Fisk condemns jounalists for using US and Israeli distortions

Robert Fisk on Canadian tour slams 'cowardly' journalistic colleagues

Award-winning British journalist has repeatedly interviewed Bin Laden and spent the last 26 years warning us why the Muslim and Arab world resent the West

by Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, 15 NOV: On this cold Toronto night and on the eve of a possible war in Iraq, a friend comments that Robert Fisk appears more emotional this time around in a new series of speaking engagements.

"What I fear is an American attempt to reshape the Middle East, to rewrite a history of a region, which is hot shot with anger against the United States," the Middle East correspondent for the London based The Independent told an overflowing crowd at the auditorium of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.

Fisk demonstrated his abilities as a brilliant raconteur in his account of traveling to Osama bin Ladin's lair in 1997.

"I was driven by one of his armed followers, hundreds of miles across the mountains of Afghanistan, high up the rugged towering Kabul Gorge. The clouds were below us, waterfalls of ice clinging to the leaning rock above our little Toyota vehicle. At one point the gunman driving turned to me and said "Toyota is good for holy war."

A chillier atmosphere greeted Fisk in his third interview with bin Ladin who disconcertingly cleaned his teeth with a piece of wood during their chat. This robed figure "wearing cheap plastic sandals," with "the eyes of a cat" and "a slight infirmity in one of his feet" boasted to "Mr. Robert" of having destroyed the Soviet Union, which had invaded Afghanistan, and was now prepared with the help of God "to turn the United States into a shadow of itself."

Years later, Fisk recalled those disturbing words in a Brussels hotel room when he watched "the terrible images of New York and the World Trade Centre disappear into two almost Biblical columns of smoke."

An intense man given to insisting upon precision in the use of the English language, Fisk has made a career in his 26 years in the Middle East of warning us in the West about why Muslims and Arabs resent and hate us.

But on this night he saved his most critical and biting comments for his own profession.

"The language of Middle East journalism has become so cowardly, so slippery, so deferential, so lofty of the phrases used by the State Department, the President, the US diplomats, Israeli officials."

Fisk provided examples of how phrases and terminology coined by American and Israeli officials eventually come out of the mouths of TV reporters on CNN and help shape perceptions of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

"It is difficult to explain to Arabs for example why the New York and Washington massacres [on Sept 11 one year ago] were an act of terrorism which they were. But why the massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beruit between the 16th and 18th of September 1982 has never been called an act of terrorism by journalists or by government?"

The equation of "Arab," "terrorist" and "Osama bin Ladin" was the front-page theme of Feb. 19, edition of Newsweek, which bore the headline, "Terror Goes Global." Displayed was the sinister photographic image of a man "his face wrapped almost completely in Arab headdress, with an automatic rifle also on display.

After some digging around by Fisk, he learned that this unnamed person on the magazine front was a Palestinian gunman attending the funeral of a fellow Tanzim militia member in the occupied West Bank. "Newsweek's cover picture is a lie," stated Fisk, because it used the image of a Palestinian fighter, dangerous as he might be to Israelis during their current war with Palestinians over the status of the occupied terrorities, to personify terrorism worldwide. "Palestinians have been effortlessly transformed into enemies of the world."

Meanwhile, American, and some Canadian journalists, are falling in step with a directive originally issued by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that American diplomats use the term "disputed" instead of "occupied" in reference to the territories Israel holds on the West Bank and Gaza.

The result is the erasing from the journalist lexicon of the reality of illegal Jewish colonies and Israeli army checkpoints crisscrossing the Palestinian territories, Fisk charges. "Disputed, you see, suggests an argument about land deeds or conflicting "heritage claims" as CNN once memorably called them."

Associated Press has apparently gone further by referring to the once-occupied territorities as "war-won," because they were captured by Israel during the Six Day War of 1968.[sic]

Fisk has drawn criticism for describing the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza as a form of "colonialization," similar to how French established their presence in Algeria before the country revolted and gained its independence in the early 60s. (Ariel Sharon has also unapologetically made the same parallel in an interview with the French press.)

Now, CNN has issued a directive to its own reporters that henceforth Gilo, a controversial settlement on Arab land in the West Bank south of Jerusalem, will be called "a Jewish neighbourhood" by the network reporters.

You might understand why a Palestinian would choose to attack a settlement, but "not a cosy neighbourhood," says Fisk.

Furthermore, the BBC has now also adopted "targeted killings," the phrase used by Israeli officials to refer to the assassination of selected Palestinians, Fisk said. Some of these targeted killings have involved innocent civilians, which is why the terminology is "highly misleading."

But it is not only the reporting around the Israel-Palestine conflict that has been affected.

"Humouring Turkey," a key ally in the possible war against Iraq, has also become a major focus of effort for western governments. It is reflected in how journalists talk about the deliberate killing of 1.5-million Christian Armenians in 1915 in Ottoman-ruled Turkey, says Fisk.

There is no dispute among historians that this event happened and yet the New York Times, which broke the story on the massacres 87 years ago, today refers to the details behind killings (their occurrence disputed officially by a succession of Turkish governments) as "hotly debated" or "a matter of intense debate" in its reporting.

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