.) emotional and political support for the U.S. government in pursuit of its Middle East policies, with disastrous consequences for all concerned; (c.) the counterreaction from much of the Arab world, where a large majority of ordinary people and ruling elites are contemptuous of American policy; a very small band of criminal fanatics in al-Qaeda and associated groups goes a step further and wages war against Americans at home or abroad.

Such coverage of the Middle East-and Arab countries in it-is an integral element in perpetuating and exacerbating existing tensions and fear. (Arab coverage of Americans shares a lot of these same weaknesses.) All of this is made worse by the inherent bias-reflecting long-standing U.S. government policy and Israeli perspectives-embedded in most of this coverage. And when what is reported also stresses the Arab’s anti-Israel and anti-U.S. sentiments of Arabs-and these are real-little space remains for reporting on the defining reality of ordinary Arab lives. This reality is the heroic durability and epic stoicism as ordinary Arabs demand to be treated in their countries as citizens with rights instead of as subjects, victims and chattel of modern Arab authoritarianism.

This narrative is all too familiar to American reporters; they’ve told this story often and with eloquence and persistence when, for example, Russians and Poles fought against Communism, and Chinese students and black South Africans waged struggles against their oppressive systems, and girls and women in Afghanistan battled for their rights at great risk. But this story is rarely told in Arab lands, where instead death and hatreds take center stage in stories filed by Western reporters-stories routinely insinuating the inscrutability of exotic and alien values and an inherently violent faith.

A half-century ago many in the American media ignored entirely or provided a distorted, incomplete and one-dimensional coverage of African Americans, then called Negroes. Reporters then, as now, accurately reflected prevalent values in much of American society. Journalists did not create this racism or oppression; they only reflected it in what they covered-and what they didn’t report on-and, in doing so, aided in perpetuating its flaws and crime. Something similar is happening in reporting on the Arab world today, as prevailing political interests and norms, with a nod to crass commercialism, defeat what might otherwise be journalists’ better instincts.

This is a difficult-and even profound-professional challenge. How do journalists make the lives and aspirations of Arab men and women who will not succumb to criminality or terror relevant to Western audiences? How do they do this when there is no iconic image of a solitary man standing before a tank, as happened in Tiananmen Square? The spirit of Arab defiance and self-assertion in the face of police states and foreign occupiers is the stuff of drama. It is also the force behind mass politics in the Arab world-a force that is increasingly being exploited and misused by extremist leaders far afield, such as Iran’s president. Osama bin Laden and his gang of criminals has also tried desperately and repeatedly to tap into this mountain of discontent, in most cases without success.

Masses of ordinary, discontented Arabs have refused to turn violent to express their angst as they also refuse foreign hegemony or occupation as an antidote to their domestic abuse of power. They cling to religion and traditional social values, while demanding more accountable and participatory governance. They adhere to their powerful religious dictates of charity and tolerance and, in most parts of the Arab world, they insist on living in pluralistic societies. And despite the West’s perception, almost desperately they seek to engage meaningfully with Americans, Europeans and others abroad who would reciprocate the quest for mutually beneficial relations.

With policies and rhetoric seemingly locked in place, along with gun sights, it is perhaps too much to expect Western political leaders to see this human reality beneath the surface of the political brutality of a regime such as Hosni Mubarak’s in Egypt. Or to understand the mass anger tapped by Moktada al-Sadr in Iraq. I do, however, expect my journalist colleagues in the Western press to focus on this extraordinary human dynamic that defines this entire region.

It’s a great story. It’s also the most likely route to our mutual salvation and exit from the cycle of warfare and extremism that our incompetent leaders have fostered and that degrades us all.

Killing the Messenger (Click here)

The well-known journalist John Pilger joined the Mirror in 1963, and worked there for over 20 years. Pilger later claimed that ‘The Mirror was the first popular paper to encourage working-class people to express themselves, for whatever reason, to their newspaper’. Luckily for him, ‘Irreverence and a certain anarchy were encouraged’. Later, when Robert Maxwell took over ownership of the newspaper, Pilger was personally assured that his job was secure: ‘Eighteen months later, after relentless interference from Maxwell, I was sacked.’

The media typically comprise large conglomerates – News International, CBS (now merged with Westinghouse), Turner Broadcasting (now merged with Time-Warner) – which may belong to even larger parent corporations such as General Electric (owners of NBC). All are tied into the stock market. Wealthy people sit on the boards of these major corporations, many with extensive personal and business contacts in other corporations. Herman and Chomsky point out, for instance, that: ‘GE [General Electric] and Westinghouse are both huge, diversified multinational companies heavily involved in the controversial areas of weapons production and nuclear power.’ It is difficult to conceive that press neutrality would not be compromised in these areas. But more widely, press freedom is limited by the simple fact that the owners of the media corporations are driven by free market ideology. How likely is it, then, that such owners would happily allow their own newspaper, radio or TV station to criticise systematically the ‘free market’ capitalism which is the source of his material wealth?

