Stop me if you're bored...
Apr. 17th, 2002 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixandreaI'll probably ignore you anyway, its important to me to get this stuff out into the public domain...
Robert Fisk: Fear and learning in America
As an outspoken critic of US policy in the Middle East, Fisk expected a
hostile reception when he paid his first visit to the American Midwest since
11 September. He couldn't have been more mistaken
17 April 2002
Independent
Osama bin Laden once told me that Americans did not understand the Middle
East. Last week, in a little shuttle bus shouldering its way through
curtains of rain across the Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the Des
Moines Register and realised that he might be right. "BIG HOG LOTS CALLED
GREATER THREAT THAN BIN LADEN," announced the headline. Iowa's 15 million
massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure that the state waterways are
polluted. "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United
States and US democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says
Robert F Kennedy Junior, president of... a New York environment group...
'We've watched communities and American values shattered by these bullies,'
Kennedy said..." I took out my pocket calculator and did a little maths.
Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000 miles from Afghanistan. Another planet,
more like.
I've been travelling to the United States for years, lecturing at Princeton
or Harvard or Brown University, Rhode Island, or San Francisco, or Madison,
Wisconsin. God knows why. I refuse all payment and take just a
business-class round trip from Beirut because I can't take 14 hours of
screaming babies in each direction. American college students are tough as
nails and bored as cabbages, and in some cities – Washington is top of the
list – I might as well talk in Amharic. If you don't use phrases like "peace
process", "back on track" or "Israel under siege", there's a kind of
computerised blackout on the faces of the audience. Total Disk Failure. Why
should my latest bout of Americana have been any different?
Sure, there were the usual oddballs. There was the old black guy whose first
"question" on the Middle East in a Chicago University lecture theatre was a
long and proud announcement that he hadn't paid taxes to the IRS since
1948 – a claim so wonderful that I forbore the usual threat to close down on
him. There were the World Trade Centre conspiracists who insisted that the
US government had planted explosives in the twin towers. There was the
silver-haired lady who wanted to know why God couldn't be made to resolve
the hatred between Israelis and Palestinians. And a Native American Indian
in Los Angeles who ranted on about a Jewish plot to deprive his people of
their land. A bespectacled man with long white hair in a ponytail shut him
up before declaring that the Israeli-Palestinian war was identical to the
American-Mexican war that deprived his own people of... well, of Los
Angeles. I began to calculate the distance between LA and Jenin. A galaxy
perhaps.
And there were the little tell-tale stories that showed just how biased and
gutless the American press has become in the face of America's Israeli lobby
groups. "I wrote a report for a major paper about the Palestinian exodus of
1948," a Jewish woman told me as we drove through the smog of downtown LA.
"And of course, I mentioned the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin by
the Stern Gang and other Jewish groups – the massacre that prompted 750,000
Arabs to flee their homes. Then I look for my story in the paper and what do
I find? The word 'alleged' has been inserted before the word 'massacre'. I
called the paper's ombudsman and told him the massacre at Deir Yassin was a
historical fact. Can you guess his reply? He said that the editor had
written the word 'alleged' before 'massacre' because that way he thought
he'd avoid lots of critical letters."
By chance, this was the theme of my talks and lectures: the cowardly, idle,
spineless way in which American journalists are lobotomising their stories
from the Middle East, how the "occupied territories" have become "disputed
territories" in their reports, how Jewish "settlements" have been
transformed into Jewish "neighbourhoods", how Arab militants are
"terrorists" but Israeli militants only "fanatics" or "extremists", how
Ariel Sharon – the man held "personally responsible" by Israel's own
commissioner's inquiry for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700
Palestinians – could be described in a report in The New York Times as
having the instincts of "a warrior". How the execution of surviving
Palestinian fighters was so often called "mopping up". How civilians killed
by Israeli soldiers were always "caught in the crossfire". I demanded to
know of my audiences – and I expected the usual American indignation when I
did – how US citizens could accept the infantile "dead or alive", "with us
or against us", axis-of-evil policies of their President.
And for the first time in more than a decade of lecturing in the United
States, I was shocked. Not by the passivity of Americans – the
all-accepting, patriotic notion that the President knows best – nor by the
dangerous self-absorption of the United States since 11 September and the
constant, all-consuming fear of criticising Israel. What shocked me was the
extraordinary new American refusal to go along with the official line, the
growing, angry awareness among Americans that they were being lied to and
deceived. At some of my talks, 60 per cent of the audiences were over 40. In
some cases, perhaps 80 per cent were Americans with no ethnic or religious
roots in the Middle East – "American Americans", as I cruelly referred to
them on one occasion, "white Americans", as a Palestinian student called
them more truculently. For the first time, it wasn't my lectures they
objected to, but the lectures they received from their President and the
lectures they read in their press about Israel's "war on terror" and the
need always, uncritically, to support everything that America's little
Middle Eastern ally says and does.
