MER - MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 30 December 2005: When Robert Fisk speaks we should all be listening. And though his new book is expensive we should all be buying, reading, and passing it along to others. This rare Op Ed by Fisk managed to get published in the L.A. Times this week. The N.Y.Times and the Washington Post usually do all they can to avoid Fisk, actually the former at least seems to work overtime to undercut and discredit him...fortunately not an easy task. Back in 1998 when MER had a half-hour weekly TV program we broadcast a series of four programs based on an exclusive lengthy tour-de-force interview with Fisk conducted by Mark Bruzonsky when Fisk visited Washington that year. Earlier this year by the way, on a plane going to give a keynote address to a foundation in the New Mexico, Fisk was told by U.S. 'Homeland Security' authorities that he was some kind of risk and was not allowed to enter to the U.S. Indeed, serious knowledge, truth-telling, historical insights, and commitment to justice have all become risky to those who control and benefit from contemporary American imperialism and Israeli manipulations in the critical region known as the Middle East. A crucial linkage to today's situation are the fears and failures of American journalism, and what we call the corporate media, to truly inform the American people what is really happening both at home and abroad and why. That of course is one of the key reasons MER was established nearly ten years ago and will be making a major effort to have much more impact in the year soon ahead. Stay tuned! And please tell your friends and family to also get the new MER at www.MiddleEast.Org/MER

Telling it like it isn't

By Robert Fisk

ROBERT FISK is Middle East correspondent for the London
Independent and the author, most recently, of "The Great War
for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East,"
published last month by Knopf.

December 27, 2005 - L.A.Times

I FIRST REALIZED the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers.

"I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore."

Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been.

This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" — or even, in some cases, "outposts."

Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land — just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory.

Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all — so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall.

The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.

If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act.

And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security barrier" — words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm at the entrance to a private housing complex.

For Palestinians to object violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious people. By our use of language, we condemn them.

We follow these unwritten rules elsewhere in the region. American journalists frequently used the words of U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency — referring to those who attacked American troops as "rebels" or "terrorists" or "remnants" of the former regime. The language of the second U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently — and grotesquely — by American journalists.

American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which the horrors of conflict — the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs — are kept off the screen. Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities" don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography" of death (which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have just killed.

Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war.

Back in the old days, we used to believe — did we not? — that journalists should "tell it how it is." Read the great journalism of World War II and you'll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to know or preferred a different version.

So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-fisk27dec27,0,6099761.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

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ROBERT FISK

Robert Fisk is Britain’s most highly decorated foreign correspondent. He has received the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times, most recently in 1995 and 1996. His specialty is the Middle East, where he has spent the last twenty-three years. Currently the Beirut correspondent for the London Independent, Fisk has covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war, and the conflict in Algeria. He is the author of Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Atheneum, 1990), and his reporting from Lebanon has brought him international attention. He was the one who broke the story about the Israeli shelling of the U.N. compound in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996.

Fisk visited Madison, Wisconsin, in April to give two lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He brought with him film footage of the Qana shelling, as well as footage of an Israeli bombing of a Lebanese ambulance carrying fourteen people. He showed a film he made about Palestinians who had lost their homes when Israel became a state. He also showed interviews with Jews who lost family members in Nazi concentration camps, and he went to Auschwitz to show where the Holocaust took place. In one of his lectures, he made a special point of taking on those who deny the truth of the Holocaust.

Robert Fisk, a world renowned Middle East correspondent for London's Independent, currently resides in Beirut. Mr. Fisk received a Ph.D in Political Science from Trinity College, Dublin in 1985 and an Honorary Doctorate of Literature and Journalism from the University of Lancaster, England. He was The Times Belfast correspondent from 1971 to 1975, and its Middle East correspondent from 1976 to 1987. Fisk has covered the recent conflict in Northern Ireland, Israeli invasions of Lebanon, the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War, wars in Bosnia and Algeria, NATO war with Yugoslavia, and the Palestinian uprisings. Fisk was the winner of the Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and in 2000 for his articles on NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. He was awarded the John Hopkins SIAS-CIBA prize for international journalism. Fisk is theauthor of three books: The Point of No Return: The Strike which Broke the British in Ulster (1975), In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster, and the Price of Neutrality (1982, 1983), and Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990, 1992). Most recently Fisk contributed a chapter to Iraq Under Siege: the Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (2000).