The second filter of the propaganda model is advertising. Newspapers have to attract and maintain a high proportion of advertising in order to cover the costs of production; without it, the price of any newspaper would be many times what it is now, which would soon spell its demise in the marketplace. There is fierce competition throughout the media to attract advertisers; a newspaper which gets less advertising than its competitors is put at a serious disadvantage. Lack of success in raising advertising revenue was another factor in the demise of ‘people’s newspapers’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is clear, therefore, that for any publication or commercial radio or TV station to survive, it has to hone itself into an advertiser-friendly medium. In other words, the media has to be sympathetic to business interests, such as the travel, automobile and petrochemical industries. Even the threat of withdrawal of advertising can affect editorial content. A letter sent to the editorial offices of a hundred magazines by a major car producer stated: ‘In an effort to avoid potential conflicts, it is required that Chrysler corporation be alerted in advance of any and all editorial content that encompasses sexual, political, social issues or any editorial content that could be construed as provocative or offensive.’ In 1999, British Telecom threatened to withdraw advertising from The Daily Telegraph following a number of critical articles. The journalist responsible was suspended.

A 1992 US study of 150 news editors found that 90 per cent said that advertisers tried to interfere with newspaper content, and 70 per cent tried to stop news stories altogether. 40 per cent admitted that advertisers had in fact influenced a story. In the UK, £3.2 billion is spent on newspaper ads annually and another £2.6 billion on TV and radio commercials, out of a total advertising budget of £9.2 billion. In the US, the figure is tens of billions of dollars a year on TV advertising alone. An advertising-based system makes survival extremely difficult for radical publications that depend on revenue from sales alone. Even if such publications survive, they are relegated to the margins of society, receiving little notice from the public at large. Advertising, just like media ownership, therefore acts as a news filter.

The third of Herman and Chomsky’s 5 filters relates to the sourcing of mass media news: ‘The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest.’ Even large media corporations such as the BBC cannot afford to place reporters everywhere. They therefore concentrate their resources where major news stories are likely to happen: the White House, the Pentagon, No 10 Downing Street, and other centralised news ‘terminals’. Although British newspapers may occasionally object to the ‘spin-doctoring’ of New Labour, for example, they are in fact highly dependent upon the pronouncements of ‘the Prime Minister’s personal spokesperson’ for government-related news. Business corporations and trade organisations are also trusted sources of stories considered newsworthy. Editors and journalists who offend these powerful news sources, perhaps by questioning the veracity or bias of the furnished material, can be threatened with the denial of access to their media life-blood – fresh news.

Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, points out that ‘Professional journalism relies heavily on official sources. Reporters have to talk to the PM’s official spokesperson, the White House press secretary, the business association, the army general. What those people say is news. Their perspectives are automatically legitimate.’ Whereas, according to McChesney, ‘if you talk to prisoners, strikers, the homeless, or protesters, you have to paint their perspectives as unreliable, or else you’ve become an advocate and are no longer a “neutral” professional journalist.’ Such reliance on official sources gives the news an inherently conservative cast and gives those in power tremendous influence over defining what is or isn’t ‘news’. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, warns: ‘This is precisely the opposite of what a functioning democracy needs, which is a ruthless accounting of the powers that be.’

The fourth filter is ‘flak’, described by Herman and Chomsky as ‘negative responses to a media statement or [TV or radio] program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, law-suits, speeches and Bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat and punitive action’. Business organisations regularly come together to form flak machines. Perhaps one of the most well-known of these is the US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC) – comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world’s largest public relations companies, to rubbish the credibility of climate scientists and ‘scare stories’ about global warming (see Chapter 4).

In her 1997 book Global Spin, Sharon Beder documented at great length the operations of corporations and their hired PR firms in establishing grassroots ‘front movements’ to counter the gains made by environmentalists. One such coalition, the Foundation for Clean Air Progress, is ‘in reality a front for transportation, energy, manufacturing and agricultural groups’. The Foundation was established to challenge the US Clean Air Act by ‘educating’ the public about the progress made in air quality over the previous twenty-five years. As Beder notes, the Foundation’s ‘focus is on individual responsibility for pollution, as opposed to the regulation of industry to achieve further improvements.’ The threat – real or imagined – of law-suits can be a powerful deterrent to media investigation. In the UK, environmental journalist Andrew Rowell notes that, ‘Britain’s archaic libel laws prevent much of the real truth about the destructive nature of many of [the] UK’s leading companies from ever being published or broadcast. Very few people within the media will take on the likes of Shell, BP or [mining company] RTZ’.

The fifth and final news filter that Herman and Chomsky identified was ‘anti-communism’. Manufacturing Consent was written during the Cold War. A more apt version of this filter is the customary western identification of ‘the enemy’ or an ‘evil dictator’ – Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Slobodan Milosevic (recall the British tabloid headlines of ‘Smash Saddam!’ and ‘Clobba Slobba!’). The same extends to mainstream reporting of environmentalists as ‘eco-terrorists’. The Sunday Times ran a particularly nasty series of articles in 1999 accusing activists from the non-violent direct action group Reclaim The Streets of stocking up on CS gas and stun guns.

