Robert Fisk: Banality and barefaced lies

[Violet_Crumble]

Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise
Published: 23 December 2006

I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?

I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".

Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".

Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt - secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".

Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States".


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2097774.ece

[Douglas Carpenter]

1. BTW: Democracy Now carried an excellent speech by Robert Fisk a few days ago

link:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/20/1443230&mode=thread&tid=25

"Hundreds of Muslim Americans recently gathered in Long Beach, California for the sixth annual convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. The convention was titled "Reform, Relevance and Renewal: Understanding Islam for the Future." With more than thirty years experience covering almost every major event in the Middle East, veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk was invited to deliver the keynote address. He has reported on the civil wars in Algeria and Lebanon, the Iranian revolution, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war. He was one of the first journalists to report on the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. He reported on the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq.

His latest book is "The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East."

(An absolutely excellent book by the way (almost 1100 pages)which covers several of the major conflicts of the Middle East over the past several years. The first chapter covers his three different interviews with Osama bin Laden. Then he spends a couple chapters on the Iran/Iraq War. He also has chapters on the early days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Lebanon conflict and of course the Israel/Palestine conflict. He has one chapter on the Armenian genocide of 1915. Perhaps the best overall book I have read covering a variety of Middle East conflicts.)

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Great-War-Civilisation-Conquest-Middle/dp/1400075173/sr=1-2/qid=1167131968/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-8701952-4352901?ie=UTF8&s=books

listen/watch or read transcript of Mr. Fisk's address:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/20/1443230&mode=thread&tid=25

[izzie]

2. Well I am sure many will dip these two in mud for some time.

And I feel just as sure they are both right.

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

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[xchrom]

3. good read. thank you for the article.

[question everything]

5. Carter is having problems with Israel being a secular state

which, like the support for Islamic theocratic militants groups Hamas and Hezbollah is amazing on DU, of all places.

From an op-ed in the WSJ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116709330748759250.html (subscription)

Mr. Carter indeed seems to have a religious problem with the Jewish state. His book bewails the fact that Israel is not the reincarnation of ancient Judea but a modern, largely temporal democracy. "I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures," he recalls telling Prime Minister Golda Meir during his first tour through the country. "A common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of the Labor government."