Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning one of Fisk's best

Transcript Of Robert Fisk Speech At Concordia University In
Montreal - November 17, 2002

(Transcribed by Ken Hechtman)

I notice that Aaron did not say, "Turn off your mobile phones", and I'm
not going to either. Just a few
months ago, when I was in Ireland, I was giving a lecture I announced
that anyone whose mobile
phone rang would be sold into slavery. Immediately, a mobile phone rang,
and it was mine. Keep your
phones on - it's no problem.

Ladies and Gentlemen, September the 11th, 2001 did not change the world.
I tell my colleagues,
"Please stop printing and broadcasting those words." Over and over,
after September the 11th, this
had become one of the outstanding dangerous lies which we journalists
have been propagating.
September the 11th may give President George W. Bush the excuse to
change the world but that
should be exposed for what it is: a manipulation of grief and fear in
order to start a war that has
nothing to do with the international crimes against humanity which took
place in New York, Washington
and Pennsylvania just over a year ago. A war against a country -- yes,
led by a monster - but a country
which has nothing to do with those atrocities.

On September the 12th this year, I went to the United Nations General
Assembly to have a look at Mr.
Bush. You know, when you see someone on television, that flat image
gives you an idea, but you need
to actually see the man in the flesh. So I went to the General Assembly,
I wasn't very far away from Mr.
Bush. I watched him start what I fear is an American attempt to reshape
the Middle East. To rewrite
the history of a region which is white-hot with anger at the United
States. It will, I suspect, be the most
frightening attempt to change the map of the Middle East, since Britain
and France, victors over the
Ottoman Empire divided up the spoils of the 1914-18 war, the war my
father fought in.

I heard Mr. Bush's increasingly violent demands for an attack on Iraq
and ranging change elsewhere in
the Middle East. And be sure when it starts, if it starts, our
television broadcasters will use their familiar
strap-line "War on Terror." Already, I notice, it's "Showdown in Iraq"
on CNN and "Crisis in Iraq" on the
BBC - we're a little bit behind CNN, but we'll catch up.

In the days and weeks that followed September the 11th, I became
increasingly disturbed by the vapid,
hopeless, gutless, unchallenging, journalism which passed for coverage
in the Western media. The
terrifying events of September the 11th were mutated into a movie:
America at War, The War on
Terrorism, War on Terror. Often, these titles would appear in a kind of
laminated gold typeface, the
kind that once appeared in Biblical epics. Charlton Heston in Ben-Hurï¿½
And each newscast would be
introduced with an orchestral theme. A jingle for someone to come back
to the living room to watch the
next part of a serial. I felt that this obscured realities, just as I
felt it also dishonored the dead. And just
as in the 1991 Gulf War, we were also treated to the hapless, gutless
picture of journalists wearing
army costumes. CNN's man in Kandahar was among the first to don a Marine
helmet. When I
condemned this pathetic piece of theater, CNN's executives announced
that the US Marines had
insisted that their reporter wear the helmet. This is no excuse.
Journalists have no business obeying
military orders that make them look like combatants.

And when so many of our colleagues accept these orders, as they did in
the 1991 Gulf War, or when
they turn up with a pistol, like Geraldo Rivera in Jalalabad, saying
they want to shoot Osama Bin
Laden, the representative of FOX News, is it any wonder that we
journalists have become the targets
of attacks?

But my talk to you tonight is not about the dangers of journalism. It's
about the dangers now posed by
journalism itself. Facile, unquestioning acceptance of authority, and
the trite and bland and deeply
misleading government statements which are parroted and then blended
into <unintelligible> and
headlines. From the very start, I predicted in the Independent, my own
paper in London, that this was
not a war on terror, but a war against America's enemies, and most
probably, Israel's enemies too.
Which is what it is turning out to be. Yet we went along, indeed we
still go on, against all the evidence,
in calling it a war on terror, a war for democracy, a war against evil.
Newsweek actually carried a front
cover headline which read, "The Evil One." Not content with allowing
governments to become
headline-writers, journalists were now using Biblical authority for
their stories. We: the West,
democracy, the forces of good. We were the ones that suffered. And a few
weeks ago we had to suffer
again. But when the date fell due for the anniversary of the bombardment
of Afghanistan, and the
thousands of civilians killed there, did we carry long and moving
accounts of those thousands of
people killed? Did we, hell.

Let me first ask you one question: When did we first hear of the Iraqi
dimension of September the
11th? A dimension that factually has no substantial connection with the
slaughter that occurred just
over a year ago. Did anyone say back then, in the days and weeks
immediately following these crimes
against humanity, that Iraq would be in the firing line? Where exactly
did the slippage come? At what
point did Osama Bin Laden fade away, to be replaced by Saddam Hussein?
Our journalists, who
should have picked this up at once, were silent. Far from doing their
jobs alerting readers and viewers
to this astonishing transition in US foreign policy, they were
[unintelligible], the New York Times, the
Washington Post, suddenly began to run a lot of stories on the supposed
intelligence links between
Iraq and Bin Laden. Eight stories in one week, I recall. Each sourced to
administration officials,
intelligence officials, diplomats -- all of them, of course, anonymous.
A copy of the International Herald
Tribune - I read the Tribune in Beirut to get an idea of what the Post
and the Times are saying - the
copy had seven stories, of which each first paragraph ended with the
words, "Comma, officials said."
That should be the name of the newspaper, Officials Said.

I want to show you the front page of the Daily Express, not my favorite
British tabloid, from September
the 9th, 2002. For decorum's sake, I shall put my hand hereï¿½ Nuclear
Attack in Just Months! Mr. Blair
didn't tell me about that a year ago. What's the target, Trafalgar
Square? So today while we prepare to
discuss the wisdom of starting yet another war in the Middle East, as
though there weren't a bloody
enough war going on there already, we remain quiescent. We do not want
to investigate just how
Target: Kabul became Target: Baghdad and in the coming days perhaps
Target: Damascus or Target:
Beirut or even, since the RAND Corporation's lecture which referred to
the Kingdom as "the kernel of
evil", Target: Riyadh.