The demonisation of enemies is useful, essential even, in justifying strategic geopolitical manoeuvring and the defence of corporate interests around the world, while mollifying home-based critics of such behaviour. The creation of an ‘evil empire’ of some kind, as in postwar western scaremongering about the ‘Soviet Menace’ or earlier talk of the ‘Evil Hun’, has been a standard device for terrifying the population into supporting arms production and military adventurism abroad – both major sources of profit for big business. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein has been a useful bogeyman for US arms manufacturers who have notched up sales of over $100bn to Saddam’s neighbours in the Middle East. The fifth filter also applies to media demonisation of anti-globalisation protesters – often described as ‘rioters’ – and anyone else perceived as a threat to free-market ideology.

This brief description of the propaganda model hardly does justice to the sophisticated and cogent analysis presented by Herman and Chomsky. The interested reader is urged to consult their book directly. Its particular relevance here is that it explains how and why the status quo of corporate power is maintained in modern society, the dominance of the neoliberal agenda of free trade with its automatic rejection of alternatives (Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There Is No Alternative’), and the emasculation of dissident viewpoints which are variously labelled as ‘biased’, ‘ideological’ or ‘extreme’. How likely is it that anyone calling for radical change in society – whether environmentalists, human-rights activists or opponents of the arms trade – will be consistently and fairly reported by corporate news organisations? How much more likely is it that their arguments will be vilified, marginalised or simply ignored?

[The above is an extract from the 'Spotlight on the Media': Chapter 3 of 'Private Planet' (Jon Carpenter Publishing).

American journalists probably feel more pressure about their coverage of Israel and Palestine than any other subject. That is true even of Extra!; despite having a readership that is overwhelmingly sympathetic to our progressive critique of the media, our Middle East coverage invariably elicits angry letters and complaints, sometimes resulting in cancelled subscriptions.

According to Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, his publication has felt “tremendous pressure” to alter its editorial position that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is the “fundamental source of the problem.” Hundreds of subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions, and donors have announced publicly that they will stop giving money to the magazine (Democracy Now!, 11/15/00).

To a notable degree, anti-Palestinian media criticism consists of elliptical reasoning and baffling non-sequiturs, not to mention clumsiness with facts. The tone of much of the criticism is illustrated by a Jerusalem Post letter to the editor (12/19/00) that complained that CNN correspondents “constantly refer to innocuous ‘stone-throwing’ by Palestinian kids, instead of calling them what they really are: rocks.”

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which takes out expensive full-page advertisements in papers like the New York Times, issued a November 18 press release headlined “Blatant Anti-Semitism on CNN.” The smoking gun for this serious charge was that “a Palestinian-American now living in Ramallah was paraphrased by CNN reporter Fionnuala Sweeney as saying ‘she would have voted for George W. Bush because the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman, is Jewish.’”

The release did not allege that CNN’s reporter agreed with the anti-Semitic comment, only that the comment was reported–in CAMERA’s words–”as if this were a perfectly normal sentiment.” One could argue just as easily that CNN’s report showed a subtle bias against the Palestinians by choosing an anti-Semite to represent the Palestinian viewpoint. But subtlety is not a hallmark of such arguments, and “blatant anti-Semitism” is what CNN was accused of.

Even when such criticism contains a kernel of truth, it typically misses the larger picture. CAMERA condemned a New York Times article (10/24/00) about Palestinian television for “covering up” the Palestinian media’s incitement of violence against Israel. The article had quoted from a fiery sermon by a Palestinian cleric broadcast on local television, without citing the sermon’s most incendiary passage, which urged the audience to “kill those Jews.” Journalistically speaking, the criticism is fair enough, but CAMERA neglected to point out an equally crucial omission in the Times article: The cleric who gave the sermon was arrested by the Palestinian Authority within hours of his speech (London Guardian, 10/17/00; Knight Ridder, 10/19/00).

“Real pressure”

The government of Israel itself has entered the spin-control fray. In November, the Israeli dailies Ma’ariv (11/8/00) and Ha’aretz (11/13/00) reported that Israel’s foreign ministry was establishing a special public relations headquarters in New York to reinforce Israel’s PR strategy. The office would reportedly be headed by a former director general of the Israel Broadcasting Association, who would coordinate with the foreign ministry’s PR department, a steering committee formed of senior officials of U.S. Jewish organizations, and six public relations firms–including “some of the most well known in America”–that had been hired at a cost of $1 million.

In a mid-October conference call (a transcript of which was obtained by researcher Phyllis Bennis), Israeli government spokesperson Nachman Shai explained Israel’s media strategy to a group of 30 to 60 U.S. Jewish leaders and other leading Israel supporters. He singled out CNN for criticism, adding that his office was pressuring the network to shift its coverage in a more pro-Israel direction.

He drew particular attention to CNN’s Occupied Territories correspondent Rula Amin, who is herself Palestinian. Shai told the group: “We are putting real pressure on the heads of CNN to have [Amin and other reporters] replaced with more objective pro-Israel reporters that are willing to tell our side of the story.”

Amin has been subject of almost obsessive loathing by many of Israel’s supporters in the media. The feeling is probably motivated more by her Palestinian background than the content of her reporting, which, while putting a somewhat more human face on the Palestinians than most American fare, is not much different than what typically appears on, say, the BBC.