There was, for example, the crinkly-faced, ex-naval officer who approached
me after a talk at a United Methodist church in the San Diego suburb of
Encinitas. "Sir, I was an officer on the aircraft carrier John F Kennedy
during the 1973 Middle East war," he began. (I checked him out later and he
was, as my host remarked, "for real".) "We were stationed off Gibraltar and
our job was to refuel the fighter jets we were sending to Israel after their
air force was shot to bits by the Arabs. Our planes would land with their
USAF and Marine markings partly stripped off and the Star of David already
painted on the side. Does anyone know why we gave all those planes to the
Israelis just like that? When I see on television our planes and our tanks
used to attack Palestinians, I can understand why people hate Americans."
In the United States, I'm used to lecturing in half-empty lecture halls.
Three years ago, I managed to fill a Washington auditorium seating 600 with
just 32 Americans. But in Chicago and Iowa and Los Angeles this month, they
came in their hundreds – almost 900 at one venue at the University of
Southern California – and they sat in the aisles and corridors and outside
the doors. It wasn't because Lord Fisk was in town. Maybe the title of my
talk – "September 11: ask who did it, but for heaven's sake don't ask why" –
was provocative. But for the most part they came, as the question-and-answer
sessions quickly revealed, because they were tired of being suckered by the
television news networks and the right-wing punditocracy.
Never before have I been asked by Americans: "How can we make our press
report the Middle East fairly?" or – much more disturbingly – "How can we
make our government reflect our views?" The questions are a trap, of course.
Brits have been shoving advice at the United States ever since we lost the
War of Independence, and I wasn't going to join their number. But the fact
that these questions could be asked – usually by middle-aged Americans with
no family origins in the Middle East – suggested a profound change in a
hitherto docile population.
Towards the end of each talk, I apologised for the remarks I was about to
make. I told audiences that the world did not change on 11 September, that
the Lebanese and Palestinians had lost 17,500 dead during Israel's 1982
invasion – more than five times the death toll of the international crimes
against humanity of 11 September – but the world did not change 20 yearsago.
There were no candles lit then, no memorial services. And each time I said
this, there was a nodding of heads – grey-haired and balding as well as
young – across the room. The smallest irreverent joke about President Bush
was often met with hoots of laughter. I asked one of my hosts why this
happened, why the audience accepted this from a Briton. "Because we don't
think Bush won the election," she replied.
Of course, it's easy to be fooled. The first local radio shows illustrated
all too well how the Middle East discourse is handled in America. When
Gayane Torosyan opened WSUI/KSUI for questions in Iowa City, a caller named
"Michael" – a leader of the local Jewish community, I later learnt, though
he did not say this on air – insisted that after the Camp David talks in
2000, Yasser Arafat had turned to "terrorism" despite being offered a
Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem and 96 per cent of the West
Bank and Gaza. Slowly and deliberately, I had to deconstruct this nonsense.
Jerusalem was to have remained the "eternal and unified capital of Israel",
according to Camp David. Arafat would only have got what Madeleine Albright
called "a sort of sovereignty" over the Haram al-Sharif mosque area and some
Arab streets, while the Palestinian parliament would have been below the
city's eastern walls at Abu Dis. With the vastly extended and illegal
Jerusalem municipality boundaries deep into the West Bank, Jewish
settlements like Maale Adumim were not up for negotiation; nor were several
other settlements. Nor was the 10-mile Israeli military buffer zone around
the West Bank, nor the settlers' roads, which would razor through the
Palestinian "state". Arafat was offered about 46 per cent of the 22 per cent
of Palestine that was left. I could imagine the audience of WSUI/KSUI
falling slowly from their seats in boredom.
Yet back at my folksy, wooden-walled hotel, the proprietor and his wife – P
Force volunteers in the Kennedy era – had listened to every word. "We know
what is going on," he said. "I was a naval officer in the Gulf back in the
Sixties and we only had few ships there then. In those days, the Shah of
Iran was our policeman. Now we've got all those ships in there and our
soldiers in the Arab countries and we seem to dominate the place." Osama bin
Laden, I said to myself, couldn't put it better.
How odd, I reflected, that American newspapers can scarcely say even this.
The Daily Iowan – there are no fewer than four dailies in Iowa City, press
freedom being represented by the number of newspapers rather than their
depth of coverage – had none of my hotel landlord's forthrightness. "The
situation in the Middle East is one that many Americans do not adequately
understand," it miserably lamented, "nor can they be reasonably articulate
about it." This rubbish – that Americans were too dumb to comprehend the
Middle East bloodbath and should therefore keep their mouths shut – was a
pervasive theme in editorials. Even more instructive were the reports of my
own lectures.