Even when our own dear prime minister Tony Blair returns from the United
States telling us that there
is going to be a "blood price", quote-unquote, that has to be paid in
the event of a war, not a single
journalist points out that this will be a blood price principally paid
by the Iraqis, not by us. And if by the
British, certainly by the young soldiers from Manchester or Suffolk, not
by anyone from the region of
Mr. Blair. Blood, by the way, the word blood is becoming an increasing
part of our discourse. Richard
Armitage [unintelligible], announced two months ago that the Lebanese
Hezbollah was the A-Team of
terrorism, Al Qaeda being relegated to the World Division. Armitage said
that Hezbollah owed America
a blood debt. Note how yet again, we're on the move. First the heart of
darkness beats in a man with a
beard and a propensity to live in Afghan caves. Then he transmogrifies
into a resident of Baghdad with
a liking for chemical weapons and who is supposedly building a nuclear
bomb. [unintelligible]

Armitage's blood debt presumably refers to the killing of 241 US
servicemen in the US Marine Barracks
in Beirut in October of 1983, though he didn't say so. Very few
reporters have tried to winkle out what
all this means. To its great credit, I should say that the Nation
magazine in New York has published a
first-class article detailing the number of US administration officials
who had previously worked for
pro-Israeli lobby groups in Washington. This at least might persuade why
the Bush administration now
appears to be set to redraw the map of the Middle East along lines which
Israel itself can only dream
of. No mention of all this, of course, in the mainstream media in the
United States or in Canada. And
still the blindness goes on.

Immediately after the 1991 Gulf War, once it was clear that the awful
Saddam would remain in power,
the United States government suddenly stopped making reference to the
Iraqi president. I remember
how Colin Powell told a press conference I attended in northern Iraq
(the Kurdish bit) that the
American government was talking to "Iraqi officials" He made no mention
of the Hitler of Bagdad who
had been on our screens for so long. So I asked Colin Powell, "What
happened to the Saddam factor?
Why are there no references to the [unintelligible] - and not without
good reason - a few weeks
before?" He just shrugged his shoulders and went on talking
[unintelligible]. Having failed to destroy
him, Saddam had been turned into a non-person, to be reactivated eleven
years later when we wanted
to go to war again. In just such a way, this year Osama Bin Laden was
airbrushed out of the picture -
he may be bring himself back in at the moment, but that's a different
matter. No US official this year
any longer mentions his name, exactly the same as Saddam Hussein in
1991. Having failed to destroy
him, Bin Laden was turned into a non-person, although Saddam-like, I'm
sure we will be able to
disinter him when we need him in the months to come.

The language of journalism has, as usual, fallen into step with that of
government. Note how almost
every journalistic reference to Al Qaeda now talks about how US forces
in Afghanistan are mopping up
- wait for it - Al Qaeda remnants. The word remnants began to be used at
a US press briefing I
attended at Bagram, Afghanistan, and has effortlessly and without any
self-questioning, entered the
journalistic lexicon. We are always closing in on, hunting down,
chasing, liquidating, cornering, those
elusive remnants. True, when US forces tried to ambush those remnants in
Shah-I-kot earlier this
year, those remnants turned out to be of around brigade-strength. And
true, the attempted
assassination of Hamid Karzai and the carbomb in Kabul which killed 26
people does suggest that
there are rather more remnants than we bargained for. But no matter.
We've now lined up Baghdad in
our sights.

Many of you will be aware of the story which appeared in the New York
Times on October 10th in
which it was revealed to us that the White House is developing a
detailed plan based on the post-war
occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government, war
crimes trials for Iraqi leaders
and - wait for it - General Tommy Franks, commander of US forces, is
likely to play the role of General
Douglas MacArthur. Quite a role to fill. There's a little bit of a
problem. See, there is no emperor of
Iraq. The problem for General Tommy Franks, if he does turn up in
Baghdad to play the role of
General Douglas MacArthur, is that the one unifying sovereign symbol
that held Japan together amid
the ashes of nuclear defeat in 1945 was the Emperor Hirohito,
mysteriously absolved of his war
responsibility for Japan's wartime atrocities - his military underlings
went to the gallows on his behalf.
But in Iraq, of course, the emperor is Saddam Hussein, and if you were
to believe the US
administration, the dictator from Tikrit will be in the dock with all
the rest of the Iraqi war criminals.
General Franks will have to combine the role of emperor with that of
military governor, which is how
America's whole imperial adventure, I suspect, may fall to bits. And
what if the mosques defy American
occupation? What if the Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north
set up their own civil
administration? Will the United States arrest all the imams who preach
against America's hegemony?

After the 1991 Gulf War, a large group of Iraqi opposition figures met
in Beirut. They met there to plan
for the new Iraq. Sounds familiar to you, does it not? On the prevailing
belief of [unintelligible] of
course, that Saddam would be gone within weeks. But within 24 hours, the
opposition, including the
most secular and liberal of Iraqi movements, was announcing that it
would not allow foreign troops to
contaminate what it called, quote, "the sacred banks of the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers." At this point,
of course, the Americans lost all interest in this manifestation of
Iraq's opposition to Saddam Hussein.
In 1991, US troops occupied only a small part of Southern Iraq. Does the
Bush administration think
things will be any better if they occupy all of Iraq?

Now, it just might be that the Americans do have an emperor in mind for
occupied Iraq. A member of
the same Hashemite family which was, long ago, awarded the throne of
Baghdad courtesy of Winston
Churchill as a consolation prize for being booted out of Damascus by the
French. The
re-establishment of the Hashemite Kingdom in Iraq might allow King
Abdullah of Jordan to cash in on
some of the oilfields of Iraq, which he'd have to share, of course with
the very [unintelligible] American
oil companies run by Mr. Bush's chums. Or it might be a question of the
former Crown Prince Hassan
who showed up to a meeting of the Iraqi opposition in London a couple of
months ago. I notice that
General Franks paid a sudden visit to Amman last month. I wonder why.

But let's go back to Afghanistan for a moment. Afghanistan is descending
deeper into anarchy. It is
impossible to travel by night on the roads. The drug barons are back in
control. Read the UN's warning
on the massive new narcotics traffic that's due to start when this
year's poppy crop is in. And we can't
even bother to investigate the mass graves in northern Afghanistan where
our war criminal allies
buried over a thousand of their Taliban enemies after they were
suffocated to death in containers.

But let me give you a personal reflection on all this. As Aaron
mentioned, on December 8th of last
year, I was attacked by a gang of Afghan refugees in a village, in Qila
Abdullah, not far from the
Pakistan-Afghan border. My car had broken down and the Afghans, many of
whom were refugees
from the recent US bombing raids on Kandahar, decided to take out their
rage on me. I was beaten on
the head with stones, kicked and cut. Rescue came from a religious man.
I recall he had a turban, but I
had so much blood in my eyes I could scarcely see him. And he escorted
me to a Pakistani policeman.

