a British newsman’s righteous rage

An enraged Sir Harold Evans, not known for his warm-heartedness toward Israel’s policies, thunders against demonstrators carrying signs that say “We Are All Hezbollah”:

Are we the violent hijackers of the state of Lebanon who started this war without provocation and without reference to the elected government? Are we the “democrats” who hold hostages for years and murder political opponents?

Are we the suicide bombers, Hizbullah’s contribution to civilization, randomly murdering innocents in the thousands - Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, for this cause or that, it makes no difference?

Are we Hassan Nasrullah, the latest pin up boy of terrorism, who competes with Iran’s mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the most dedicated to kill Jews? He makes no secret of Hizbullah’s genocidal ambitions. “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel,” he says, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a world wide basis.” Big joke.
Are we the puppets of our paymasters in Iran?

Are we the cowards condemned as such by the UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, for hiding our fighters and rocket launchers among women and children?

Evans has been a consistent principled voice against the new totalitarianism and the new post-9/11 anti-Semitism—the latter trend detailed in Ron Rosenbaum’s anthology Those Who Forget the Past, to which Evans contributed a piece.

Check it out. It’s even more timely now than when it was published two years ago.

Here’s an excerpt from the Evans selection, taken from a talk he gave in September 2002. In two short paragraphs, Evans—a newsman by trade and by instinct—explains the shortcomings of media coverage of the Middle East. It is highly relevant in light of “Reutersgate” (which, I note, is picking up steam. See Tim Rutten’s excellent piece in the L.A. Times). Here’s Evans four years ago (emphasis added):

…much Middle East reporting falls into the impartiality trap. It gives equal weight to information from corrupt police states and proven liars as to information from a self-critical democracy. The pious but fatuous posture is that this is somehow fair, as if truth existed in a moral vacuum, something to be measured by the yard like calico. Five million Jews in Israel are a vulnerable minority surrounded by 300 million Muslims, who for the most part are governed by authoritarian regimes, quasi-police states, that in more than fifty years have never ceased trying to wipe it out by war and terrorism. They muzzle dissent and critical reporting, they run vengeful penal systems, they have failed in almost every measure of social and political justice from the rights of women to fair trials and freedom of the press, they deflect the frustrations of their streets to the scapegoat of Zionism, and they breed and finance international terrorism.

Yet it is Israel that is regarded with skepticism and sometimes hostility. Take the battle of Jenin. The Guardian was moved to write the editorial opinion that Israel’s attacks on Jenin were “every bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York on September 11. Every bit? Every bit as repellent? Did we miss something? Was there some American provocation of Osama comparable to the murder of nineteen Israelis at Passover? Was something going on in the World Trade Center as menacing as the making of bombs in Jenin, known to Palestinians as Suicide Capital?

(Those Who Forget the Past, pp. 45-46)

The protestations of executives from news organizations that they are beyond reproach—that they are shocked and stunned to have their professional credibility questioned—are ridiculous to those of us who have long been smelling the rotten corpse of American and British journalism in general and their coverage of the Middle East in particular.

The worst part is the implicit anti-Israeli prejudice of our journalists and their editors. Evans continues:

The presumption in the Jenin feeding frenzy in print and in hours and hours of television was that the Palestinian stories of 3,000 killed and buried in secret mass graves must be true, yet the main spokesman Saeb Erekat has been shown time and again to be a liar. Human Rights Watch now puts the death toll at a total of 54, and on their count 22 civilians—the Israelis say 3. Some Palestinian militants in fact claim Jenin as a victory in the killing of 23 Israeli soldiers.

Evans doesn’t mention Erekat running around screaming about the “massacre.” But I remember it well. So when the Qana “massacre” happened a couple of weeks ago, I was skeptical.

Maybe this technique will run its course soon. A bored media audience quickly tires of the word “massacre” when it is applied to something less than an actual massacre. And of course there is also the danger than if a real massacre should occur, the word will have lost its meaning. We may already have reached that point. That’s what happens when you use language solely as a tool of propaganda—your audience becomes desensitized.