Lulua
11-12-2001, 13:13
. HYPOCRISY, HATRED AND THE WAR ON TERROR
[By Robert Fisk, The Independent, Nov. 8, 2001]
================================================== =====================
"If the U.S. attacks were an assault on "civilization", why shouldn't
Muslims regard the Afganistan attack as a war on Islam?"
"Air campaign?" "Coalition forces?" "War on terror?" How much longer
must we go on enduring these lies? There is no "campaign," merely an air
bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by the
world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No MiGs have taken to the
skies to do battle with the American B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition
soaring into the air over Kabul comes from Russian anti-aircraft guns
manufactured around 1943.
Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kandahar,
or the Italian air force, or the French air force over Herat. Or even
the Pakistani air force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a
few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed.
Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the
Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya, which we have already left in Vladimir
Putin's bloody hands? I even seem to recall a massive terrorist car bomb
that exploded in Beirut in 1985 targeting Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the
spiritual inspiration to the Hezbollah, who now appears to be back on
Washington's hit list; it missed Nasrallah, but slaughtered 85 innocent
Lebanese civilians. Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book,
Veil, that the CIA was behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to fund
the operation. So will U.S. President George Bush be hunting down the
CIA murderers involved? The hell he will.
So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbiting on
about the "air campaign," "coalition forces," and the "war on terror?"
Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle?
Certainly Muslims don't. In fact, you don't have to spend long in
Pakistan to realize that the Pakistani press gives an infinitely more
truthful and balanced account of the "war," publishing work by local
intellectuals, historians and opposition writers, along with Taliban
comments and pro-government statements, as well as syndicated Western
analyses; and all this, remember, within a military dictatorship
government.
You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the
subcontinent to realise why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and
Larry King Live don't amount to a hill of beans. The Beirut daily
As-Safir ran a widely-praised editorial asking why an Arab who wanted to
express the anger and humiliation of millions of other Arabs was forced
to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country. The implication, of course,
was that this -- rather than the crimes against humanity -- on September
11 was the reason for America's determination to liquidate Osama bin
Laden. Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the
Pakistani press on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the
United States in the aftermath of the September atrocities.
One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary"
in The News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who
was arrested in Alabama on September 19 with an expired visa. In jail in
Mississippi, he was beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth.
Then, long after he had sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat
him against a wall with the words: "Hey bin Laden, this is the first
round. There are going to be 10 rounds like this." There are dozens of
other such stories in the Pakistani press and most of them appear to be
true.
Again, Muslims have been outraged by the hypocrisy of the West's
supposed "respect" for Islam. We are not, so we have informed the world,
going to suspend military operations in Afghanistan during the holy
fasting month of Ramadan. After all, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq conflict
continued during Ramadan. So have Arab-Israeli conflicts. True enough.
But why, then, did we make such a show of suspending bombing on the
first Friday of the bombardment last month out of our "respect" for
Islam? Because we were more respectful then than now? Or because the
Taliban remained unbroken we decided to forget about all that "respect"?
"I can see why you want to separate bin Laden from our religion," a
Peshawar journalist said to me a few days ago. "Of course you want to
tell us that this isn't a religious war, but please, please stop telling
us how much you respect Islam."
There is another disturbing argument I hear in Pakistan. If, as Mr. Bush
claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on
"civilization," why shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as
a war on Islam?
The Pakistanis swiftly spotted the hypocrisy of the Australians. While
itching to get into the fight against bin Laden, the Australians have
sent armed troops to force destitute Afghan refugees out of their
territorial waters. The Aussies want to bomb Afghanistan but they don't
want to save the Afghans. Pakistan, it should be added, hosts 2.5
million Afghan refugees. Needless to say, this discrepancy doesn't get
much of an airing on our satellite channels. Indeed, I have never heard
so much fury directed at journalists as I have in Pakistan these past
few weeks. Nor am I surprised.
What, after all, are we supposed to make of the so-called "liberal"
American television journalist Geraldo Rivera who is just moving to Fox
TV, a Murdoch channel? "I'm feeling more patriotic than at any time in
my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge," he announced last
week. "And this catharsis I've gone through has caused me to reassess
what I do for a living." This is truly chilling stuff. Here is an
American journalist actually revealing that he's possibly "itching for
revenge."
Infinitely more shameful and unethical were the disgraceful words of
Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, to his staff. Showing the misery
of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said. "It
seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in
Afghanistan ... we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian
shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible
for killing close to 5,000 innocent people."
Mr. Isaacson was an unimaginative boss of Time magazine, but these
latest words will do more to damage the supposed impartiality of CNN
than anything on the air in recent years. Perverse? Why perverse? Why
are Afghan casualties so far down Isaacson's compassion list? Or is
Isaacson just following the lead set down for him a few days earlier by
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who portentously announced to the
Washington press corps that in times like these "people have to watch
what they say and watch what they do."
Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the U.S. government's demand not to
broadcast bin Laden's words in toto lest they contain "coded messages."
