[wvns] Israelis Murder News Cameraman: Ambulence Attacked
How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole
By John Pilger
July 25, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-07/25pilger.cfm
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 honour 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 misdemeanours 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 programme 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 programme 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
colonising 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 saviours, 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
non-existent 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 "sceptic" 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 programme" 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
favourite 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. The craven
liberal campaign against the first real hope for the poor of Venezuela
is a striking example.
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, honourable
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 bath in their silence."
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