Media

Monitoring power with Robert Fisk  

An engrossing talk by the famed journalist in Vancouver’s east side lays a righteous beating on Western journalism by reed eurchuk

By Reed Euchuk  

Speaking in Vancouver on June 4th , reporter Robert Fisk advised the sell out crowd at the Martime Labour Centre to “refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by our presidents, our prime ministers and by our generals and by our journalists.” “Rarely in history have soldiers, journalists, presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless and unquestioning ranks,” said Fisk, who writes for the British paper The Independent. Fisk has reported from the Middle East for about thirty years and knows the region better than any other Western journalist.

Following the attacks at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Fisk found himself besieged by phone calls from fellow journalists asking him “who” did it, and “how” did they do it. But, said Fisk, they all scrupulously avoided asking “why” did it happen. Fisk tried to bring the “why” that is the motive for the attack forward for discussion but he received blistering criticism instead. He debated Allan Dershowitz, who criticized Fisk’s desire to ask “why” as pro-terrorist, anti-American and anti-Semite. “The moment you asked why, you were howled down,” said Fisk. Topics such as the long and brutal history of the West in the Arab world, the role of the US in supporting Israel in the oppression of the Palestinian people, and the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia were left out of the debate. “And what I came to realize,” Fisk continued “was that we journalists were taking our narrative from our leaders: it was good against evil, them against us, they hate our democracy, anything, anything but concentrate on the problems of the Middle East.”

A deep sense of history pervades Fisk’s work, as witnessed in his current book, The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. He quoted Arab Historian George Antonius, who, in 1938, wrote that “The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilization; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilized world.” Antonius warned an independent Jewish state in Israel “cannot be accomplished without forcibly displacing the Arabs.” Winston Churchill concurred, writing, “To maintain itself, the Jewish State must be armed to the teeth, and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army.” And with the growth of that army, “who can be sure that, cramped within their narrow limits, they would not plunge into the new undeveloped lands that lie around them?” asked Churchill.

And today, Fisk finds the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel still at the centre of all the Middle-East conflicts. Throughout almost 50 years of bloodshed, the “one outstanding, virtually unchanging phenomenon that assured the . . . balance of power” in the area has been “America’s unwavering, virtually uncritical support for Israel” said Fisk.

“Terror, Terror, Terror”

“Terrorism is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary,” said Fisk, and a license to ignore injustice, oppression and occupation. Fisk saved some of his most critical comments for other journalists. The language of terror, which Fisk called the “soap opera of the devil,” serves as a convenient cloak obfuscating the real conflicts on the ground. Fisk went through a roll-call of fifty years of Arab terrorists, as according to the US government and their corporate media palace guards. From Nasser (called the “Mussolini of the Nile”), to Qaddafi, to Khomeni, to Bin Laden, to Arafat, to Hussein, the names of the terror “mastermind” a la minuit, echo over the last few decades.

The language of the corporate press reflects the “nature of the parasitic osmotic relationship between the press . . . and those in power” said Fisk. The language “dehumanizes” the oppressed, he said, by ignoring the context of the conflicts. So instead of “occupied territories,” which implies the military subjugation of a disenfranchised people, journalists use the term “disputed territories” which puts the colonizer and the disenfranchised as equally entitled to a claim on the land. Likewise, “colonists” become “settlers,” again a neutral term suggesting homesteading on a previously unoccupied territory. And, the Israeli apartheid “wall” becomes a “security fence.” Has anyone heard of the “Berlin fence?” asked Fisk.

A journalist’s sources say a lot about the perspective implied in the writing. Fisk named and counted the sources in a November 2005 article on Iraq from the Los Angeles Times. Among the attributed sources were, “US officials said”; “US authorities say”; and “said one Justice Department counterterrorism official.” Twenty-one of 22 sources were similarly US government sources. “Sometimes I think the LA Times and New York Times should be called the “US Officials Say.”

Fisk likes to recall the ideas of one of his favourite journalists, Amira Hass, on the role of journalists. Hass’s mother told her about her experience of entering the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944 as a Jewish woman transported with others from Yugoslavia. As she and the others, many of whom were ill from the journey, were marched into the camp, Hannah Hass “saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking.” “This image became very formative in my upbringing,” Hass said later, “this despicable ‘looking from the side.’”

This story Hass uses to explain why she is a journalist.

Hass, who writes from the West Bank, where she resides in a Palestinian town, said “There is a misconception that journalists can be objective. . . . But being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is really about—it’s to monitor power and the centres of power.”