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Journalists under fire- Robert Fisk
bhaloo
01/01/03 at 23:01:54
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Journalists under fire for telling the truth -by Robert Fisk


First it was Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel,
who advised the US President to take the "harshest measures
possible" against those who attacked America on 11 September,
2001.

Let us forget, for a moment, that Fox News's Jerusalem
bureau chief is Uri Dan, a friend of Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon and the author of the preface of the new edition
of Sharon's autobiography, which includes a revolting account
of the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinian civilians
and Sharon's innocence in this slaughter.


Then Ted Koppel, one of America's leading news anchormen,
announced that it may be a journalist's duty not to reveal
events until the military want them revealed in a new war
against Iraq. Can we go any further in journalistic cowardice?

Oh yes, we can. ABC television announced, a little while ago,
that it knew all about the killing of four al-Qa'ida members by
an unmanned "Predator" plane in Yemen but delayed broadcasting
the news for four days "at the request of the Pentagon."

So now at least we know for whom ABC works. The Pentagon said that
the murdered men - and let's not lose sight of the "murdered" bit,
though that's not the word ABC used - were between "two to 20"
of the top ranks of al-Qa'ida.

Really? So were they numbers two, three, four and five in
al-Qa'ida? Or numbers 17,18,19 and 20? Who cares? The press are
onside. Don't ask who is resisting forthcoming US censorship of
the Iraq war. Ask who is first to climb aboard the bandwagon.

In Canada, the situation is even worse. Canwest, owned by Israel
Asper, owns over 130 newspapers in Canada, including 14 city
dailies and one of the country's largest papers, the National Post.
His "journalists" have attacked colleagues who have deviated from
Mr Asper's pro-Israel editorials.

As Index on Censorship reported, Bill Marsden, an investigative
reporter for the Montreal Gazette has been monitoring Canwest's
interference with its own papers. "They do not want any criticism
of Israel," he wrote. "We do not run in our newspaper op-ed pieces
that express criticism of Israel and what it is doing in the Middle
East..." But now, "Izzy" Asper has written a gutless and repulsive
editorial in the Post in which he attacks his own journalists, falsely
accusing reporters of "lazy, sloppy or stupid" journalism and
being "biased or anti-Semitic".

These vile slanders are familiar to any reporter trying to do his
work on the ground in the Middle East. They are made even more
revolting by inaccuracies. Mr Asper, for example, claims that my
colleague Phil Reeves compared the Israeli killings in Jenin earlier
this year - which included a goodly few war crimes (the crushing
to death of a man in a wheelchair, for example) - to the
"killing fields of Pol Pot".

Now Mr Reeves has never mentioned Pol Pot. But Mr Asper wrongly claims
that he did. It gets worse. Mr Asper, whose "lazy, sloppy or stupid"
allegations against journalists in reality apply to himself, states -
in the address to an Israel Bonds Gala Dinner in Montreal, which
formed the basis of his preposterous article - that "in 1917,
Britain and the League of Nations declared, with world approval, that
a Jewish state would be established in Palestine".

Now hold on a moment. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 did not say that
a Jewish state would be established. It said that the British
government would "view with favour the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people." The British refused to
use the words "Jewish state". This may not matter much to lazy
writers like Mr Asper. But when it comes to the League of Nations
being involved, we really are into mythology.

The League of Nations was created after the First World War - had it
existed in 1917, it might have stopped the whole war - and Mr Asper
is simply wrong (or, as he might have put it, "lazy, sloppy or
stupid") to suggest it existed in 1917. At no point, of course, does
Mr Asper tell us about Israeli occupation or the building of Jewish
settlements, for Jews and Jews only, upon Arab land. He talks about
"alleged Palestinian refugees" - about as wrongheaded a remark as
you can get - and then claims that the corrupt and foolish Yasser
Arafat is "one of the world's cruel and most vicious terrorists for
the past 30 years".


He concluded his speech to Israel's supporters in Montreal with the
dangerous request that "you, the public, must take action against
the media wrongdoers". Wrongdoers? Is this far from President Bush's
"evildoers"? What in the hell is going on here? I will tell you.
Journalists are being attacked for telling the truth, for trying to
tell it how it is.

American journalists especially. I urge them to read a remarkable
new book published by the New York University Press and edited by
John Collins and Ross Glover. It's called Collateral Language and is,
in its own words, intended to expose "the tyranny of political
rhetoric". Its chapter titles - "Anthrax", "Cowardice", "Evil",
"Freedom", Fundamentalism", "Justice", "Terrorism", Vital Interests"
and - my favourite - "The War on..." (fill in the missing country)
tell it all.

Meanwhile, rest assured, the journalists are getting onside, to tell
you the story the government wants you to hear.

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           Robert Fisk writes for the Independent.
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