Sitting in the Red Crescent ambulance on it's way to Quetta, I realized
how carefully I was going to
have to handle the frightening and very painful event which had just
occurred to me and which I knew
would be reported by other journalists. I did not with to be the source
of another Muslim-bashing story.
A lone Briton savagely assaulted by an angry mob of Afghans either. I
hate the "What and Where"
stories that leave out the "Why". Some context had to be given to their
fury, some reference had to be
made to the fact that they had been most cruelly bereaved. That my
sudden and very Western
appearance represented to them the face of those who had just
slaughtered their loved ones. So I felt
I needed to make this point. I said it and I wrote in my own newspaper,
the Independent, that if I was
one of those grief-filled Afghan men, I too would have attacked Robert
Fisk. Those who beat me, I
wrote, were innocent of any crime except being victims of the world.
Almost every published and
televised report mentioned the reasons behind the assault, except for
the British Mail on Sunday,
which used an agency story from the Associated Press but then deleted my
explanation. In the Mail, a
mob of angry Afghans, of course, attacked me, apparently without reason.
Readers might have been
excused for thinking that Afghans are always angry, primitive,
generically violent and thus prone to
beat up foreigners. The classic Islamophobic reaction of anyone reading
the Mail.

Later reactions were even more interesting. Among quite a number of
letters which arrived from
readers of the Independent, by far the great majority of them expressing
their sympathy, came a few
Christmas cards, all but one of them unsigned, expressing the writers'
disappointment that the Afghans
hadn't, quote, "finished the job."

The Wall Street Journal, one of my favorite newspapers, carried an
article which said more or less the
same thing, under the subhead, "A Self-Loathing Multiculturalist Gets
His Due." In it, Mark Steyn wrote
of my reaction that, I quote, "had to have a heart of stone not to weep
with laughter." The "Fisk
Doctrine," I'm quoting somebody, "the Fisk Doctrine," he went on, "taken
to its logical conclusion
absolves of responsibility, not only the perpetrators of September the
11th, but also Taliban supporters
who attacked several of his fellow journalists in Afghanistan, all of
whom, alas, died before they were
able to file a final column explaining why they deserved
[unintelligible]."

Now apart from the fact that most of my colleagues who died in
Afghanistan were killed by thieves,
who had taken advantage of the Taliban's defeat, Steyn's article was
interesting for two reasons. He
insinuated that I somehow approved - approved! - of the crimes against
humanity on September the
11th, or at least would absolve the mass murderers. More importantly,
Steyn's article would not have
been written had I not explained the context of the assault that was
made upon me, tiny though it was
in the scale of suffering being visited on Afghanistan. Had I merely
reported being attacked by a mob,
the story would have fitted neatly into the general American media
presentation of the Afghan war. No
reference to civilian deaths from US B-52 bombers, no suggestion that
the widespread casualties
caused by the American presence would turn Afghans furious against the
West. We were, after all,
supposed to be liberating these people, not killing their relatives. Of
course my crime -- and the Wall
Street Journal gave its column a headline "Hate-me Crimes" - my crime
was to report the Why as well
as the What and Where.

I was crossing the Atlantic on September the 11th, 2001. My plane took
off from Belgium just after the
first reports of the first attack on the World Trade Center. It turned
round off the coast of Ireland after
the US closed its airspace. So I filed my first column for the
Independent on the satellite phone - the
plane's phone - on the seat beside me. I did so without notes, dictating
to a copy-taker wearing
earphones in Manchester, England. And I did so pointing out there would
be an attempt in the coming
days to avoid asking the Why questions. I wrote about the history of
deceit and lies in the Middle East,
the growing Arab anger over the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children
under UN sanctions and the
continued occupation of Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. I suggested Bin
Laden could well have been
responsible. I wrote that thousands of Muslims may soon die in
Afghanistan and elsewhere as a result
of the outrages that occurred in New York and Washington.

Emails poured into the Independent. Most of them in support of my
article, but many demanding my
resignation. The attacks on America were caused, quote, "by hate itself,
of precisely the obsessive and
dehumanizing kind that Fisk and Bin Laden have been spraying." According
to the same message,
from Professor Judea Pearl of UCLA, I was "drooling venom and a
professional hate-peddler." Another
missive, signed Ellen Popper, announced that I was "in cahoots with the
arch-terrorist Bin Laden."
Mark Bourne labeled me "a total fascist." I was "psychotic", according
to Lillian Barry-Weiss. Brendan
Corrin of San Diego told me, "you are actually supporting evil itself."
It was only 750 words on the
inside page of the Independent, ladies and gentlemen.

On an Irish radio show, a Harvard professor, whom I needn't mention -
Dershowitz, of course -
announced that I was "a vile, a dangerous man," and that
anti-Americanism, of which I was obviously
guilty, was the same as anti-Semitism. The show's Irish presenter pulled
the plug on the good
professor. But I got the point. Not only was it wicked to suggest that
someone might have had reasons,
however warped, to commit this mass slaughter, it was even more
important not to suggest what the
reasons might be. To criticize the United States, to be anti-American,
whatever that is, is to be a
Jew-hater, a racist, a Nazi. Merely to suggest that Washington's
policies in the Middle East, its
unconditional support of Israel, its support for Arab dictators, its
approval of the UN sanctions that cost
so many lives, might have led, however in such a warped way and a
twisted way, to the heinous
attacks on September the 11th, was an act of evil in itself. Oddly, the
fact that the mass murderers
were all Arabs and that most of them came from Saudi Arabia, was not
regarded as a problem by
typical readers. Arab terrorists are familiar from Hollywood films, of
course. The sin was to connect the
Arabs who did this with the problems of the lands they came from. To ask
the Why question.

When the cops turn up at the scene of any crime here in Montreal - oh,
you don't have any crimes
here in Montreal, do you? When the cops turn up at the scene of a crime
in Torontoï¿½ When the cops
turn up at the scene of a crime in Vancouver, the first thing they do is
look for a motive. Even in
television movies, they look for a motive. But when the crime scene is
on a vast and terrifying scale in
New York and Washington, the one thing we're not allowed to do is look
for a motive. The killers of
New York, they hated democracy - never mind they wouldn't have had the
slightest idea what
democracy isï¿½

Ladies and gentlemen, I say all this because I have a particular
interest in Osama Bin Laden. Back in
1997, I met him and not for the first time. I interviewed him in Sudan
in 1994 and then in Afghanistan in
1996, then again the following year. That last night in May, I was
driven by one of his armed followers
hundreds of miles across the mountains of Afghanistan, high above the
rugged [unintelligible] gorge.
The clouds were below us, waterfall ice clinging to the rock above our
Toyota. On the [untintelligible]
journey, at one point the gunman next to me said, "Toyota is good for
holy war."

[unintelligible] fairly amusing, and I kid you not, however, Bin Laden
would never make a joke like that.
After hours of sliding and slipping on the scree by sheer persistence we
reached a pile of stones - an
air-raid shelter 25 feet high and 25 feet wide cut into the living rock
of the mountainside by Bin Laden's
own construction crews at the height of the war between the Afghans and
the Russians. The war, of
course, in which Bin Laden had fought with great courage on our side,
being wounded 6 times. The
side, of course, the allies, the West called "themselves", of course.
Indeed, it's interesting that that
particular camp was bombed last year, by the Americans, and with
pinpoint accurate strikes. It was
accurate. All the camps were hit. The only thing we weren't told by
reporters at the time was it wasn't
very difficult to find them because virtually all those camps had been
built by the CIA.