For example, Amin was attacked by Amos Perlmutter, the hawkish Washington Times foreign affairs columnist, who called her a “purveyor of Palestinian propaganda” (10/30/00). His only example was to claim that “with no evidence, she reported the false Palestinian argument that the two Israelis who were lynched in Ramallah were Mossad agents.” That is false. In fact, in her live report on the lynching (10/12/00), Amin had merely reported, accurately, that the mob that attacked the Israeli reservists had “assumed that these were undercover units.”

So far, the effect of all this pressure against Amin has been unclear. After broadcasting Amin’s reports in October on an almost daily basis, in early November CNN moved its London bureau chief, Tom Mintier, into the Jerusalem bureau, where his reports from the occupied territories have largely replaced Amin’s, at least on the network’s U.S. service. From early November until late December, CNN’s U.S. programming did not include any stories by Amin, a fact CNN executives attributed to the heavy coverage of the disputed U.S. presidential election, which left little airtime for Middle East stories. Amin reappeared briefly on the network with several reports between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. But as of this writing, in early February, she has not been seen in the United States in 2001. CNN firmly insists it has not bowed to pressure from critics to downplay Amin’s reporting.

Pals vs. Issies

While the American press is perceived abroad as being unambiguously sympathetic to Israel, the most visible form of media criticism in the United States takes the opposite view–that the U.S. press is constantly propagandizing for the Palestinian cause. This belief is repeated so often, and by so many prominent organizations and individuals, that it has been largely absorbed into conventional wisdom.

When CNN’s weekend program on the news media (Reliable Sources, 10/14/00) took up the question of Middle East coverage, the host, Howard Kurtz–an influential media reporter for the Washington Post who is generally seen as a liberal–grilled a panel of journalists on whether the press was being unfair to Israel. One prominent journalist, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, was asked if he thought the Washington Post’s October 13 front page had “made it seem too much like Israel was committing an act of aggression” when it launched retaliatory strikes on Palestinians following the Ramallah lynchings.

The Post had printed a huge two-column color photograph of the killings on its cover, showing a Palestinian triumphantly displaying his blood-stained hands to the crowd. But Kurtz pointed out that the banner headline over the story was “Israel Strikes Palestinian Sites,” and that the lynching itself was announced only in the sub-headline over the main story below. McManus agreed that “yes, it was probably a bad call,” though he did not think it was necessarily motivated by anti-Israel ideology.

“The whole question of who is depicted as the aggressor,” Kurtz mused to Newsweek managing editor Ann McDaniel on the same program, “is part of the public relations war…. It seems to me you have a number of Palestinian kids as young as 12 who were killed in this violence. But the Palestinians also put children out there on the front lines, and therefore reap a lot of sympathy when these horrible casualties take place.” McDaniel replied apologetically that American journalists “probably make a mistake in not thinking” enough about whether the public “perceive us as balanced.”

Kurtz finally got the answer he seemed to be looking for when he asked Joe Klein of The New Yorker, a prominent Washington pundit, whether the media have a tilt on Israel. Klein replied: “From my own experience covering wars over there and covering the situation there, the press corps–especially the foreign press corps–tend to lean a little bit toward the Palestinians because their situation is a bit more desperate. I think that that’s a natural tendency in any situation of combat. Even the nicknames that reporters have for the two combatants kind of tilts things. The Palestinians are called the Pals. And the Israelis are called the Issies.”

U.S. News & World Report owner and editor Mortimer Zuckerman also argued that there was an anti-Israel slant in an October 23 editorial. Charging that the media had “reinforced the impression that the powerful Israelis were using excessive force,” Zuckerman assured us that “this impression was false,” with no further evidence provided. Unfortunately for Zuckerman, he happened to choose exactly the phrase–”excessive force”–used almost verbatim by Amnesty International (10/19/00), Human Rights Watch (10/17/00), Physicians for Human Rights (11/3/00), the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (12/6/00), the U.N. Human Rights Commission (11/27/00) and the U.N. Security Council (10/7/00) to characterize Israel’s actions.

SIDEBAR: The Smoking Caption

Of all the baleful slanders directed against Israel by the allegedly pro-Palestinian U.S. media, the case of Tuvia Grossman stood out in critics’ eyes as the most outrageous. On September 29, the first day of the al-Aqsa uprising, the Associated Press sent out a photograph of an injured man in Jerusalem, crouching near an Israeli soldier holding a nightstick. AP’s caption identified the wounded man as a Palestinian, but he turned out to be an American Jew named Tuvia Grossman, who was studying at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem.

An AP editor in the Jerusalem office had received garbled information from the Israeli photographer who took the picture, and hastily assumed the wounded man was a Palestinian hurt in the day’s demonstrations. In fact, Grossman had been beaten by a crowd of angry Palestinians as he tried to make his way to the Western Wall to pray. The AP photo and the erroneous caption were picked up by seven or eight U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times (9/30/00), which printed it alongside several photos on page 6. When relatives of Grossman saw the photograph and recognized him, they called the AP to ask for a correction. The AP corrected the mistake, and almost all of the newspapers promptly printed corrections as well.