The headline, "Fisk: Who really are the terrorists?" in the Daily Iowan last
week at least caught the gist of my message, and included my own examples of
American press bias in the Middle East, although it failed on the facts,
wrongly reporting that it was the United Nations (rather than the far more
persuasive Israeli Kahan Commission) which concluded that Sharon was
"personally responsible" for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. The Des Moines
Register's account of one of my talks was intriguing. It concentrated on my
interviews with Osama bin Laden – which I had indeed mentioned in my
lecture – and then referred to my account of how an Afghan crowd beat me up
last December. I had told the American audience that the Afghans were
outraged by US bombing raids that had just killed their relatives around
Kandahar and how important it had been to include this fact in my own report
of the fray – to give context and reason to the Afghan attack on me. The
Register used my words to describe the attack but then itself made no
mention of the reasons. Long live, I thought, the Iowa City Press-Citizen,
whose own headline – "Middle East reporter slams media" – got the point.
It's not that Iowans have any excuse to be unaware of the Middle East. In
the small town of Davenport, Israelis have been trained in the systems of
the Apache AH-64 attack helicopters used to assassinate Palestinians on
Israel's wanted list. According to one local journalist, several Iowa
companies, including the regional office of Rockwell, have been involved in
military contracts worth millions of dollars with Israel. CemenTech of
Indianola supplies equipment to the Israeli air force. The day I arrived in
Iowa City, John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, was telling Iowans that a
hundred foreign nationals "from countries known as home to terrorists" had
been interrogated in the state. Another hundred were likely to be
"interviewed" soon. There was no editorial comment on this.
So Iowa University classes were absorbing. One young woman began by
announcing that she knew the American media were biased. When I asked why,
she said that "it has to do with America's support for Israel..." and then,
red-faced, she dried up. Not so the student in Rex Honey's global studies
class. After I had outlined the military trap into which the Americans had
been lured in Afghanistan – the supposed "victory" followed by further
engagements with al-Qa'ida and then, inevitably, daily battles with Afghan
warlords and sniping attacks on Western troops – he put his hand up. "So how
do we beat them?" he asked. There was a gentle ripple of laughter through
the room. "Why do you want to 'beat' the Afghans," I asked? "Why not help
them build a new land?" The student came up to me afterwards, hand
outstretched. "I want to thank you, sir, for all you told us," he said. I
had a suspicion he was a military man. Are you planning to join the army, I
asked? "No, sir," he replied. "I'm going to join the Marines."
I advised him to stay clear of Afghanistan. In its own way, the American
national press was doing the same. Two days later, the Los Angeles Times, in
a remarkable dispatch from its correspondent David Zucchino, reported on the
bitterness and anger among Afghans whose families had been killed in United
States B-52 bomber raids. The recent American battle in Gardez, the report
said, had left "bitterness in its wake".
If only the same bluntness was applied to the Palestinian-Israeli war. Alas,
no. On the freeway past Long Beach on Friday, I opened the LA Times to be
told that Israel "mops up [sic] in the West Bank", while the syndicated
columnist Mona Charen was telling readers in other papers that "98 per cent
of Palestinians have not been living under occupation since Israel pulled
out under the Oslo accords" and that the Israeli Prime Minister at the time,
Ehud Barak, had offered Arafat "97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza". This
was 1 per cent higher even than the statistic from "Michael" on WSUI/KSUI
radio. Arafat – "this murderer with the deaths of thousands of Jews and
Arabs on his hands" – was to blame. The issue between Israel and her
neighbours, Charen contended, "is not occupation, it is not settlements and
it certainly is not Israeli brutality and aggression. It is the Arabs'
inability to live peacefully with others".
Maybe California is organically different from the rest of the United
States, but its journalists as well as its students seemed a tad smarter
than the Midwest of America. The Orange County Register, a traditionally
conservative newspaper in an area that is now 50 per cent Latino, has been
trying to tell the truth about the Middle East and was carrying a tough
feature by Holger Jensen, which warned that if President Bush didn't rein in
Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister "will succeed where Osama bin Laden
failed: forcing us into a war of civilisations against 1.2 billion Muslims".
When I lunched with senior editorial staff, they invited three members of
the Orange County Muslim community to join them.
Cocktails with friends of the Methodist church revealed a sane grasp of the
Middle East – one of them was deeply disturbed by a recent remark by
Israel's Internal Security Minister, Uzi Landau, who had said that "we're
not facing human beings, but rather beasts". A black guest commended the UN
secretary general Kofi Annan's criticism of Israel. Yet when I flipped on
Fox News, there was Benjamin Netanyahu out-Sharoning Sharon, declaring that
Palestinian suicide bombers would soon be prowling America's streets,
meeting Congressmen to enlist their help in Israel's "war on terror", even
while the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was in Israel.
