More Fisk

To: Retort

Here is Fisk on the Al-Jazeera network which is currently enraging our
masters.


Lost in the Rhetorical Fog of War
Robert Fisk
9 October 2001
The Independent

 > > A few months ago, my old friend
> > Tom Friedman set off for the small
> > Gulf emirate of Qatar, from where,
> > in one of his messianic columns
> > for The New York Times, he
> > informed us that the tiny state's
> > Al-Jazeera satellite channel was a
> > welcome sign that democracy might be coming to the Middle
> > East. Al-Jazeera had been upsetting some of the local Arab
> > dictators E President Mubarak of Egypt for one E and Tom
> > thought this a good idea. So do I. But hold everything. The
> > story is being rewritten. Last week, US Secretary of State
> > Colin Powell rapped the Emir of Qatar over the knuckles
> > because E so he claimed E Al-Jazeera was "inciting
> > anti-Americanism''.
> >
> > So, goodbye democracy. The Americans want the emir to
> > close down the channel's office in Kabul, which is scooping the
> > world with tape of the US bombardments and E more to the
> > point E with televised statements by Osama bin Laden. The
> > most wanted man in the whole world has been suggesting that
> > he's angry about the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions,
> > about the corruption of pro-western Arab regimes, about Israel's
> > attacks on the Palestinian territory, about the need for US
> > forces to leave the Middle East. And after insisting that bin
> > Laden is a "mindless terrorist'' E that there is no connection
> > between US policy in the Middle East and the crimes against
> > humanity in New York and Washington E the Americans need
> > to close down Al-Jazeera's coverage.
> >
> > Needless to say, this tomfoolery by Colin Powell has not been
> > given much coverage in the Western media, who know that
> > they do not have a single correspondent in the Taliban area of
> > Afghanistan. Al-Jazeera does.
> >
> > But why are we journalists falling back on the same sheep-like
> > conformity that we adopted in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999
> > Kosovo war? For here we go again. The BBC was yesterday
> > broadcasting an American officer talking about the dangers of
> > "collateral damage'' E without the slightest hint of the
> > immorality of this phrase. Tony Blair boasts of Britain's
> > involvement in the US bombardment by talking about our
> > "assets'', and by yesterday morning the BBC were using the
> > same soldier-speak. Is there some kind of rhetorical fog that
> > envelops us every time we bomb someone?
> >
> > As usual, the first reports of the US missile attacks were
> > covered without the slightest suggestion that innocents were
> > about to die in the country we plan to "save''. Whether the
> > Taliban are lying or telling the truth about 30 dead in Kabul, do
> > we reporters really think that all our bombs fall on the guilty
> > and not the innocent? Do we think that all the food we are
> > reported to be dropping is going to fall around the innocent and
> > not the Taliban? I am beginning to wonder whether we have not
> > convinced ourselves that wars -- our wars -- are movies. The
> > only Hollywood film ever made about Afghanistan was a Rambo
> > epic in which Sylvester Stallone taught the Afghan mujahedin
> > how to fight the Russian occupation, help to defeat Soviet
> > troops and won the admiration of an Afghan boy. Are the
> > Americans, I wonder, somehow trying to actualise the movie?
> >
> > But look at the questions we're not asking. Back in 1991 we
> > dumped the cost of the Gulf War -- billions of dollars of it -- on
> > Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. But the Saudis and Kuwaitis are not
> > going to fund our bombing this time round. So who's going to
> > pay? When? How much will it cost us-- and I mean us? The
> > first night of bombing cost, so we are told, at least $2m, I
> > suspect much more. Let us not ask how many Afghans that
> > would have fed -- but do let's ask how much of our money is
> > going towards the war and how much towards humanitarian
> > aid.
> >
> > Bin Laden's propaganda is pretty basic. He films his own
> > statements and sends one of his henchmen off to the
> > Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. No vigorous questioning of course,
> > just a sermon. So far we've not seen any video clips of
> > destroyed Taliban equipment, the ancient Migs and even older
> > Warsaw Pact tanks that have been rusting across Afghanistan
> > for years. Only a sequence of pictures E apparently real E of
> > bomb damage in a civilian area of Kabul. The Taliban have kept
> > reporters out. But does that mean we have to balance this
> > distorted picture with our own half-truths?
> >
> > So hard did a colleague of mine try, in a radio interview the
> > other day, to unlink the bin Laden phenomenon from the
> > West's baleful history in the Middle East that he seriously
> > suggested that the attacks were timed to fall on the
> > anniversary of the defeat of Muslim forces at the gates of
> > Vienna in 1683. Unfortunately, the Poles won their battle
> > against the Turks on 12, not 11, September. But when the
> > terrifying details of the hijacker Mohamed Atta's will were
> > published last week, dated April 1996, no one could think of
> > any event that month that might have propelled Atta to his
> > murderous behaviour.
> >
> > Not the Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon, nor the
> > Qana massacre by Israeli artillery of 106 Lebanese civilians in
> > a UN base, more than half of them children. For that's what
> > happened in April, 1996. No, of course that slaughter is not
> > excuse for the crimes against humanity in the United States
> > last month. But isn't it worth just a little mention, just a tiny
> > observation, that an Egyptian mass-murderer-to-be wrote a will
> > of chilling suicidal finality in the month when the massacre in
> > Lebanon enraged Arabs across the Middle East?
> >
> > Instead of that, we're getting Second World War commentaries
> > about western military morale. On the BBC we had to listen to
> > how it was "a perfect moonless night for the air armada'' to
> > bomb Afghanistan. Pardon me? Are the Germans back at Cap
> > Gris Nez? Are our fighter squadrons back in the skies of Kent,
> > fighting off the Dorniers and Heinkels? Yesterday, we were told
> > on one satellite channel of the "air combat'' over Afghanistan. A
> > lie, of course. The Taliban had none of their ageing Migs aloft.
> > There was no combat.
> >
> > Of course, I know the moral question. After the atrocities in
> > New York, we can't "play fair" between the ruthless bin Laden
> > and the West; we can't make an equivalence between the
> > mass-murderer's innocence and the American and British
> > forces who are trying to destroy the Taliban.
> >
> > But that's not the point. It's our viewers and readers we've got
> > to "play fair" with. Must we, because of our rage at the
> > massacre of the innocents in America, because of our desire
> > to cowtow to the elderly "terrorism experts", must we lose all
> > our critical faculties? Why at least not tell us how these
> > "terrorism experts" came to be so expert? And what are their
> > connections with dubious intelligence services?
> >
> > In some cases, in America, the men giving us their advice on
> > screen are the very same operatives who steered the CIA and
> > the FBI into the greatest intelligence failure in modern history:
> > the inability to uncover the plot, four years in the making, to
> > destroy the lives of almost 6,000 people. President Bush says
> > this is a war between good and evil. You are either with us or
> > against us. But that's exactly what bin Laden says. Isn't it
> > worth pointing this out and asking where it leads?
> >
> >
> >