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17 April 2002 08:05 GMT+1
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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 Internal links As Powell prepares to leave, the fighting flares again in
Bethlehem Powell's diplomatic mission appears doomed to fail Grieving survivors
say the Israelis buried war crimes in heaps of reeking rubble Church of the Nativity
hit by fire as battle goes on Rules on weapons exports to Israel to be tightened
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.
End<{{{
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