Comrades,
This is an article by Robert Fisk, which is taken from the Polpular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) web-site.
Javad
When Journalists Refuse to Tell the Truth about Israel
'Fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" means we are
abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East'
Robert Fisk
Independent (UK) 17 April 2001
What if we had supported the apartheid regime of South Africa
against the majority black population? What if we had lauded
the South African white leadership as "hard-line warriors"
rather than racists? What if we had explained the shooting of
56 black protesters at Sharpeville as an understandable
"security crackdown" by the South African police. And
described black children shot by the police as an act of
"child sacrifice" by their parents? What if we had called upon
the "terrorist" ANC leadership to "control their own people".
Almost every day that is exactly the way we are playing the
Israeli-Palestinian war. No matter how many youths are shot
dead by the Israelis, no matter how many murders - by either
side - and no matter how bloody the reputation of the Israeli
Prime Minister, we are reporting this terrible conflict as if
we supported the South African whites against the blacks. No,
Israel is not South Africa (though it happily supported the
apartheid regime) and no, the Palestinians are not the blacks
of the shanty towns. But there's not much difference between
Gaza and the black slums of Johannesburg; and there's not much
difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in the
occupied territories and that of the South African police. The
apartheid regime had death squads, just as Israel has today.
Yet even they did not use helicopter gunships and missiles.
Rarely since the Second World War has a people been so
vilified as the Palestinians. And rarely has a people been so
frequently excused and placated as the Israelis. Israeli
embassies are now buttonholing editors around the world,
saying that it's not fair to call Israel's Prime Minister
"hard-line". And the reporters are falling into line.
Sharon, we are told, may turn into a pragmatist, another De
Gaulle; in truth he's more like the French putschist generals
in Algeria. They also used torture and massacred their Arab
opponents. It needed an Israeli writer - Nehemia Strasler, in
Ha'aretz - to point out that Sharon's career spells anything
but peace. He voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in
1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in
1985. He opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace
conference in 1991. He opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the
Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a vote for peace with
Jordan in 1994. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997.
He condemned the manner of Israel's retreat from Lebanon in
2000. He is now building Jewish settlements on occupied Arab
land - in total violation of international law � at a faster
rate than his predecessor.
Yet we are to believe that it is the corrupt, Parkinson's-
haunted Yasser Arafat who is to blame for the war. He will not
"control" his people. He is chastised by George Bush while his
people are bestialised by the Israeli leadership. Rafael
Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, used to talk of the
Palestinians as "cockroaches in a glass jar". Menachem Begin
called them "two-legged beasts". Rabbi Ovdia Yousef, the
spiritual head of the Shas party, called them "serpents". In
August last year, Ehud Barak called them "crocodiles". Last
month, the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called
Arafat a "scorpion". Even the South African regime never
called the blacks by such vile names.
And woe betide the diplomat or journalist who points this out.
Earlier this year, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in Paris,
accused the Swedish president of the European Union of
"encouraging anti-Jewish violence". To condemn Israel for
"eliminating terrorists", the centre wrote in a letter to the
Swedish prime minister, "recalls the allied argument during
the Second World War, according to which bombing the railways
leading to Auschwitz would encourage anti-Semitism among the
Germans". Sweden was making "a unilateral attack against the
state of the survivors of the Holocaust". And the Swedish
president's crime? She had dared to say that "the practice of
eliminations constitutes an obstacle to peace and could
provoke new violence". She did not even refer to death squads.
In February Newsweek propagated a virtual fraud on its cover
by showing - under the headline "Terror Goes Global -
Exclusive: Bin Laden's International Network" - a frightening
photograph of a man (head and shoulders), his face covered in
an Arab scarf, holding a rifle in his right hand. The reader
would imagine this to be a member of Osama bin Laden's network
of "global terror". But I traced the Finnish photographer who
took this picture. He snapped it at a funeral on the West
Bank. The man was an armed member of the Palestinian Tanzim
militia -- and had nothing to do with Bin Laden. The Tanzim
are violent enough. But the cover generically smeared the
entire Palestinian people by associating them with the man
supposedly responsible for bombing US embassies in Africa.
As that brave American writer Charley Reese said in his
regular US column, the Israelis "have created their own
unconquerable enemy". They have made the Palestinians so
crushed, so desperate, so humiliated that they have nothing to
lose. We, too, have done this. Our gutlessness, our refusal to
tell the truth, our fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites"
- the most loathsome of libels against any journalist - means
that we are aiding and abetting terrible deeds in the Middle
East. Maybe we should look up those cuttings of the apartheid
era and remember when men were not without honour.
(c) 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.
� 2001 All rights reserved
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