But the coded messages go out on television every hour. They are "air
campaign," "coalition forces," and "war on terror."
[By Robert Fisk, The Independent, Nov. 8, 2001]
================================================== =====================
"If the U.S. attacks were an assault on "civilization", why shouldn't
Muslims regard the Afganistan attack as a war on Islam?"
"Air campaign?" "Coalition forces?" "War on terror?" How much longer
must we go on enduring these lies? There is no "campaign," merely an air
bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by the
world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No MiGs have taken to the
skies to do battle with the American B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition
soaring into the air over Kabul comes from Russian anti-aircraft guns
manufactured around 1943.
Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kandahar,
or the Italian air force, or the French air force over Herat. Or even
the Pakistani air force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a
few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed.
Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the
Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya, which we have already left in Vladimir
Putin's bloody hands? I even seem to recall a massive terrorist car bomb
that exploded in Beirut in 1985 targeting Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the
spiritual inspiration to the Hezbollah, who now appears to be back on
Washington's hit list; it missed Nasrallah, but slaughtered 85 innocent
Lebanese civilians. Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book,
Veil, that the CIA was behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to fund
the operation. So will U.S. President George Bush be hunting down the
CIA murderers involved? The hell he will.
So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbiting on
about the "air campaign," "coalition forces," and the "war on terror?"
Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle?
Certainly Muslims don't. In fact, you don't have to spend long in
Pakistan to realize that the Pakistani press gives an infinitely more
truthful and balanced account of the "war," publishing work by local
intellectuals, historians and opposition writers, along with Taliban
comments and pro-government statements, as well as syndicated Western
analyses; and all this, remember, within a military dictatorship
government.
You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the
subcontinent to realise why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and
Larry King Live don't amount to a hill of beans. The Beirut daily
As-Safir ran a widely-praised editorial asking why an Arab who wanted to
express the anger and humiliation of millions of other Arabs was forced
to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country. The implication, of course,
was that this -- rather than the crimes against humanity -- on September
11 was the reason for America's determination to liquidate Osama bin
Laden. Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the
Pakistani press on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the
United States in the aftermath of the September atrocities.
One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary"
in The News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who
was arrested in Alabama on September 19 with an expired visa. In jail in
Mississippi, he was beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth.
Then, long after he had sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat
him against a wall with the words: "Hey bin Laden, this is the first
round. There are going to be 10 rounds like this." There are dozens of
other such stories in the Pakistani press and most of them appear to be
true.
Again, Muslims have been outraged by the hypocrisy of the West's
supposed "respect" for Islam. We are not, so we have informed the world,
going to suspend military operations in Afghanistan during the holy
fasting month of Ramadan. After all, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq conflict
continued during Ramadan. So have Arab-Israeli conflicts. True enough.
But why, then, did we make such a show of suspending bombing on the
first Friday of the bombardment last month out of our "respect" for
Islam? Because we were more respectful then than now? Or because the
Taliban remained unbroken we decided to forget about all that "respect"?
"I can see why you want to separate bin Laden from our religion," a
Peshawar journalist said to me a few days ago. "Of course you want to
tell us that this isn't a religious war, but please, please stop telling
us how much you respect Islam."
There is another disturbing argument I hear in Pakistan. If, as Mr. Bush
claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on
"civilization," why shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as
a war on Islam?
The Pakistanis swiftly spotted the hypocrisy of the Australians. While
itching to get into the fight against bin Laden, the Australians have
sent armed troops to force destitute Afghan refugees out of their
territorial waters. The Aussies want to bomb Afghanistan but they don't
want to save the Afghans. Pakistan, it should be added, hosts 2.5
million Afghan refugees. Needless to say, this discrepancy doesn't get
much of an airing on our satellite channels. Indeed, I have never heard
so much fury directed at journalists as I have in Pakistan these past
few weeks. Nor am I surprised.
What, after all, are we supposed to make of the so-called "liberal"
American television journalist Geraldo Rivera who is just moving to Fox
TV, a Murdoch channel? "I'm feeling more patriotic than at any time in
my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge," he announced last
week. "And this catharsis I've gone through has caused me to reassess
what I do for a living." This is truly chilling stuff. Here is an
American journalist actually revealing that he's possibly "itching for
revenge."
Infinitely more shameful and unethical were the disgraceful words of
Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, to his staff. Showing the misery
of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said. "It
seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in
Afghanistan ... we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian
shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible
for killing close to 5,000 innocent people."
Mr. Isaacson was an unimaginative boss of Time magazine, but these
latest words will do more to damage the supposed impartiality of CNN
than anything on the air in recent years. Perverse? Why perverse? Why
are Afghan casualties so far down Isaacson's compassion list? Or is
Isaacson just following the lead set down for him a few days earlier by
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who portentously announced to the
Washington press corps that in times like these "people have to watch
what they say and watch what they do."
Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the U.S. government's demand not to
broadcast bin Laden's words in toto lest they contain "coded messages."
But the coded messages go out on television every hour. They are "air
campaign," "coalition forces," and "war on terror."