"Why Israel's Mission Must Continue," the New York Times's comment page
shouted on Friday. A long and tedious article on Israel's crusade against
"terror" by an Israeli army colonel, Nitsan Alon, included several of my
favourite cop-out phrases, including the stock reference to "a large number
of civilians" who were – yes – "caught in the crossfire".
By the time I was addressing the more bohemian denizens of an art club in
Los Angeles, the newspapers I was attacking were beginning to turn up. Mark
Kellner arrived to report for The Washington Times. "He's going to stitch up
everything you say," a friend remarked. "The Washington Times is to the
right of the Republican Party." We shall see.
But if my audiences had been largely made up of Americans without any Middle
East roots, the same could not be said of Sunday's cocktails at the home of
Stanley Sheinbaum, the philanthropist, art collector and libertarian – we
shall forget the period in which he helped to run the Los Angeles Police
Department – where my little speech was to set off some verbal
hand-grenades. Sheinbaum it was who met Syria's President Hafez el-Assad at
President Jimmy Carter's request, arranging Assad's extraordinary summit
with Carter in Geneva. "Tell me something good about yourself," he said to
me. Have you heard nothing good from anyone else, I enquired? "Nope," he
said.
But I liked Sheinbaum, a crusty, humorous man in his eighties who encourages
every liberal Jewish American to have his say about the Middle East. As the
lunchtime fog embraced the rose gardens and villas and swimming pools and
hills of Brentwood, up stepped Rabbi Haim dov Beliak to explain how he
intends to close down the bingo and gambling operations of one of America's
greatest Jewish settlement builders. "Call me when you get back to Beirut –
by all means write about it." As we scoffed Stanley Sheinbaum's strawberries
and sipped his fine Californian red wine, another rabbi approached. "You're
gonna have some hostile people in your audience," he said. "Just let 'em
hear the truth."
So I did. I talked about the cowardice of Secretary Powell, who dawdled his
way around the Mediterranean to give Sharon time to finish destroying the
Jenin refugee camp. I talked about the rotting bodies of Jenin and the
growing evidence that back in 1982 Sharon's troops handed the survivors of
the Sabra and Chatila massacre back to their Phalangist tormentors to be
killed. I said that Arafat was never offered 96 per cent of the West Bank at
Camp David. I advised the 100 or so people in the room to read the Israeli
journalist Amira Haas' courageous reports in Haaretz. I talked about the
squalor of the Palestinian camp. I talked of suicide bombings as "evil" but
suggested that Israel would never have security until it abided by UN
Security Council Resolution 252; that Israel would never have peace until it
abandoned all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan and East Jerusalem.
"I find it very difficult to ask you a question, because what you said made
me so angry," a woman began afterwards. Why did I not realise that the
Palestinians wanted to destroy all of Israel, that the right-of-return would
destroy the state? For an hour I explained the reality I saw in the Middle
East; an all-powerful Israel fighting an old-time colonial war. I talked
about the 1954-62 Algerian war, its brutality and cruelty, the French army's
torture and killings, the Algerians' slaughter of civilians, the frightening
parallels with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I talked about the
Palestinians who wanted, at the least, an admission of the injustice their
people had suffered in 1948, adding that there were Palestinians aplenty who
realised that financial compensation would have to suffice for most of those
refugees whose homes were in what is now Israel. I talked about Sharon and
his bloody record in Lebanon. And about the pressures of the Israeli lobby
in America, the fear of being labelled an anti-Semite, and the feeble
reporting of the Middle East.
A rabbi was the first to tell me afterwards that the Palestinians were
victims, that they should be given a real state. An old lady asked me for
the name of the best book on the Algerian war. I gave it to her; Alastair
Horne's A Savage War of Peace . A card was pushed into my hand. "Insightful
talk!" the owner had written at the bottom and – hate though I do the word
"insightful" – I couldn't help noticing that the name on the card was Yigal
Arens, the son of one of Israel's most ruthless right-wing ministers, who
had once informed me – in Beirut, back in 1982 – that Israel would "fight
forever" against Palestinian terror.
On the freeway to LAX afterwards, the terminals and control tower looming
through the Californian haze, I looked over Saturday's LA Times. A report on
page 12 revealed that the BBC's award-winning film on Sharon's involvement
in the Sabra and Chatila massacres had been dropped from a Canadian film
festival after protests from Jewish groups. The organisers had explained
that The Accused "could invite unwanted attention from interest groups" –
whatever that means. But a paragraph at the end of the report caught my
attention. "Sharon, who was the Israeli defence minister at the time,
allegedly facilitated the assault on the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps..."
There it was again. Allegedly? How many angry letters was that little lie
supposed to avoid? Allegedly indeed.
But on reflection, I didn't think the Americans I met would be fooled by
this. I didn't think my hotel proprietor would accept "allegedly". Nor the
old naval officer from the John F Kennedy. Nor the listeners to KSUI. Nor
even Stanley Sheinbaum. Yes, Osama bin Laden told me he thought Americans
didn't understand the Middle East. Maybe he was right then. But not any
more.