I waited in a tent along with several of Bin Laden's armed followers.
The phrase "Al Qaeda" was not
known to us then. A paraffin lamp sputtered in a corner. Then Bin Laden
himself came in. White Saudi
robe, dishdash, red kaffiyah, cheap plastic slippers on bare feet, lithe
as a cat, but I thought I saw a
slight infirmity in one of his feet. I was carrying over my shoulder a
small satchel which I use in rough
country to carry my passport and other items but Bin Laden saw some
Arabic-language newspapers in
the bag and seized upon them, turning to study them in the corner of the
tent in silence for all of 20
minutes. He didn't even know the Iranian foreign minister had just
visited Saudi Arabia. And I sat there
in the tent, all of us ignored by Bin Laden, and thought how isolated he
appeared. He didn't have a
radio, he didn't have a television. When he spoke, however, it was with
a determination, a chilling
self-conviction that I had not seen before. I still have my notes from
that meeting and what he said is
even more sinister in retrospect.

"Mr. Robert," he said, "We fought and beat the Russian Army in
Afghanistan. We won our battle
against the Russians on this very mountain upon which you are now
sitting, and that battle destroyed
the Soviet Union." Give or take some exaggeration, I wouldn't want to
object to that. There's a certain
amount of truth in it. From time to time, Bin Laden, rather
disconcertingly to me, would clean his teeth
with a piece of wood while I was asking a question, a piece of mishrak
wood. The only man who's ever
been interviewed by me who cleaned his teeth while I'm asking questions.
But then he went on, "Mr.
Robert, I pray to God that he will permit us to turn the United States
into a shadow of itself."

Ladies and gentlemen, I could not fail to remember those terrible words
when I saw the equally terrible
images of New York when I got back to Brussels that night, and saw the
World Trade Center
disappearing into two almost Biblical columns of smoke. New York, I
realized, was now a shadow of
itself. Just that one word comes to immediately to mind. But Bin Laden's
power in the Middle East - in
the Middle East - comes from what he says and not what he does. I don't
believe he climbs to the top
of a mountain, pulls out a mobile phone and mutters, "Put Plan B into
action," the way it's done in
Hollywood and the State Department. I fear, however, that his awful
power and influence comes more
from his words. Many times, I have listened, I have personally been
present, his armed followers
hanging upon those words as though he were the Messiah or the Mahdi.

He would demand the American forces leave the Middle East, leave what he
called the land of the two
holy places, Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. He demanded the end of
what he called the corrupt
regimes which are supported by the West. Saudi Arabia, of course, the
other Gulf States, Egypt,
Jordan, etc. He demanded an end to the Israeli occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza. He demanded
an end to the sanctions on Iraq. Whether or not he really felt that
strongly, that is what he said. And his
words have a special resonance in the Arab world because for decades
they were humiliated by the
West and especially by America. A world which many perceive as deeply
corrupted and damaged
almost beyond repair by the culture and armed might and politics of the
West. Without those feelings
of despair, humiliation and fury, Bin Laden would, I believe, truly be a
voice in the wilderness - ignored,
derided, perhaps committed to a hospital for the insane. But to many
Arabs, and this is the point, to
many Arabs who are appalled, for moral and religious reasons, by the
staggering massacres in New
York and Washington, Bin Laden does not sound insane. Which is why
[unintelligible] today.

You know, I spent 26 years in the Middle East trying to answer the Why.
And in no part of the world is
our reporting so flawed, so biased in favor of one country and so
contemptible in its use of words.
Indeed, the language of Middle East journalism, has become so cavalier,
so slippery, so deferential, so
wrong, so ready to use the phrases used by the State Department, the
President, US diplomats, Israeli
officials that reporting has become in many cases incomprehensible. Such
is the bizarre nature of our
profession in the region that any talk like the one given to you
tonight, has to follow a special mantra:
Saddam Hussein is a wicked, cruel tyrant who invaded Iran - we were very
keen on that at the time -
and then Kuwait. He used poison gas on the Kurds - but we didn't object
to that at the time. His Iranian
war did cost up to a million lives. He has a hangman on 24 hour duty.
Women are hanged on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yasser Arafat is a corrupt, vain little despot,
allowing his 11 - some say 13 -
secret services to beat torture and occasionally kill Palestinians
opponents. I should add that I never
could see why Israel wanted to negotiate with him, unless they saw him
as a[n unintelligible] ally who
[unintelligible].

[unintelligible] Middle East, because we have distorted the truth,
either because we are afraid of
criticism from Israel and its supporters or because we journalists
prefer an easy life, unencumbered by
hate mail and letters to the editor. Take the pejorative use of that
word "terror". The mass murders of
September the 11th may require a redefinition by those journalists,
including myself, who normally
abjure the word from our reporting on the grounds that it is used
exclusively about Arabs. Its overuse,
almost as a punctuation mark, in any discussion of the Arab-Israeli
conflict remains as poisonous as
ever. It's difficult to explain to Arabs, for example, why the New York
and Washington massacre was
and act of terror - which it was - but the massacre of up to 1700
Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila
refugee camps in Beirut between the 16th and the 18th of September 1982
has never been called
terrorism by journalists or by governments. The death toll in Chatila,
after all, was more than half that
of the Twin Towers.

Was this strange omission of the word terrorism because the killers,
members of the Christian
Lebanese Phalangist militia happened to be allied to Israel? Did it not
qualify as an act of terrorism
because most of the murderers were wearing Israeli Defense Force
uniforms, albeit with the acronym
Zahal crossed out? Did it fail the terrorism test because Israel's
forces had surrounded the camps and
because Ariel Sharon, the defense minister, had sent the Phalange into
the camps. Not once, ever,
has a Western newspaper called the mass murderers of Sabra and Chatila
terrorists. Indeed, Israel's
own Kahane Commission of Inquiry, flawed but none the less a very good
document in its way, which
held Ariel Sharon personally responsible, called the Phalangist killers
"soldiers."

This is not an isolated example. Twelve Israelis, most of them armed,
were killed - and I called it a
massacre, just as I do when the Israelis kill Palestinians in the same
way. They were killed, twelve of
them, just a couple of days ago. But let's go back to another massacre
in Hebron, where an Israeli
reserve officer, Baruch Goldstein, massacred 29 Palestinians in a Hebron
mosque, on the 25th of
February, 1994. He was not called a terrorist. CNN referred to him as
deranged. Later, the Israeli
ambassador to London said that Goldstein was "deranged by fanaticism."
Other reports spoke of
Goldstein as an extremist, or a member of the underground - note the
ghostly echo of World War II
heroism there. Yet when Hamas took its inevitable and wicked revenge
with a bus bomb in the Israeli
town of Afula, CNN recovered its nerve. The reporter Bill Delaney told
us it was an act of Arab
terrorism. I should say that there are Israeli journalists who entirely
take my side on this and agree on
the total misnomer that is the use of the word terrorism.

