Journalist Robert Fisk about criticising Israel

Journalist Robert Fisk about criticising Israel

The noted journalist Robert Fisk sounds off about the
abuse he's had for daring to criticise Israel in the
western press Robert Fisk: I am being vilified for telling the truth
about Palestinians
'The abuse being directed at anyone who dares to criticise Israel is
reaching McCarthyite proportions'
13 December 2000
In the Middle East jungle, a journalist has to expect
a few sticks and
stones. A Bahrain newspaper cartoonist once depicted
me as a rabid dog (fit,
of course, for extermination), and Cairo's most
lickspittle columnist called
me "a crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt".
But the degree of abuse and outright threats now being
directed at anyone
academic, analyst, reporter who dares to criticise
Israel (or dares to
tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast
reaching McCarthyite
proportions. Take Edward Said, the brilliant
Palestinian academic who is a
professor at Columbia University.
He has been facing unprecedented abuse from the
Zionist Organisation of
America, which last year demanded that he be fired
from the Modern Language
Association and which now demands on an almost daily
basis his dismissal
from his professorship at Columbia solely because he
points out, with
clinical ferocity and painful accuracy, the historical
tragedy of
Palestinian dispossession, the brutality of Israel's
continued occupation
and the bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement.
Columbia University has
issued an unprecedented public defence of Said and
"the fundamental values
of a great university", quoting John Stuart Mill and
adding that to give way
to the Jewish lobby's demand would be "a threat to us
all and to academic
freedom".
Too true. Noam Chomsky himself Jewish is one of
the most profound
philosophers of our age, but his scathing reviews of
the Israeli occupation
and America's blind, unquestioning support for Israel
now earn him ever more
ruthless abuse. In the United States, he wrote
recently, a whole population
is kept in ignorance of the facts because "the
economic and and military
programmes (of Israel) rely crucially on US support,
which is domestically
unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes
were known."
Ignorance of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered
to in the US that only
a few tiny newspapers report anything other than
Israel's point of view. You
won't find Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put
very well by Charlie
Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel note
the boondocks
location when he wrote that "Palestinians won't get
their independence
until Americans get theirs".
But the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's
rules is now
international. We must say that Israel is under siege
by Palestinians
(rather than occupying Palestinian land), that
Palestinians are responsible
for the violence (even though Palestinians are the
principal victims), that
Arafat turned down a good deal at Camp David (though
he was offered just
over 60 per cent of his land, not 94 per cent), and
that Palestinians
indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why
the Israeli troops have
shot so many Palestinian children).
Israeli ambassadors and Israel's lobbyists have never
been such frequent
visitors to European newspaper offices, to complain
about reports or
reporters, sometimes in a quite disgraceful manner.
The Johannesburg Star
a sister paper of The Independent which carries my own
Middle East reports
was confronted by one pro-Israeli group this year
which claimed that I was
in some way assisting the right-wing historian David
Irving someone I have
never met and never wish to meet. They subsequently
withdrew their
allegation.
Then an odd thing happened in Ireland at a
prize-giving ceremony in memory
of a Belfast journalist. Mark Sofer, Israel's
ambassador in Dublin, had been
invited to talk about reporting in conflict zones to
journalism students
under the auspices of Co-operation Ireland, a
charitable movement dedicated
to North-South relations. But at one point he chose to
use the opportunity
to attack my own reporting of the Middle East, to
suggest that it should not
be read or believed. Mr Sofer is, of course, entitled
to his views but not
to air his prejudices in a charitable forum without
allowing a right of
reply. The charity has since announced that it
"totally dissociates itself"
from the ambassador's remarks. So it should.
And yet it goes on. In South Africa, in Europe, in
Australia I still
treasure the five pages of abuse in an Australian
lobby group's magazine
headlined "The Ignoble Scribe" and accusing me of a
"stupor of
self-deception". Oddly, you can now learn more from
the Israeli press than
the American media. The brutality of Israeli soldiers
is fully covered in
Ha'aretz, which also reports on the large number of US
negotiators who are
Jewish. Four years ago, a former Israeli soldier
described in an Israeli
newspaper how his men had looted a village in southern
Lebanon; when the
piece was reprinted in The New York Times, the looting
episode was censored
out of the text.
So here's just one final question. If Arab ambassadors
and lobbyists behaved
like their Israeli opposite numbers, would we listen
to them? Would we
respect them? Would we run for cover and print only
one side of the story?
Would we hell.