[A-List] Robert Fisk on journalistic cowardice

[Michael Keaney]

Robert Fisk: Journalists are under fire for telling the truth
The Indepedent
18 December 2002

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 Aspen. 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.