A far greater effort of significance, and here I'm going to need the
first transparency I brought. This is
the cover of Newsweek magazine on February 19th last year. We'll have a
look at it here. It's one of
those lovely American covers which I enjoy. Terror Goes Global! There we
are. It alludes, of course, to
Osama Bin Laden's global network of terror. Beneath these words, as you
can see, is a photograph of
a Palestinian in a kaffiyah headdress which almost totally conceals his
face. Holding in his hand is an
automatic rifle. Now the reader, you tonight, might suppose that this is
part of the terror network.
Indeed, we're obviously meant to believe this. But I was puzzled when I
saw this cover picture because
I'd seen it before. It was taken by a Finnish photographer, Ilka
[unintelligible] of the Gamma Picture
Agency in Paris. [unintelligible] now lives in New York. So from Beirut
I gave him a call. I called up the
United States and I said, "Ilka, tell me about this picture."

"I took the picture in the West Bank," Ilka told me, "It was a member of
the Tanzim at a Palestinian
funeral." Thus, you see, a Palestinian gunman, armed and attending the
funeral of a fellow Palestinian
killed by Israelis, had been turned into a representative of global
terror. Palestinians as a people, and
the man on this cover is very clearly a Palestinian, have been
effortlessly transformed into enemies of
the world. It wasn't the fault of the photographer, but that cover on
Newsweek is a lie. The man whose
face is covered by the kaffiyah, dangerous though he undoubtedly is - or
was - to the Israelis, has
nothing to do with Bin Laden or the lead story in the magazine. Thank
you for taking that off and
putting up the second one.

Just as Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, has been doing his best,
rather vainly I think, to link
Yasser Arafat with Bin Laden - how they must hate each other for the
comparison - [unintelligible]
underway to decontextualize Israel's role in the occupied territories.
Indeed, once the State
Department in Washington told its diplomats throughout the Middle East
to stop using the word
occupied in relation to the West Bank and Gaza, American journalists
dutifully followed their example.
Henceforth the land would be called disputed, as in, quote, "Benjamin
Netanyahu turns up the heat by
OK'ing new housing in the disputed territories." Time caption, March
7th, 1997. Disputed, of course,
changes the reality.

I was driving through Ashafiya into Beirut the other day when the BBC
called me up, live from London,
"we're going on the air in just a few seconds, Bob." - with the Israeli
spokesman in Jerusalem. And the
moment I referred to the occupied territories - "They are not occupied!"
he said. "Oh, I see. So those
soldiers who stopped me between Ramallah and Jenin last week were Swiss,
were they? Or were they
Burmese?" You see, by deleting occupation from the lexicon, journalists
erase the colonies - illegally
built for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. They erase the humiliating
checkpoints which still cover, as
they do today, the West Bank and Gaza. Disputed suggests an argument
about land deeds, or
conflicting inheritance claims, as CNN once memorably called them.
Failing to point out, of course, that
many of the Palestinians have documents to prove their ownership while
many of the settlers believe
that someone up there gave them the land. The Associated Press, the
largest American news agency
in the world, has now gone one further. Anxious to avoid occupied, the
agency now refers to lands
which are - try this one out - war-won. There must have been a bloody
good reason to escape from
occupied to get that word. This contorted expression places an almost
victorious faï¿½ade upon the
reality of occupation.

I've been searching in vain to find the first use - and this is a
linguistic issue - of the phrase settlements
and settlers in relation to the occupation. These Israeli settlements,
as you know, on occupied land,
are colonies and their inhabitants are colonists, every bit as much as
the French colonized Algeria.
When I made that point in my own newspaper, the Independent, in London,
a stream of letters
accused me of deliberately trying to make a parallel between Palestinian
terrorism and the FLN's
ultimately successful 1958-62 war of independence against France. I was
indeed making that parallel.
Interestingly, Ariel Sharon has himself compared all of Israel to
Algeria under French rule, revealing to
the correspondent of the French magazine L'Express, just under a year
ago, that he told President
Chirac of France that, quote, "you've got to understand that we here are
like you in Algeria. We have
no other place to go. Besides, we have no intention of leaving."

It's very interesting - and how many of you spotted this? - that the
phrase "The Peace of the Brave"
which Arafat trundles out all the time, which President Clinton often
uses, that phrase is a phrase of De
Gaulle's used about the Evian agreement which brought the
Algerian-French war to an end. The
French word for settler is colon, accurately representing what the
Israeli settlers in the West Bank and
Gaza are doing. But today even that word settler is disappearing. CNN,
in one of its most recent
contributions to journalism, sent out an instruction to correspondents
telling them that Gilo, the Jewish
settlement build partly on Arab land, not entirely, but partly on Arab
land south of Jerusalem, is to
change its definition. I quote: "We refer to Gilo as a Jewish
neighborhood on the outskirts of
Jerusalem, built on land occupied by Israel in 1967. We don't refer to
it as a settlement."

Now it happens of course that Gilo is a settlement, built for Jews only
on occupied Palestinian land,
some of it originally bought by Jews but otherwise taken - CNN's got the
occupied bit right - which is
partly owned by Palestinians in the village of Beit Jalla. Gilo of
course is Hebrew for Jalla. It was
constructed in violation of UN Security Council resolution 242 and 338
and in violation of international
law. CNN's little lie about neighborhood transforms the history. Cruel
though it is to do so -- and I
oppose all violence, at all times, always - cruel though it is for them
to do so, you can understand why
a Palestinian might want to shoot at a settlement. But a friendly
neighborhood, like downtown
Montreal? He would have to be insane. Mindless violence. Terrorism. You
see? The
decontextualization. Of course I called up CNN in Atlanta from Beirut. I
wanted a comment on this. And
it's only fair to tell you what CNN told me down the telephone line. A
spokesman officially said, "We
really don't want to talk about this."

[Break]

The BBC recently advised its reporters in the Middle East to use the
phrase, quote, "targeted killings"
for the murder of Palestinians in the streets by Israeli death squads,
preferring this to assassinations,
which, suggests the BBC, should be reserved for more important folk than
the suspected Palestinian
gunmen and bombers on Israel's hit list. But of course it just happens
that targeted killings is Israel's
own expression for the killing of certain Palestinians and I don't
believe for a moment that the BBC did
not know that. And as a growing list of totally innocent civilians
killed during these attacks
demonstrates, the word targeted - particularly the nine children killed
in the air strike in Gaza to kill the
Hamas man - targeted is itself highly deceiving. The only one
presumption that hasn't come yet is
Palestinians using the word targeted when they so cruelly kill
civilians.

