KK-Fourm,
fra Independent den 13. des.
Knut Rognes
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Robert Fisk: I am being vilified for telling the truth about Palestinians
'The abuse being directed at anyone who dares to criticise Israel is
reaching McCarthyite proportions'
13 December 2000
In the Middle East jungle, a journalist has to expect a few sticks and
stones. A Bahrain newspaper cartoonist once depicted me as a rabid dog
(fit, of course, for extermination), and Cairo's most lickspittle columnist
called me "a crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt".
But the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at anyone –
academic, analyst, reporter – who dares to criticise Israel (or dares to
tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching McCarthyite
proportions. Take Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian academic who is a
professor at Columbia University.
He has been facing unprecedented abuse from the Zionist Organisation of
America, which last year demanded that he be fired from the Modern Language
Association and which now demands on an almost daily basis his dismissal
from his professorship at Columbia – solely because he points out, with
clinical ferocity and painful accuracy, the historical tragedy of
Palestinian dispossession, the brutality of Israel's continued occupation
and the bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement. Columbia University has
issued an unprecedented public defence of Said and "the fundamental values
of a great university", quoting John Stuart Mill and adding that to give
way to the Jewish lobby's demand would be "a threat to us all and to
academic freedom".
Too true. Noam Chomsky – himself Jewish – is one of the most profound
philosophers of our age, but his scathing reviews of the Israeli occupation
and America's blind, unquestioning support for Israel now earn him ever
more ruthless abuse. In the United States, he wrote recently, a whole
population is kept in ignorance of the facts because "the economic and and
military programmes (of Israel) rely crucially on US support, which is
domestically unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes were known."
Ignorance of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered to in the US that
only a few tiny newspapers report anything other than Israel's point of
view. You won't find Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put very well by
Charlie Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel – note the
boondocks location – when he wrote that "Palestinians won't get their
independence until Americans get theirs".
But the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is now
international. We must say that Israel is under siege by Palestinians
(rather than occupying Palestinian land), that Palestinians are responsible
for the violence (even though Palestinians are the principal victims), that
Arafat turned down a good deal at Camp David (though he was offered just
over 60 per cent of his land, not 94 per cent), and that Palestinians
indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why the Israeli troops
have shot so many Palestinian children).
Israeli ambassadors and Israel's lobbyists have never been such frequent
visitors to European newspaper offices, to complain about reports or
reporters, sometimes in a quite disgraceful manner. The Johannesburg Star –
a sister paper of The Independent which carries my own Middle East reports
– was confronted by one pro-Israeli group this year which claimed that I
was in some way assisting the right-wing historian David Irving – someone I
have never met and never wish to meet. They subsequently withdrew their
allegation.
Then an odd thing happened in Ireland – at a prize-giving ceremony in
memory of a Belfast journalist. Mark Sofer, Israel's ambassador in Dublin,
had been invited to talk about reporting in conflict zones to journalism
students under the auspices of Co-operation Ireland, a charitable movement
dedicated to North-South relations. But at one point he chose to use the
opportunity to attack my own reporting of the Middle East, to suggest that
it should not be read or believed. Mr Sofer is, of course, entitled to his
views – but not to air his prejudices in a charitable forum without
allowing a right of reply. The charity has since announced that it "totally
dissociates itself" from the ambassador's remarks. So it should.
And yet it goes on. In South Africa, in Europe, in Australia – I still
treasure the five pages of abuse in an Australian lobby group's magazine
headlined "The Ignoble Scribe" and accusing me of a "stupor of
self-deception". Oddly, you can now learn more from the Israeli press than
the American media. The brutality of Israeli soldiers is fully covered in
Ha'aretz, which also reports on the large number of US negotiators who are
Jewish. Four years ago, a former Israeli soldier described in an Israeli
newspaper how his men had looted a village in southern Lebanon; when the
piece was reprinted in The New York Times, the looting episode was censored
out of the text.
So here's just one final question. If Arab ambassadors and lobbyists
behaved like their Israeli opposite numbers, would we listen to them? Would
we respect them? Would we run for cover and print only one side of the
story? Would we hell.
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