<nettime> A.11-Truth Is The Victim, The Same Old Double Standards Prevail

[JSalloum@aol.com]

http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/webcast/display.php3?article_id=388

The Intifada: Truth Is The Victim As The Same Old Double Standards Prevail

by Robert Fisk
from the Independent
UK 10:22am Mon Oct 30 '00

Why do we always get taken in by the same lies? Don't reporters carry history
books, even a cuttings file, to remind them of what they wrote in the last
Arab-Israeli war? Even the quotes - the meretricious, cliché- soaked statements
are the same.

Let's go back to June 1982. Southern Lebanon. A UN ceasefire is in place
between Yasser Arafat's PLO guerrillas and Israel. In London, a Palestinian
tries to assassinate the Israeli ambassador; his potential killer belongs to
the anti-Arafat Abu Nidal faction, intent on provoking an Israeli invasion of
Lebanon.

Israel bombs Arafat's men in Lebanon. After several days under attack, they
fire Katyusha rockets over the border into Israel. And what happens? Israel
invades Lebanon because it is under "terrorist" attack and suggests - wait for
it - t hat "Arafat cannot control his men".

Sound familiar? There's more. By the time cameras were recording the thousands
of civilian casualties of the Lebanon war, the Israelis were asking why the
"terrorists" were hiding behind the civilians. Why did the Palestinians use
children in their war? Israel said it did not intend to kill children, even the
ones I found in the Makassed hospital in Beirut, their bodies still on fire
from the phosphorus shell that killed them, and blamed their deaths on the PLO.

And duly, I recall, most journalists in 1982 fell in line with the narrative
laid down by the Americans and the Israelis, just as they do today. As usual,
the slaughter of Palestinian children is blamed on the Palestinians. The death
of Arab civilians is the fault of the Arabs. Arafat cannot control "his
people".  Arabs are turned into "terrorists", as opposed to the folk who are
killing the Arab civilians and children whose deaths, of course, are the
responsibility of their own grieving parents.

No, we should not get romantic about the corrupt, venal Palestinian officials
who tried to rule their little statelets in 1982 - and in 2000. In 1982 we
listened to the PLO drivelling on about the "Zionist death wagon" and the
massacre of thousands of civilians around a town called Jezzine. The "massacre"
turned out to be myth - as most journalists suspected and reported. The PLO
would claim they were fighting for the Lebanese - a complete lie - and that
this was the most important battle since Stalingrad, a parallel as laughable as
it was grotesque. But the PLO's "propaganda machine", in reality so
preposterous, was of such inefficiency that no one would take it seriously.

But at least, in 1982, Arafat would talk to the press. At least the PLO could
field a few English speakers. Today, Arafat refuses to talk to foreign
correspondents, let alone in English, and fields a bunch of officials (apart
from Hanan Ashrawi) whose inability to speak good English renders them almost
incomprehensible.  Claims that Palestinians were not firing at Israeli soldiers
were destroyed by video which clearly showed that Palestinian policemen, far
from directing traffic, were shooting at their opposite numbers on the Israeli
side.

And yet again - the record shows it all too clearly - journalists in 1982 found
themselves browbeaten by a supposedly outraged Israel which claimed reporting
was hopelessly biased towards the Palestinians. This ridiculous assertion was
taken so seriously in the US that the New York Times allowed an Israeli lobby
group to "monitor" its reporting. Journalist Tom Friedman had remarks about
Israel's "indiscriminate" artillery fire censored from his reports, while the
US media used the word "terrorists" (always Arab "terrorists") like a
punctuation mark.

 But it is the traditional double standard that marks the propaganda victory of
one side over the other in the Middle East. When Israel sent its Lebanese
Christian militias into the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in 1982, those
militias massacred up to 2,000 Palestinian civilians. Not only did Israel say
this was "a mistake". They attacked journalists who reported the murders as
"anti-Semitic".

Similarly, the killing of Palestinian children by Israeli troops now. On any
other story - in Kosovo, East Timor or Belfast - the killing of so many
children by "security forces" would engender outrage on the part of
journalists. If Serb "security forces" were killing Albanian youths at this
rate last year, Nato would have gone to war weeks earlier.

Yet today, we hear the usual weasel words. We hear of Israel's "tough
response", its "robust" action, its "restraint". No, the Israelis are not the
Serbs.  Nor are they the Indonesian army. But journalists are the same. So
fearful of creating "controversy" by telling the truth according to real
journalistic standards, so vain that they must avoid all criticism, so lacking
in resolve that they must announce that the 12-year-old Palestinian shot by the
Israelis in Gaza was "killed in crossfire", that they are actively taking
sides. And if a massacre follows, will we tell the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth? I doubt it.

 © 2000 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

 www.independent.co.uk/www/

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