To the untrained eye, the Grossman affair might seem like the sort of routine journalistic error that occurs every day in the news business. Corrections to erroneous stories appear all the time. No one alleged any deliberate falsification in the Grossman case; the vast majority of injuries in Jerusalem the day the Grossman photograph was taken were sustained by Palestinians, so the assumption that the wounded man was Palestinian was plausible, though careless.

But the pro-Israel media critics cried bias. Newspapers across the country carried angry commentaries and letters by supporters of Israel brandishing the mislabeled photograph as palpable proof of their long-held suspicions. The New York Post (10/5/00) and Wall Street Journal (10/6/00) each ran op-eds on the photo. In commentaries, the mislabeled photo was proof that pro-Palestinian “misreporting by the media has been rampant” (Albany Times-Union, 10/25/00), and that “Anti-Israel Bias Warps American Minds” (Providence Journal-Bulletin, 10/13/00). Daily Oklahoman columnist Edie Roodman (10/13/00) accused the media of “indirectly stimulating riots” by Palestinians.

When Ted Koppel arrived at the East Jerusalem YMCA to produce a television special, he was “assailed by indignant American expatriates who complained to him about the mislabeled AP photograph” (Jerusalem Post, 10/13/00). “We’ve gotten a flood of emails and a number of phone calls about the photograph,” the editor of a Jewish newspaper in Boston told the Boston Globe (10/7/00).

The New York Times went to unusual lengths to remedy the error. After printing an initial correction setting out the facts (10/4/00), the Times published a second correction a few days later (10/7/00) to further explain that the officer in the photo was “not beating Mr. Grossman,” but rather telling angry Palestinians to move away from the man–even though the original caption had not accused the officer of doing anything to Grossman. (The caption had simply said “an Israeli policeman and a wounded Palestinian.”) The correction apologized for having “omitted an explanation of the scene” of the photograph.

Apparently even these two corrections were not sufficient. The Times also ran a 670-word news article about the incident (10/7/00), tracing the caption error from its genesis in the AP’s Jerusalem newsroom to the New York Times and the other newspapers. The Times reprinted the original photo beside the article, this time with an accurate caption.

The word is out: Any U.S. journalist, columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public official or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite by the well-oiled Israeli lobby and its supporters. And any who dare speak truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict aren’t simply vilified: Many have been threatened with death, some have been fired from their jobs; others’ families have been driven from their homes. Every effort is made to silence these voices and suppress discussion of what Israel is actually doing to the Palestinian people.

Israel’s defenders have a special vengeance for Jews who don’t fall in line behind Sharon’s scorched earth policy because they give the lie to the charge that Israel’s critics are simply anti-Semites. Adam Shapiro, whose family is Jewish, is an International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist who has been working in the West Bank for several years. As a member of Seeds of Peace, he works with Jews and Palestinians to create better understanding between them.

All hell broke loose on March 29, 2002, Good Friday, when Shapiro seized a rare opportunity on CNN to sketch out some of the savage realities of the Israeli occupation and remind people that it is heavily financed by U.S. tax dollars. Shapiro found himself trapped inside Yasser Arafat’s compound after the Israelis had surrounded it and opened fire. “The Sharon government sometimes will apologize after it kills an innocent civilian,” Shapiro told CNN from the besieged compound, “but it does not apologize for raping the cities and for going in and carrying out terrorist actions, going house to house much like the Nazis did in World War II, tearing holes through the walls, roughing up people, killing people, assassinating people. This is a terrorist government funded, by the way, by the United States government to the tune of $3 billion a year in U.S. military aid. These are American helicopters and tanks and F-16s doing this damage to the Palestinian people.”

The response to Shapiro’s CNN appearance was swift and cruel. On April 1st, the New York Post, launched its opening salvo with a series of scathing attacks on Shapiro and his family. Overnight, Shapiro became the “Jewish Taliban,” and his family was characterized in bold print as vile “traitors” to the Israeli cause. Pro-lsraeli forces then widely distributed the Shapiros’ home address, and his family was besieged by smears and threats. According to Shapiro, his parents-who publicly supported him-were forced to flee their home in Brooklyn and to seek police protection. “My father, who is a New York public high school teacher and a part time teacher at the Yeshiva [Jewish Day School], was informed that he was fired from his job at the Yeshiva, without any reason or grounds,” Shapiro told me. Shapiro’s brother Noah said, “…the threats my parents and I are receiving are severe death threats, calling for our death, calling for my brother’s death, calling for him to burn in hell in a fiery death.”

Then there’s the case of Livi Regenbaum Saleh, a former reporter for the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. She’s convinced she lost her job for marrying a Palestinian and is now suing the paper for discrimination. Regenbaum’s boss gave her stories “rave reviews” and “good comments,” until he found out that she’d married a Palestinian. “Then unfortunately, I got married.” Regenbaum-Saleh told me in an April 30th interview, “and I told my boss my husband’s name and he asked me how to spell it. The next day I was called into his boss’s office and fired.”

Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor and founder of Tkkun Magazine and a biting critic of Israel’s occupation, has also been repeatedly attacked and threatened. “I certainly get lots of death threats every single day and I get lots of disgusting attacks,” says Lerner. “Americans are attacked for merely raising questions, or not being enthusiastic enough for Israeli policies. You hear Bush’s line repeated a thousand times: ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”‘ Lerner says he knows rabbis and prominent members of the Jewish community who are terrified of speaking out and being vilified as traitors to Israel. “Even [Jewish] parents say this kind of stuff to their kids, if they ask ‘what about the Palestinians, weren’t they there first?”‘

TARGETING THE PRESS

Lerner notes that pro-lsraeli forces have methodically gone after the media-leading many a news editor or TV producer to think twice before putting an Adam Shapiro or a Michael Lerner on to discuss Israel and Palestine. “These people,” says Lerner, “call up the media day after day. When they hear a Michael Lerner getting quoted in the Los Angeles Times, you know the editor, the assignment editor, the author of the article, everybody is going to be receiving 20-30 phone calls of complaints. “

As the Jewish host of “Flashpoints,” a daily news magazine on Pacifica Radio, I know just what Rabbi Lerner is talking about. We’ve reported extensively on the punishing cruelties and apartheid character of Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza, including its program of ethnically purging the Palestinian population. And for this reporting, we have been viciously attacked.

Here’s a sample. I received the following e-mail after noting that my grandfather was a revered Orthodox Rabbi of international prominence. “Dennis spare us this crap about your family. If your grandfather knew that you-Dennis the homosexual- was slandering Israel and the Jewish community in the U.S. daily on KPFA [he wouldn't support you]…Jewish blood is on your hands; you are known as anti-Semite by the Jewish community in Berkeley.”

Of course, labeling me anti-Semitic is about as accurate as Bush’s Orwellian characterization of Sharon as a “man of peace” at the height of the Jenin onslaught. My grandfather not only wrote and interpreted prayers and blessed Matzo (his name appeared on the Matzo boxes), but I am told by my mother that he also helped rescue Jews from pre-war Nazi Germany. When my mother was a teenager, her job was to help those he brought to the U.S. get their papers and find places to live. My uncle, the late Dr. Leo Pfeffer, was special counsel to the American Jewish Congress and a leading constitutional authority on the separation of church and state.

But this history matters little to Israel’s unquestioning defenders. They are simply out to quash on-the-ground, truthful coverage from Occupied Palestine. And the more blatant and extreme Israel’s atrocities, the greater their frenzied determination to suppress coverage of it.

During Israel’s March and April invasion of the West Bank, “Flashpoints” did over 100 interviews with people on the scene. We spoke with people inside Yasser Arafat’s compound, talked with people in Jenin while Israeli tanks were rolling in, and spoke daily with those inside Bethlehem’s besieged Church of the Nativity. These interviews made it possible for us to paint a picture of what was really going on, in contrast to the mainstream media’s pro-lsrael bias and its refusal to expose the full extent of Israel’s scorched earth policy. Invariably, after these reports, I received e-mail and phone call attacks far more vicious and hateful than any I’ve received in 20 years of reporting. Some were quite personal and specific, and clearly meant to spook me and derail my work. The e-mail attacks were most vicious after Israel had carried out or was about to carry out a particularly violent operation-such as the assault on and collective punishment of civilians in the Jenin refugee camp.

One particularly troubling account came from Chivvis Moore, an American teacher at Birzeit University in Ramallah, who managed to get into the Jenin camp just after it had been ravaged by Israeli tanks and U.S.-made Apache attack helicopters. “There are dead bodies and the smell of dead bodies throughout the camp,” Moore reported. “I have seen people who were burned to death after their houses had missiles dropped on them or some kind of explosive thrown through the walls. These people are burned sometimes down to the skeleton. Many people here are buried under the rubble, but that rubble is not simply the rubble of a house that was crashed down, that was destroyed. It’s rubble created by bulldozers that came after the destruction and that have turned over the earth so that now we found one foot in one place and one foot in another place six yards away from one another in a way that would probably not have occurred had it just been a death caused by the falling of a house.”

Immediately after Moore’s report “AdolfHitler@ss.org” e-mailed me: “You mother-f…ing-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl style, AMEN!!!”

Homicidebomber@killajew.org added: “Dennis, keep up the good work. It gives me more power to commit more Passover massacres. Thank you!!” After an especially compelling interview with Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, I received the following gem from “terror@plo.gov”: “Thanks for your support. God willing we will kill all the f…ing Jews in the world.” And soon after Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was killed and savagely beheaded, I began to receive e-mails that purported to be from “danielpearl@wsj.com,” such as: “A good Jew like me is dead, headless and cut to pieces…a mother f…ing asshole like you lives in Luxury in Berkeley. What the f… is wrong with this picture?”

Israel and its supporters strike hardest at those whose work reaches the widest audiences. There is perhaps no other journalist in the West who more vividly conveys the realities of Israel’s actions than Robert Fisk, an award-winning reporter for the London Independent, based in Beirut, Lebanon. Fisk was recently threatened by none other than Hollywood heavyweight, John Malkovich.