Robert Fisk: Fear and learning in America
As an outspoken critic of US policy in the Middle East, Fisk expected a
hostile reception when he paid his first visit to the American Midwest since
11 September. He couldn't have been more mistaken
17 April 2002
Independent
Osama bin Laden once told me that Americans did not understand the Middle
East. Last week, in a little shuttle bus shouldering its way through
curtains of rain across the Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the Des
Moines Register and realised that he might be right. "BIG HOG LOTS CALLED
GREATER THREAT THAN BIN LADEN," announced the headline. Iowa's 15 million
massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure that the state waterways are
polluted. "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United
States and US democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says
Robert F Kennedy Junior, president of... a New York environment group...
'We've watched communities and American values shattered by these bullies,'
Kennedy said..." I took out my pocket calculator and did a little maths.
Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000 miles from Afghanistan. Another planet,
more like.
I've been travelling to the United States for years, lecturing at Princeton
or Harvard or Brown University, Rhode Island, or San Francisco, or Madison,
Wisconsin. God knows why. I refuse all payment and take just a
business-class round trip from Beirut because I can't take 14 hours of
screaming babies in each direction. American college students are tough as
nails and bored as cabbages, and in some cities – Washington is top of the
list – I might as well talk in Amharic. If you don't use phrases like "peace
process", "back on track" or "Israel under siege", there's a kind of
computerised blackout on the faces of the audience. Total Disk Failure. Why
should my latest bout of Americana have been any different?
Sure, there were the usual oddballs. There was the old black guy whose first
"question" on the Middle East in a Chicago University lecture theatre was a
long and proud announcement that he hadn't paid taxes to the IRS since
1948 – a claim so wonderful that I forbore the usual threat to close down on
him. There were the World Trade Centre conspiracists who insisted that the
US government had planted explosives in the twin towers. There was the
silver-haired lady who wanted to know why God couldn't be made to resolve
the hatred between Israelis and Palestinians. And a Native American Indian
in Los Angeles who ranted on about a Jewish plot to deprive his people of
their land. A bespectacled man with long white hair in a ponytail shut him
up before declaring that the Israeli-Palestinian war was identical to the
American-Mexican war that deprived his own people of... well, of Los
Angeles. I began to calculate the distance between LA and Jenin. A galaxy
perhaps.
And there were the little tell-tale stories that showed just how biased and
gutless the American press has become in the face of America's Israeli lobby
groups. "I wrote a report for a major paper about the Palestinian exodus of
1948," a Jewish woman told me as we drove through the smog of downtown LA.
"And of course, I mentioned the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin by
the Stern Gang and other Jewish groups – the massacre that prompted 750,000
Arabs to flee their homes. Then I look for my story in the paper and what do
I find? The word 'alleged' has been inserted before the word 'massacre'. I
called the paper's ombudsman and told him the massacre at Deir Yassin was a
historical fact. Can you guess his reply? He said that the editor had
written the word 'alleged' before 'massacre' because that way he thought
he'd avoid lots of critical letters."
By chance, this was the theme of my talks and lectures: the cowardly, idle,
spineless way in which American journalists are lobotomising their stories
from the Middle East, how the "occupied territories" have become "disputed
territories" in their reports, how Jewish "settlements" have been
transformed into Jewish "neighbourhoods", how Arab militants are
"terrorists" but Israeli militants only "fanatics" or "extremists", how
Ariel Sharon – the man held "personally responsible" by Israel's own
commissioner's inquiry for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700
Palestinians – could be described in a report in The New York Times as
having the instincts of "a warrior". How the execution of surviving
Palestinian fighters was so often called "mopping up". How civilians killed
by Israeli soldiers were always "caught in the crossfire". I demanded to
know of my audiences – and I expected the usual American indignation when I
did – how US citizens could accept the infantile "dead or alive", "with us
or against us", axis-of-evil policies of their President.
And for the first time in more than a decade of lecturing in the United
States, I was shocked. Not by the passivity of Americans – the
all-accepting, patriotic notion that the President knows best – nor by the
dangerous self-absorption of the United States since 11 September and the
constant, all-consuming fear of criticising Israel. What shocked me was the
extraordinary new American refusal to go along with the official line, the
growing, angry awareness among Americans that they were being lied to and
deceived. At some of my talks, 60 per cent of the audiences were over 40. In
some cases, perhaps 80 per cent were Americans with no ethnic or religious
roots in the Middle East – "American Americans", as I cruelly referred to
them on one occasion, "white Americans", as a Palestinian student called
them more truculently. For the first time, it wasn't my lectures they
objected to, but the lectures they received from their President and the
lectures they read in their press about Israel's "war on terror" and the
need always, uncritically, to support everything that America's little
Middle Eastern ally says and does.