I would like that next slide up here. Now, I was amused to see a BBC
advertisment - here we are - a
Group Television documentary announcing the end of the peace process - I
often wonder about that.
Whoever gave us the phrase "peace process"? Who, I wonder, did? But
anyway, When Peace Died is
a BBC film, came out last year. On the left, as you can see, the
appalling picture of a Palestinian, his
hands covered, as you can see, in Israeli blood after the cruel lynching
of two Israeli soldiers. The third
soldier [unintelligible]. On the right, the equally iconic picture of
poor little Mohammed Al-Dura just
before he was shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Let's have a look at the
back of the post card, shall we?
I'm going to read it to you.

On the left it says - spot what's wrong, I'll stick my hand up to help
you, "Two images capture the
hatred that is destroying the peace process in the Middle East.
Mohammed, the boy from Gaza,
shielded by his father, but still dying under a hail of bullets and the
brutal murder of two Israeli soldiers
by a Palestinian mob. Note how Mohammed Al-Dura's death carries no
attribution. Now many Israelis,
a very brave member of the Israeli Knesset who spoke up about this, and
almost all the journalists who
investigated the case - but not, of course, the Israeli Army - concluded
that Israeli troops did kill the
boy, though they may not all have known who was behind the wall when
they were firing. So Al-Dura's
death, you see, was caused by a hail of bullets. A distant relation, I
think, of the clashes in Palestinians
keep seeming to walk into, the crossfires in which they seem to keep
getting caught. While the killing of
the Israeli soldiers is firmly attributed, and rightly, to a Palestinian
mob.

The easiest way out of this problem for many journalists, I fear, is to
distort the coverage so that
events which are unfavorable to Israel, however dramatic, are buried
deep in the story. Just five days
before the Qana attack, in which 106 Lebanese civilians were killed in
the UN base in 1996, an Israeli
pilot flying an American Apache helicopter fired an air-to-ground
missile into an ambulance packed
with women and children in southern Lebanon. The Israeli Army claimed,
wrongly, I discovered after
weeks of investigation, that a Hezbollah fighter, a terrorist of course,
was in the vehicle. Four children,
two women were killed. I actually was a little bit in front of the
ambulance on the road, got back there in
time and with a Swedish UN liason officer and soldiers of the UN Fijian
battalion, we collected all the
bits of the missile, including the bits from the corpses. And we put it
all together. And we were able to
work out the entire computer-coded markings on the exploded missile
parts and trace its origin back to
an American factory in [unintelligible], Georgia.

Of course, I decided to take the missile back to the factory. This is a
big problem, trying to get a missile
from Beirut to the United States. I could imagine the story - I have a
shrewd idea who'd be writing it - I
can imagine the story in the New York Times: British Journalist Scanned
at JFK with Explosive Traces.
But we got it back. I had to take the train all the way to
[unintelligible], 17 hours on the Amtrak, think
about that. Boeing, of course, stalled on getting an interview about
this wonderful missile. The man
was quite complacent when I put it on the table and showed them the
pictures of women and children.
I wanted to know about responsibility. We eventually carried the story
in our Sunday magazine as the
cover story.

[Break]

[ï¿½] with the US Marines, it was taken to Saudi Arabia to be used against
the Iraqis in 1990, and
subsequently, with many other similar missiles, given free of charge to
the Israelis on the Haifa
munitions pier as part of a quid pro quo with Israel for not joining in
the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
Harper's later ran a shortened version, edited by me, in their magazine
in New York. Yet not a single
American news outlet tried to follow it up. The best attempt came from a
radio station in Chicago,
whose reporter eventually told me he couldn't write about the missile
because, quote, "the Defense
Department in Washington won't confirm the story."

It is ironic that among the exceptions to the grotesque and misleading
journalism coming out of the
Middle East are a few brave Israeli reporters who question the morality
of Israel's actions and Arafat's
corruption with a ruthlessness that is rare in any European publication
and is totally absent in the
United States and Canada. Among the most courageous and eloquent of
these journalists are Gideon
Levy and Amira Hass in Ha'aretz. And if you don't read Ha'aretz, you
should.

Hass recently told me - we had a long chat recently about journalism,
and I went waffling on and on
with my pet theories of how basically we write the first page of
history. Oh, how [unintelligible] that
British [unintelligible] has got. But we do, in a sense. We're the first
people there. We're the nearest to
impartial people there will ever be. But Amira disagreed. Her mother, by
the way, was a Jewish
partisan in Yugoslavia captured by the Gestapo and she lived through the
war. Amira's version was
different. She said that the duty of journalists, and I quote her, is to
monitor the centers of power. As
good a definition as I've ever heard of our profession. But it raises an
important question: How can
Amira say things which her American counterparts shy away from - at
least not without the weasel
words that are [unintelligible] increase?

Needless to say, Hass not only puts us to shame but Arab journalists as
well. Out in the arid wastes of
Arab journalism, as many of you are very familiar, there is as little
interest in serious investigation of
the Middle East conflict as there is in the United States. As I know to
my cost. I get plenty of hate mail
from people who claim that they're friends of Israel but I get an awful
lot from the Arab world. You
know, when I managed to get into Hama, the Syrian city under siege in
1982 during the Islamist
uprising, and saw Syrian tanks shelling the mosques of Hama, Damascus
radio condemned me as a
liar. In Egypt, when I dared to question President Mubarak's 98.87%
election victory -- he didn't get a
hundred, for God's sakes. The Syrians once claimed 110% in 1976.

When I dared to question Mubarak's legitimacy as president, I was
referred to in Al Ahram as "a black
dog pecking at the corpse of Egypt." And I'll tell you what happened to
me in Bahrain, where I
investigated torture at the secret police headquarters, an institution
run by a former British Special
Branch officer. A Scotsman, actually, whose name was Ian Henderson. It
turned out - and here, if
you'd help me, I don't know how all these people are all going to see
it, but we'll sort of turn it around
and let them all see it. Here is a cartoon that appeared in Akhbar Al
Khaleej. As you see - those of you
who speak Arabic can read it - the BBC's up here. Here's Christopher
Walker of the Times. And in the
middle - the white dog here, staring at all those pound notes and bags
of thousand dollars - here's
Bob, the white dog, here. I'll show it around. Have a closer look at
Bob. I'm sure Mr. Henderson would
wish you to. He's still there, by the way, but they say he has a nice
little place somewhere in the Far
East to go to. Now, here's Bob. And I must say, I've never seen all this
swag here in my life. I want to
say also that the nightmare dentures are absolutely accurate. But as you
can see, this dog is rabid.
Well, have a look for the people 'round here. Here's Bob. Here's the
money - which I never get. Here's
the dentures. And look, he's slobbering, this dog. Because you see, he's
a rabid dog. And rabid dogs
have to be exterminated. Which is why that Arab cartoon, ladies and
gentlemen, was not a joke. It was
a threat.