In a May 14th column titled “Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?” Fisk writes, “In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me. How, I ask myself, did it come to this? Slowly but surely, the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement into death threats, the walls of propriety and legality gradually pulled down so that a reporter can be abused, his family defamed, his beating at the hands of an angry crowd greeted with laughter and insults in the pages of an American newspaper, his life cheapened and made vulnerable by an actor who-without even saying why, says he wants to kill me. Much of this disgusting nonsense comes from men and women who say they are defending Israel,” wrote Fisk. Fisk received a recent e-mail that proclaimed “Your mother was Eichmann’s daughter.” “My mother Peggy,” he responded, “who died after a long battle with Parkinson’s three and a half years ago, was in fact an RAF radio repair operator on Spitfires at the height of the Battle of Britain in 1940.”

Unquestionably, such attacks are the work of an organized campaign, not a few independent crazies. Frank Rich, a columnist of Jewish descent for the New York Times and a strong supporter of Israel, wrote on May 11th that just about every major and mid-size news organization is now being accused of being proPalestinian simply for reporting some of Israel’s most egregious attacks and carrying some Palestinian perspectives. Rich notes, “just a partial list of those targeted by protesters for alleged pro-Palestinian bias includes, in addition to the Times and the Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee, ‘Nightline’: well, you get the idea…Even now the nation’s foremost Jewish newspaper, the Forward, is fielding not just subscription cancellations but threats for accepting an ad for Jews Against the Occupation, according to its editor, J.J. Goldberg.”

Los Angeles Times media writer David Shaw stated in an April 28th piece on the subject that “major Jewish organizations and other supporters of Israel in this country have increasingly bombarded newspapers in recent weeks with charges of biased reporting.” According to Shaw, nearly 1,000 subscribers to the Los Angeles Times suspended home delivery for one day to protest what they called inaccurate reporting.

BURYING KEY STORIES

Today, more than ever, the U.S. media are taking their marching orders from the Bush administration, and its coverage is largely shaped by the so-called “war on terror.” And Israel and its supporters are waging an unrelenting campaign to cloak their actions in the rubric of “anti-terrorism,” while suppressing coverage of the real impact and motivations of its “security” operations.

This is why stories about thousands of house demolitions-where Palestinian families are given 15 minutes to move out of houses they’ve lived in for generations and then the house and everything inside is reduced to rubble in a few terrifying seconds right before their eyes-are rarely seen.

When have we read coverage of settlers stoning Palestinian children on their way to school, or attacking them with dogs-Bull Connor style-while Israeli soldiers stand by?

How often do stories run about the massive expansion of illegal settlements, or on how these settlements are used as IDF military outposts, and for jailing and interrogating illegally arrested Palestinians?

And what about exposure of the politics of water-the most vital resource in the Middle East-and how it is controlled and abused by settlers, while Palestinians are often left high and dry? And consider some of the stories suppressed or ignored by the mainstream media.

STORIES TOO HOT TO HANDLE

The Jewish Forward was not attacked simply for accepting a few ads against Israel’s occupation. It was attacked because on March 15th it published two explosive stories concerning Israeli spy rings in the U.S., and the withholding of evidence regarding the 9/11 attacks.

In one story, the Forward reported that two out of the five Israeli “moving men” arrested in New Jersey eight hours after the Twin Towers attacks were Mossad agents. They had been arrested after witnesses reported a group of men were “acting strangely” as they watched Manhattan’s Twin Towers burn from the roof of a New Jersey warehouse. The paper quoted a former high-ranking intelligence official that “Urban Moving Systems [the moving company for which the arrested men were working] was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it.”

A number of potentially incriminating items were found at the time of the arrests-some in the men’s possession, some in the moving van they were driving. “In addition to their strange behavior… suspicions were compounded when… $4,000 in cash were found in the van. Moreover, one man carried two passports and another had fresh pictures of the men standing with the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background.”

In a separate story, the Forward reported on an alleged network of Israeli spies posing as art students and collectors. According to the New York-based weekly, …a preliminary DEA report stated that more than 100 were arrested, most/y in California, Florida and Texas…The report said they tried to penetrate several government facilities, including the Tinker Air Base in Oklahoma City where AWACS surveillance planes and many B-1 bombers are repaired. The draft report allegedly states that most of the students questioned acknowledged serving in military intelligence, electronic-signals interception or explosive-ordnance units.

“The news picked up steam after it was relayed and amplified by Le Monde,” notes the Forward:

In its own reporting, Le Monde added that Israeli spies may have been trailing Al Qaeda members in the United States without informing Washington. Le Monde noted that more than one-third of the Israelis under investigation lived in Florida, which served as a temporary home base to at /east 10 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks. Those elements, Le Monde wrote, support ‘the thesis according to which Israel did not share with the U.S. all the elements it had about the planning of the September 11 attacks.’

Where might all this lead if a major news organization devoted serious resources to following the trail?

Then there is the explosive revelation that the U.S. military was in Israel during the height of the Jenin attacks to learn something about contemporary urban bulldozer warfare and house to house searches.