There was, for example, the crinkly-faced, ex-naval officer who approached
me after a talk at a United Methodist church in the San Diego suburb of
Encinitas. "Sir, I was an officer on the aircraft carrier John F Kennedy
during the 1973 Middle East war," he began. (I checked him out later and he
was, as my host remarked, "for real".) "We were stationed off Gibraltar and
our job was to refuel the fighter jets we were sending to Israel after their
air force was shot to bits by the Arabs. Our planes would land with their
USAF and Marine markings partly stripped off and the Star of David already
painted on the side. Does anyone know why we gave all those planes to the
Israelis just like that? When I see on television our planes and our tanks
used to attack Palestinians, I can understand why people hate Americans."
In the United States, I'm used to lecturing in half-empty lecture halls.
Three years ago, I managed to fill a Washington auditorium seating 600 with
just 32 Americans. But in Chicago and Iowa and Los Angeles this month, they
came in their hundreds – almost 900 at one venue at the University of
Southern California – and they sat in the aisles and corridors and outside
the doors. It wasn't because Lord Fisk was in town. Maybe the title of my
talk – "September 11: ask who did it, but for heaven's sake don't ask why" –
was provocative. But for the most part they came, as the question-and-answer
sessions quickly revealed, because they were tired of being suckered by the
television news networks and the right-wing punditocracy.
Never before have I been asked by Americans: "How can we make our press
report the Middle East fairly?" or – much more disturbingly – "How can we
make our government reflect our views?" The questions are a trap, of course.
Brits have been shoving advice at the United States ever since we lost the
War of Independence, and I wasn't going to join their number. But the fact
that these questions could be asked – usually by middle-aged Americans with
no family origins in the Middle East – suggested a profound change in a
hitherto docile population.
Towards the end of each talk, I apologised for the remarks I was about to
make. I told audiences that the world did not change on 11 September, that
the Lebanese and Palestinians had lost 17,500 dead during Israel's 1982
invasion – more than five times the death toll of the international crimes
against humanity of 11 September – but the world did not change 20 yearsago.
There were no candles lit then, no memorial services. And each time I said
this, there was a nodding of heads – grey-haired and balding as well as
young – across the room. The smallest irreverent joke about President Bush
was often met with hoots of laughter. I asked one of my hosts why this
happened, why the audience accepted this from a Briton. "Because we don't
think Bush won the election," she replied.
Of course, it's easy to be fooled. The first local radio shows illustrated
all too well how the Middle East discourse is handled in America. When
Gayane Torosyan opened WSUI/KSUI for questions in Iowa City, a caller named
"Michael" – a leader of the local Jewish community, I later learnt, though
he did not say this on air – insisted that after the Camp David talks in
2000, Yasser Arafat had turned to "terrorism" despite being offered a
Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem and 96 per cent of the West
Bank and Gaza. Slowly and deliberately, I had to deconstruct this nonsense.
Jerusalem was to have remained the "eternal and unified capital of Israel",
according to Camp David. Arafat would only have got what Madeleine Albright
called "a sort of sovereignty" over the Haram al-Sharif mosque area and some
Arab streets, while the Palestinian parliament would have been below the
city's eastern walls at Abu Dis. With the vastly extended and illegal
Jerusalem municipality boundaries deep into the West Bank, Jewish
settlements like Maale Adumim were not up for negotiation; nor were several
other settlements. Nor was the 10-mile Israeli military buffer zone around
the West Bank, nor the settlers' roads, which would razor through the
Palestinian "state". Arafat was offered about 46 per cent of the 22 per cent
of Palestine that was left. I could imagine the audience of WSUI/KSUI
falling slowly from their seats in boredom.
Yet back at my folksy, wooden-walled hotel, the proprietor and his wife – P
Force volunteers in the Kennedy era – had listened to every word. "We know
what is going on," he said. "I was a naval officer in the Gulf back in the
Sixties and we only had few ships there then. In those days, the Shah of
Iran was our policeman. Now we've got all those ships in there and our
soldiers in the Arab countries and we seem to dominate the place." Osama bin
Laden, I said to myself, couldn't put it better.
How odd, I reflected, that American newspapers can scarcely say even this.
The Daily Iowan – there are no fewer than four dailies in Iowa City, press
freedom being represented by the number of newspapers rather than their
depth of coverage – had none of my hotel landlord's forthrightness. "The
situation in the Middle East is one that many Americans do not adequately
understand," it miserably lamented, "nor can they be reasonably articulate
about it." This rubbish – that Americans were too dumb to comprehend the
Middle East bloodbath and should therefore keep their mouths shut – was a
pervasive theme in editorials. Even more instructive were the reports of my
own lectures.