In all the Middle East, nothing I think quite surpasses our journalistic
desire to humor Turkey by
obfuscating the reality of the 20th century's first genocide. The
deliberate killing of one and a half
million Armenians, Christians, most of the slaughtered in 1915 by
Ottoman Turkish Muslim authorities.
No serious academic, except for those holding chairs funded by Turkey,
disputes the facts. And
anyone who doubts them should read the recently published - and
brilliant - Encyclopedia of Genocide
by Israel's foremost Holocaust scholar Israel Charny. Indeed, my
newspaper, the Independent, now
refers to the Armenian Holocaust with a capital "H", just as it does for
the Jewish Holocaust.

Much of Charny's horrifying documentation comes from 1915 editions of
the New York Times. The
New York Times, ladies and gentlemen, broke this story, one of the great
stories of the century. The
New York Times. And all praise to it for doing so. And thus, all shame
to it for allowing the following.
Because these appalling and bloody events have been almost universally
referred to, now, by
journalists, as disputed. Like the disputed West Bank. Or as
controversial claims. And most
extraordinary of all, the New York Times, the paper which 87 years ago
did more to publicize this
horror than any other paper in the United States, has done its bit to
discredit the tragedy.

In April of 1998, for example, the Times' Steven Kinzer wrote a report
about the 70,000 Armenians
who live in present-day Turkey. Here is a key paragraph from his report.
And I'll ask you to listen
carefully and spot the troubles in it. In fact, I'll stick my hand up
when they occur. "Relations between
Turks and Armenians were good during much of the Ottoman period. But
they were deeply scarred by
massacres of Armenians that pro-Ottoman forces in eastern Anatolia
carried out in the spring of 1915.
Details of what happened there are still hotly debated, but it is clear
that vast numbers of Armenians
were killed or left to die during forced marches in a burst of what is
now called ethnic cleansing."

I still read this paragraph with a sense of great shock. What did Kinzer
mean by deeply scarred?
Relations between Turks and Armenians came to a virtual end in 1915
because there weren't many
Armenians left to have relations with. And note the intriguing phrase
"pro-Ottoman forces", which
avoids Turks, Turkish, Turkey. Most incredible of all, is Kinzer's
assertion that the details are hotly
debated. Turkey may use its lobby groups to lie about the genocide and
the Turkish government still
tries to cover up the massacres as the side effects of civil war. But
for the New York Times to present
the Armenian Holocaust as a subject of serious dispute is as insulting
to Armenians as it is for Jews to
hear the facts of their Holocaust denied. Note too how Kinzer talks
about vast numbers killed, thus
avoiding the all-important and terrible figure of one and a half million
and how ethnic cleansing takes
the place of genocide in the text.

Another of Kinzer's articles, written from the Armenian capital of
Yerevan, even carries the headline
"Armenia Never Forgets - Maybe it Should". I find this as outrageous as
if the Times ran a headline
saying that Jews should forget the hideous crimes committed against
them. During the Pope's recent
visit to Yerevan, scarcely a single agency report referred to the
genocide without a Turkish
government disclaimer. BBC World Television's coverage of the papal
visit referred to more than a
million Armenians killed as the Ottoman Empire broke up. Like the
Palestinians who mysteriously die in
clashes, the BBC couldn't bring themselves to tell us who actually
killed more than a million Armenians.
Let me give you a very recent example, this is the New York Times of
April 24th this year. April 24th,
as many of you will know, is the day on which Armenians commemorate
their genocide. He's referring
here at the beginning to the fact that there is a Holocaust Museum, as
we all know, in Washington. His
parallel - great parallel - Washington already has one major
institution, the United States Holocaust
Museum, that documents an effort to destroy an entire people. The story
it presents is beyond dispute.
But the events of 1915 are still a matter of intense dispute.

I'll go one further, since we're in Canada. Mr. B. N. Gazzarian of
Toronto -- he may even be with us
tonight, I don't know - sent me a very interesting email. He enclosed a
copy of a letter he'd written to
the Toronto Globe and Mail. Here it is. "Dear Sir, I was very upset and
offended that the Globe, the
leading national newspaper in Canada" - well, we'll just leave that -
"reprinted the article Now Who Are
the War Criminals? by Mr. Robert Fisk in its November 30th issue. It had
originally appeared in the
Independent. It had been edited in the original text and edited in the
Globe in an arbitrary, highly
offensive way to Armenians and disgraceful to your newspaper. In the
original article" - all this is
correct, by the way - "by Mr. Fisk that appeared in the Independent, he
referred to the Armenian
genocide that occurred in 1915 as the Armenian Holocaust, while the
reprint in your newspaper has
been changed to read the mass murder of the Armenians. Still your
newspaper shows that author of
the article is Mr. Fisk."

Anyway, Mr. Gazzarian called up a Miss Valerie Ross who is the editor of
the Comment section, who
said, and apparently Mr. Gazzarian was very upset about this, she said
it was the newspaper's house
policy to use the word Holocaust in reference to only one historical
event. Needless to say, I called our
syndication department in London. We have special penalties for people
who buy the syndication
rights to our newspaper and then change the copy. However, they called
me back to say that not only
had they changed it, they'd bloody well stolen it. They never asked our
permission to take it. So my
article was stolen by the Toronto Globe and Mail and then changed and
printed on the Comment
page. Thank you, Canada.

But now I want to go back to the points I've been making to you earlier.
Back in 1993, I made a 3 part
documentary film for the Discovery Channel in the United States, and
also for Channel 4 in Britain. It
was called Beirut to Bosnia and it attempted to find out why an
increasing number of Muslims had
come to hate the West. Indeed, the title was "Why Muslims Have Come to
Hate the West." We filmed
in Beirut, Southern Lebanon, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza,
Egypt, Bosnia and Croatia.
Among many of the sections and stories we filmed was that of a
Palestinian farmer called Mohammed
Hakim trying to hang on to his land just outside Jerusalem. I want to
show you this very short clip of
film now.

[ï¿½] Jews, Muslims and Christians has been illegal annexed by Israel,
which still claims it to be its
eternal and unified capital. East of the city, outside the
internationally recognized border of Israel, only
a little bit of the old rural Palestine remains, and the huge Jewish
settlements built on Palestinian land
are now cities -- a ring of Israeli concrete around Jerusalem. It takes
a brave Palestinian to hold out
here, to cling onto his own land in the face of Israel's expanding
settlements. But in this little patch of
orchard, is a family that's refused to leave its land, despite an order
to get out.

