One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the
BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On 5
July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters
video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance
trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him as a
"legitimate target." The International Federation of Journalists called the
shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist."
At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated.
Dr. David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children,
emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the
alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honor Alan [Johnston]
as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as they might be to
Israel."
He received no reply.
The atrocity was reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11
Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan Johnston's
now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four
called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth to
make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big Brother.)
While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I
would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also
mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was
a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as
Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever
happened... It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
The media wailing over the BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted
misdemeanors provide the perfect straw man. They complement a self-serving BBC
internal inquiry into news bias, which dutifully supplied the right-wing Daily
Mail with hoary grist that the corporation is a left-wing plot. Such shenanigans
would be funny were it not for the true story behind the facade of elite
propaganda that presents humanity as useful or expendable, worthy or unworthy,
and the Middle East as the Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't
matter, was of no interest.
The other day, I turned on the BBC's Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass voice
announce a program about Iraqi interpreters working for "the British coalition
forces" and warning that "listeners might find certain descriptions of violence
disturbing." Not a word referred to those of "us" directly and ultimately
responsible for the violence. The program was called Face the Facts. Is satire
that dead? Not yet. The Murdoch columnist David Aaronovitch, a warmonger, is to
interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule.
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four lexicon of opposites pervades almost everything we
see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are "the British coalition
forces," surely as benign as that British institution, St. John Ambulance, who
are "bringing democracy" to Iraq. BBC television describes Israel as having "two
hostile Palestinian entities on its borders," neatly inverting the truth that
Israel is actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University
says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally colonizing
Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the invaders.
"The great crimes against most of humanity," wrote the American cultural critic
James Petras, "are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and
thought... [that] have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and
saviors, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms" designed to disguise a state
terror that is "a gross perversion" of democracy, liberation, reform, justice.
In his reinauguration speech, George Bush mentioned all these words, whose
meaning, for him, is the dictionary opposite.
It is 80 years since Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, predicted a
pervasive "invisible government" of corporate spin, suppression and silence as
the true ruling power in the United States. That is true today on both sides of
the Atlantic. How else could America and Britain go on such a spree of death and
mayhem on the basis of stupendous lies about nonexistent weapons of mass
destruction, even a "mushroom cloud over New York"? When the BBC radio reporter
Andrew Gilligan reported the truth, he was pilloried and sacked along with the
BBC's director general, while Blair, the proven liar, was protected by the
liberal wing of the media and given a standing ovation in parliament.
The same is happening again over Iran, distracted, it is hoped, by spin that the
new Foreign Secretary David Miliband is a "skeptic" about the crime in Iraq
when, in fact, he has been an accomplice, and by unctuous Kennedy-quoting
Foreign Office propaganda about Miliband's "new world order."
"What do you think of Iran's complicity in attacks on British soldiers in
Basra?" Miliband was asked by the Financial Times.
Miliband: "Well, I think that any evidence of Iranian engagement there is to be
deplored. I think that we need regional players to be supporting stability, not
fomenting discord, never mind death..."
FT: "Just to be clear, there is evidence?"
Miliband: "Well no, I chose my words carefully..."
The coming war on Iran, including the possibility of a nuclear attack, has
already begun as a war by journalism. Count the number of times "nuclear weapons
program" and "nuclear threat" are spoken and written, yet neither exists, says
the International Atomic Energy Agency. On 21 June, the New York Times went
further and advertised an "urgent" poll, headed: "Should we bomb Iran?" The
questions beneath referred to Iran being "a greater threat than Saddam Hussein"
and asked: "Who should undertake military action against Iran first... ?" The
choice was "US. Israel. Neither country."
So tick your favorite bombers.
The last British war to be fought without censorship and "embedded" journalists
was the Crimea a century and a half ago. The bloodbath of the First World War
and the Cold War might never have happened without their unpaid (and paid)
propagandists. Today's invisible government is no less served, especially by
those who censor by omission.
However, there are major differences. Official disinformation now is often aimed
at a critical public intelligence, a growing awareness in spite of the media.
This "threat" from a public often held in contempt has been met by the insidious
transfer of much of journalism to public relations. Some years ago, PR Week
estimated that the amount of "PR-generated material" in the media is "50 per
cent in a broadsheet newspaper in every section apart from sport. In the local
press and the mid-market and tabloid nationals, the figure would undoubtedly be
higher. Music and fashion journalists and PRs work hand in hand in the editorial
process... PRs provide fodder, but the clever high-powered ones do a lot of the
journalists' thinking for them."
This is known today as "perception management." The most powerful are not the
Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton, which "sold" the
slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the Sawyer Miller Group, which sold
hated, pro-Washington regimes in Colombia and Bolivia and whose operatives
included Mark Malloch Brown, the new Foreign Office minister, currently being
spun as anti-Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations
spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that
an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is
looted.
The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces that once
provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. "For
almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the literary and cultural critic
Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist
prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." The lone,
honorable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights
who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending
the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and
Shaw.
He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which
to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from
a recent article by Amis:
Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to today?" "I've
been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask." For some reason
our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably
flirtatious.
What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially
class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part
in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and
that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor
there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their
enduring privilege.
In The Serpent, Marc Karlin's dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the narrator
describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media and coerce the
industry's liberal elite. There are clips from a keynote address that Murdoch
gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The camera pans across the audience
of TV executives, who listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them
for suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. "This is
the silence of the democrats," says the voice-over, "and the Dark Prince could
bathe in their silence."
John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US.
Comments (1)
1. Written by Has on 29-07-2007 16:35
The intentional targetting of journalists in the occupied territories is by no means a 'new' trend, as horrific as that may sound. The Israeli forces of terrorism are well known for the targetting of journalists and activists. You can find clear footage of the recent shooting of Imad Ghanem on the link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KesF4piHQjQ
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