The headline, "Fisk: Who really are the terrorists?" in the Daily Iowan last
week at least caught the gist of my message, and included my own examples of
American press bias in the Middle East, although it failed on the facts,
wrongly reporting that it was the United Nations (rather than the far more
persuasive Israeli Kahan Commission) which concluded that Sharon was
"personally responsible" for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. The Des Moines
Register's account of one of my talks was intriguing. It concentrated on my
interviews with Osama bin Laden – which I had indeed mentioned in my
lecture – and then referred to my account of how an Afghan crowd beat me up
last December. I had told the American audience that the Afghans were
outraged by US bombing raids that had just killed their relatives around
Kandahar and how important it had been to include this fact in my own report
of the fray – to give context and reason to the Afghan attack on me. The
Register used my words to describe the attack but then itself made no
mention of the reasons. Long live, I thought, the Iowa City Press-Citizen,
whose own headline – "Middle East reporter slams media" – got the point.
It's not that Iowans have any excuse to be unaware of the Middle East. In
the small town of Davenport, Israelis have been trained in the systems of
the Apache AH-64 attack helicopters used to assassinate Palestinians on
Israel's wanted list. According to one local journalist, several Iowa
companies, including the regional office of Rockwell, have been involved in
military contracts worth millions of dollars with Israel. CemenTech of
Indianola supplies equipment to the Israeli air force. The day I arrived in
Iowa City, John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, was telling Iowans that a
hundred foreign nationals "from countries known as home to terrorists" had
been interrogated in the state. Another hundred were likely to be
"interviewed" soon. There was no editorial comment on this.
So Iowa University classes were absorbing. One young woman began by
announcing that she knew the American media were biased. When I asked why,
she said that "it has to do with America's support for Israel..." and then,
red-faced, she dried up. Not so the student in Rex Honey's global studies
class. After I had outlined the military trap into which the Americans had
been lured in Afghanistan – the supposed "victory" followed by further
engagements with al-Qa'ida and then, inevitably, daily battles with Afghan
warlords and sniping attacks on Western troops – he put his hand up. "So how
do we beat them?" he asked. There was a gentle ripple of laughter through
the room. "Why do you want to 'beat' the Afghans," I asked? "Why not help
them build a new land?" The student came up to me afterwards, hand
outstretched. "I want to thank you, sir, for all you told us," he said. I
had a suspicion he was a military man. Are you planning to join the army, I
asked? "No, sir," he replied. "I'm going to join the Marines."
I advised him to stay clear of Afghanistan. In its own way, the American
national press was doing the same. Two days later, the Los Angeles Times, in
a remarkable dispatch from its correspondent David Zucchino, reported on the
bitterness and anger among Afghans whose families had been killed in United
States B-52 bomber raids. The recent American battle in Gardez, the report
said, had left "bitterness in its wake".
If only the same bluntness was applied to the Palestinian-Israeli war. Alas,
no. On the freeway past Long Beach on Friday, I opened the LA Times to be
told that Israel "mops up [sic] in the West Bank", while the syndicated
columnist Mona Charen was telling readers in other papers that "98 per cent
of Palestinians have not been living under occupation since Israel pulled
out under the Oslo accords" and that the Israeli Prime Minister at the time,
Ehud Barak, had offered Arafat "97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza". This
was 1 per cent higher even than the statistic from "Michael" on WSUI/KSUI
radio. Arafat – "this murderer with the deaths of thousands of Jews and
Arabs on his hands" – was to blame. The issue between Israel and her
neighbours, Charen contended, "is not occupation, it is not settlements and
it certainly is not Israeli brutality and aggression. It is the Arabs'
inability to live peacefully with others".
Maybe California is organically different from the rest of the United
States, but its journalists as well as its students seemed a tad smarter
than the Midwest of America. The Orange County Register, a traditionally
conservative newspaper in an area that is now 50 per cent Latino, has been
trying to tell the truth about the Middle East and was carrying a tough
feature by Holger Jensen, which warned that if President Bush didn't rein in
Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister "will succeed where Osama bin Laden
failed: forcing us into a war of civilisations against 1.2 billion Muslims".
When I lunched with senior editorial staff, they invited three members of
the Orange County Muslim community to join them.
Cocktails with friends of the Methodist church revealed a sane grasp of the
Middle East – one of them was deeply disturbed by a recent remark by
Israel's Internal Security Minister, Uzi Landau, who had said that "we're
not facing human beings, but rather beasts". A black guest commended the UN
secretary general Kofi Annan's criticism of Israel. Yet when I flipped on
Fox News, there was Benjamin Netanyahu out-Sharoning Sharon, declaring that
Palestinian suicide bombers would soon be prowling America's streets,
meeting Congressmen to enlist their help in Israel's "war on terror", even
while the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was in Israel.
"Why Israel's Mission Must Continue," the New York Times's comment page
shouted on Friday. A long and tedious article on Israel's crusade against
"terror" by an Israeli army colonel, Nitsan Alon, included several of my
favourite cop-out phrases, including the stock reference to "a large number
of civilians" who were – yes – "caught in the crossfire".
