[NYTr] Pilger on Palestine: "It Never Happened..."

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tim Murphy (activ-l)

The New Statesman - Jul 26, 2007
http://www.newstatesman.com/200707260028

"It never happened..."

By John Pilger

Concealed during the Alan Johnston kidnap crisis was the fate of a
Palestinian cameraman shot by the Israelis. The BBC, desperate to deny
charges of "bias", refused to follow the story.
 
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 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 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 warmonger David Aaron ovitch is to
interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule.

Bringing democracy

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 the St John Ambulance, who
are "bringing democracy" to Iraq. Newsnight 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 Brit ain 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 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
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 the Foreign Secretary'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 Vene zuela 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 man agement". 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 ab dication 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." 

John Pilger's website is at http://www.johnpilger.com