[Break]

[ï¿½] He did not do so. He was out before Christmas and he now lives with
his family in that village of
Qismay which you saw on the film. I went back to the place of his home a
few weeks ago and it's now
concreted over. It looks like the other houses which you saw on the
film. Again, I repeat: this film was
made nine years ago. And as I said, many people took exception at the
time to the idea that things
were happening which would bring about some kind of explosion. The last
short piece of film I want to
show you is an attempt to display and to demonstrate how Americans can
provoke [unintelligible] even
if they don't realize it. This film again -- and remember it was made
nine years ago. When I see it now
in retrospect I find it very chilling in the light of events that
occurred just over a year ago. It begins in
Sabra-Chatila.

[Break]

[ï¿½] see a house in Beirut. He'd lost a home in Acre in 1948, went back
to that home, found an elderly
Israeli inside who had been tuned out of his home in southern Lebanon in
1939 and then we took our
crew to southern Lebanon and knocked on his front door. And the old lady
who answered the door
said, "Are they coming back?" It was a fascinating journey back through
the course of history.
However, shortly after the series aired on Discovery, a series of
pro-Israeli lobby groups, including
CAMERA - which is Camera Media Resources Center - bombarded the channel
with complaints.
Joseph Ungar wrote to say that for me to say that Israel confiscates
occupied land and builds huge
Jewish settlements on Arab land, that, quote, "was twisted history." We
were also told that by claiming
the Phalange was sent into Sabra and Chatila by Israel - which the
Kahane Commission, of course,
acknowledges - this was an egregious falsehood.

In due course, we discovered that Discovery was being sent American
Express cards cut in half.
American Express being one of the sponsors of the original series.
Discovery rang me in Beirut to say
they were receiving lots of letters condemning the films from various
groups. Then director Mike
Dutfield and I heard that Discovery had cancelled the reshowing. In an
imperishable letter to Dutfield,
Bunting wrote - and I ask you not to laugh until the end - quote, "Given
the reaction to the series on its
initial airing we never scheduled a subsequent airing. So there's not
really an issue as to any
scheduled re-airing being cancelled." When I read those words, ladies
and gentlemen, I was ashamed
to be a foreign correspondent.

So, in the next and last five minutes, let me ask you what has happened
to us in the months since
September the 11th, 2001? Here we spent decades preaching to the Third
World, to China and the
Soviet Union, to Black Africa and to the Arabs about law, democracy,
human rights, fair trials. But the
moment our glittering towers were struck, we tore up all those old
lectures, arrested hundreds on
suspicion, brought prisoners drugged and blindfolded to Guantanamo Bay,
bombed the poorest
country in the world, killed thousands of its citizens. Now, as I said,
in any ordinary crime, in any
domestic crime, the first thing the cops do is look for a motive. This
we cannot and are not allowed to
do with September the 11th.

Oddly, the killers themselves were not from the deprived. I visited the
home of Ziad Jarrah, the
Lebanese suicide pilot, who came from a village in the Bekaa Valley in
Lebanon. This was the pilot of
the plane crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers so bravely
stormed the cockpit. His parents
were middle-class, his mother a schoolteacher, his father a civil
servant in the Lebanese government. I
was amazed to find that I actually knew his uncle, a bank manager in the
town of Shtira. The family
desperately wanted to believe that their son was an innocent passenger
on the plane. His father wept
in front of me because he knew. His son had had a girlfriend, a Turkish
girl, who had met his parents
the summer before their engagement was announced. In the end, she
travelled alone to meet the
family - a strange arrangement in Lebanon - because Jarrah suddenly
announced he was too busy
with flight training in the United States. His father sent him $2000
three days before September the
11th, another ten the day before the attacks. He told me Ziad rang him
up to thank him for the money -
I suspect it was used to buy airplane tickets. He had been, it later
transpired, to Afghanistan. He had
not been political before, however as a boy he had been trapped in
Beirut in the '82 siege, spending
weeks under shellfire. Had this touched him, as it had so many others at
the time? The '82 siege, after
all, gave rise to the Hezbollah.

And what are we to learn of the personal reasons for the crimes against
humanity of September the
11th? Not much. The middle-class murderes left only one infantile
statement, because I suspect their
message was their deed. They came from the Middle East. They came from a
land that has been
deceived and mistreated and humiliated for decades. Was the world really
changed forever? I don't
think so. Perhaps America was changed forever. But why should the world
be changed? Back in 1982,
during Israel's invasion of Lebanon, 17,500 people, almost all of the
civilians, were killed in just three
months. And as I said earlier, in February of the same year, 20,000
Syrians were killed by the Special
Forces of the late President Assad's brother. No one lit candles for
them. There were no church
services. There were no memorials. No one remembered and the world did
not change.

In the fall of last year I heard Colin Powell telling us from Louisburg
University, that never again could
we look up into the pale blue sky and see an airliner and feel the same
way about it. I think this is
rubbish. I look up every day from my home in Beirut on my balcony and I
see airplanes flying in the
pale blue sky and they land at Beirut Airport. I fly a lot more planes
than Secretary Powell and they
take me to my destination. You know, without in any way belittling the
horror and the evil of that terrible
day, I do sometimes wonder whether America's concentration on that one
day, to the point where we
cannot discuss the whys, isn't becoming a form of dangerous
self-absorption.

So, kindly, journalists, ignore the abuse and the lobby groups and the
attempt to softpedal reporting
about the Middle East - and about Afghanistan, and about Iraq. White
House spokesman Ari
Fleischer's remark from October of last year that, and I quote, the
press is asking a lot of questions
that I suspect the American people would prefer not to be asked or
answered, carries its own ominous
implication. But when the head of CNN announced to his reporters that
they shouldn't say too much
about the thousands of Afghan civilian casualties of America's bombing
because this might provide
propaganda for the Taliban, it was, I think the most shameful comment
made by a Western news head
in recent times.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I make an appeal to you? Let's stop saying
that September the 11th, 2001
changed the world. Let's not say disputed when we mean occupied,
neighborhood when we mean
colony, ethnic cleansing when we mean genocide. Let's not go to war for
human rights when we didn't
care about those human rights 19 years ago.

Let me just mention one thing to you before you go on. Did you know I
was in the Middle East 19 years
ago covering Iraq? At that time, when Saddam Hussein was using poison
gas against Iran - a war
crime - President Reagan sent his envoy to reopen the American Embassy
in Baghdad, and the envoy
who went there and shook the hand of Saddam Hussein was Donald Rumsfeld.
In the following year,
Donald Rumsfeld went to meet Tariq Aziz, on the very day that the United
Nations published its first
report on the war crime of the use of gas by the Iraqi Army. So let me
finish by saying one thing to you
and one sentence only. Let's do what Americans used to tell their
journalists to do and let's try to tell it
how it is. Thank you very much. God bless.

www.montrealmuslimnews.net
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

one of Fisk's best

🔗kraig grady <kraiggrady@...>

🔗John A. deLaubenfels <jdl@...>