By the time I was addressing the more bohemian denizens of an art club in
Los Angeles, the newspapers I was attacking were beginning to turn up. Mark
Kellner arrived to report for The Washington Times. "He's going to stitch up
everything you say," a friend remarked. "The Washington Times is to the
right of the Republican Party." We shall see.
But if my audiences had been largely made up of Americans without any Middle
East roots, the same could not be said of Sunday's cocktails at the home of
Stanley Sheinbaum, the philanthropist, art collector and libertarian – we
shall forget the period in which he helped to run the Los Angeles Police
Department – where my little speech was to set off some verbal
hand-grenades. Sheinbaum it was who met Syria's President Hafez el-Assad at
President Jimmy Carter's request, arranging Assad's extraordinary summit
with Carter in Geneva. "Tell me something good about yourself," he said to
me. Have you heard nothing good from anyone else, I enquired? "Nope," he
said.
But I liked Sheinbaum, a crusty, humorous man in his eighties who encourages
every liberal Jewish American to have his say about the Middle East. As the
lunchtime fog embraced the rose gardens and villas and swimming pools and
hills of Brentwood, up stepped Rabbi Haim dov Beliak to explain how he
intends to close down the bingo and gambling operations of one of America's
greatest Jewish settlement builders. "Call me when you get back to Beirut –
by all means write about it." As we scoffed Stanley Sheinbaum's strawberries
and sipped his fine Californian red wine, another rabbi approached. "You're
gonna have some hostile people in your audience," he said. "Just let 'em
hear the truth."
So I did. I talked about the cowardice of Secretary Powell, who dawdled his
way around the Mediterranean to give Sharon time to finish destroying the
Jenin refugee camp. I talked about the rotting bodies of Jenin and the
growing evidence that back in 1982 Sharon's troops handed the survivors of
the Sabra and Chatila massacre back to their Phalangist tormentors to be
killed. I said that Arafat was never offered 96 per cent of the West Bank at
Camp David. I advised the 100 or so people in the room to read the Israeli
journalist Amira Haas' courageous reports in Haaretz. I talked about the
squalor of the Palestinian camp. I talked of suicide bombings as "evil" but
suggested that Israel would never have security until it abided by UN
Security Council Resolution 252; that Israel would never have peace until it
abandoned all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan and East Jerusalem.
"I find it very difficult to ask you a question, because what you said made
me so angry," a woman began afterwards. Why did I not realise that the
Palestinians wanted to destroy all of Israel, that the right-of-return would
destroy the state? For an hour I explained the reality I saw in the Middle
East; an all-powerful Israel fighting an old-time colonial war. I talked
about the 1954-62 Algerian war, its brutality and cruelty, the French army's
torture and killings, the Algerians' slaughter of civilians, the frightening
parallels with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I talked about the
Palestinians who wanted, at the least, an admission of the injustice their
people had suffered in 1948, adding that there were Palestinians aplenty who
realised that financial compensation would have to suffice for most of those
refugees whose homes were in what is now Israel. I talked about Sharon and
his bloody record in Lebanon. And about the pressures of the Israeli lobby
in America, the fear of being labelled an anti-Semite, and the feeble
reporting of the Middle East.
A rabbi was the first to tell me afterwards that the Palestinians were
victims, that they should be given a real state. An old lady asked me for
the name of the best book on the Algerian war. I gave it to her; Alastair
Horne's A Savage War of Peace . A card was pushed into my hand. "Insightful
talk!" the owner had written at the bottom and – hate though I do the word
"insightful" – I couldn't help noticing that the name on the card was Yigal
Arens, the son of one of Israel's most ruthless right-wing ministers, who
had once informed me – in Beirut, back in 1982 – that Israel would "fight
forever" against Palestinian terror.
On the freeway to LAX afterwards, the terminals and control tower looming
through the Californian haze, I looked over Saturday's LA Times. A report on
page 12 revealed that the BBC's award-winning film on Sharon's involvement
in the Sabra and Chatila massacres had been dropped from a Canadian film
festival after protests from Jewish groups. The organisers had explained
that The Accused "could invite unwanted attention from interest groups" –
whatever that means. But a paragraph at the end of the report caught my
attention. "Sharon, who was the Israeli defence minister at the time,
allegedly facilitated the assault on the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps..."
There it was again. Allegedly? How many angry letters was that little lie
supposed to avoid? Allegedly indeed.
But on reflection, I didn't think the Americans I met would be fooled by
this. I didn't think my hotel proprietor would accept "allegedly". Nor the
old naval officer from the John F Kennedy. Nor the listeners to KSUI. Nor
even Stanley Sheinbaum. Yes, Osama bin Laden told me he thought Americans
didn't understand the Middle East. Maybe he was right then. But not any
more.