U.S. MILITARY IN JENIN

In its May 31 edition, the Marine Corps Times, a weekly that serves soldiers and their families, reported that …while Israeli forces were engaged in what many termed a brutal-some even say criminal-campaign to crush Palestinian militants and terrorist cells in West Bank towns, U.S. military officials were in Israel seeing what they could learn from that urban fight.

It is not yet clear whether Pentagon representatives were on the scene in Jenin, but the fact that they were nearby taking notes puts the lie to any notion that the U.S. is a neutral party. That this went unreported in the U.S. press is astounding.

Just weeks after the atrocities in Jenin, a senior Israeli Defense Force intelligence officer visited the United States to watch U.S. Marines experiment with new urban warfare tactics. The Marine Corps Times quoted Marine U. Col. Dave Booth, who oversees the Marine Corps-lsraeli Defense Force exchanges: We’re interested in what they’re developing, especially since Sept. 11. We’re interested in their past experience in fighting terrorism. So there’s a lot of things we could learn from them.

It speaks volumes about U.S. media coverage that such stories are rarely reported-and that Congress’s allocation of an additional $200 million in aid to Israel following its bloody attack on Jenin goes unquestioned. Meanwhile, right-wing politicians and columnists, along with Israeli spokespeople and lobbyists, are regularly given a forum to ruminate on solutions to Israel’s “Palestinian problem,” ranging from the mass murder of the families of suspected militants and suicide bombers to the pros and cons of assassinating Yasser Arafat. None other than House Majority Leader Dick Armey (Rep.Tex.) called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which is now being widely talked about in Israel, where it is euphemistically called “transfer.”

In this atmosphere, the unthinkable becomes totally acceptable. Consider the following: Attorney Nathan Lewin is an outspoken supporter of Israel’s clenched fist policies against Palestinians and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Lewin suggested in a recent article for the on-line ‘zine, Sh’ma, that Israel not only target militants, but their families as well. Lewin writes that since most “terrorists” have “closely knit” families… what if Israel and the United States announced that henceforth the perpetrators of all suicide attacks would be treated as if they had brought their parents and brothers and sisters with them to the site of the explosion? Suicide killers should know that they will take the lives of not only themselves and the many people they don’t know… but also the lives of their parents, brothers, and sisters.

Despite the vicious tactics of the Israeli lobby, Palestinians on the ground and their supporters in the U.S. say they have no intention of backing down. Many in the International Solidarity Movement see themselves as carrying on the civil rights traditions of the 1960s or following in the footsteps of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, whose members went to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists in the 1930s. They say they will not be intimidated by Israel or its bullying supporters and will stand up for justice. They’re organizing a “Freedom Summer,” modeled after the civil rights movement’s Freedom Summer organizing in the South during the 1960s.

“I will stand against this brutal occupation until they put me in the ground,” says Barbara Lubin, founder of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, which supports the building of cultural centers, clinics, and playgrounds in occupied Palestine. “And every time the Israelis blow up a playground or center or ransack a clinic, I’ll be back there rebuilding it with my bare hands if I have to.”

For every e-mail I receive threatening me for my Palestine coverage, I receive five others in support. They come from across the spectrum-from Holocaust survivors, from devout Muslims, and from Jews; from people of different ages, nationalities, and political perspectives. One Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote “Dear Dennis, I don’t know how to thank you…l have cried every day, and been enraged, over the horrendous reports from the West Bank.”

One young woman wrote that “Flashpoints” inspired her to activism. Yours is the voice I turn to each day to find caring, unyielding truth. I am frightened and outraged by the U.S. government’s stance regarding the invasion and destruction of Palestine. I am equally disturbed by the distortion and annihilating silence in the newspapers and other media I have surveyed outside of KPFA. I have been shaken out of my inactive stupor by your urgency My baby steps in activism, while small, are dedicated to you and all those whom you love and support each day.

One Muslim wrote: After I heardyou for the first time on the radio, you signed off and I turned to my husband and said, did he say Bernstein? Is he Jewish? I commend you for building bridges between the Muslim faith and yours, and giving me hope that there are more people like you and that someday we Jews, Muslims, Christians can live in peaceful co-existence.

One “disaffected Jew” shared his letter to the April 12, 2002, edition of the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California:

The moral high ground held by Jews as the premier victims of atrocities has forever been bulldozed by Sharon and his storm-troopers’ fantasies that a civilian population can be bludgeoned into submission are simplistic, not to mention not worthy of Jews. Sharon’s brutality cannot succeed. Palestinians will only resist more, as they have little /left to lose. Israel will not have peace until its right wing is forced to give back the Occupied Territories. American Jews would be wise to pressure Israel to pull back. This is no time for uncritical support.

Despite the best efforts of Israel and its U.S. shock troops, many more eyes are being opened to Israel’s brutality, and many, many people are questioning just what is going on in the Middle East-why are the Palestinian people resisting so desperately, and just what role is the U.S. really playing in the region?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dennis Bemstein is producer and host of the radio news magazine “Flashpoints,” heard regularly on Pacifica Network stations KPFA in Berkeley and KPFT in Houston. He is an award-winning investigative reporter specializing in coverage of U.S. national security and human rights issues. Contact the author at: www. flashpoints. net.