ANNOUNCEMENT:

WHO:

Investigative Reporter, Mediachannel.org advisor Greg Palast & Danny Schechter, the News Dissector

WHAT:

BOOK TALK: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast

FILM PREVIEW:

COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY by Danny Schechter

WHEN: MONDAY, APRIL FIRST 7 P.M.

WHERE: WALKER STAGE THEATRE

56 WALKER STREET bet. B’WAY & CHURCH If you live in the New York City area, come next Monday to hear investigative reporter and Mediachannel.org advisor Greg Palast discuss his new book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and also see a preview of your News Dissector’s new film COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY, the story of what happened to l75,000 uncounted votes in the Presidential Election of 2000.

DIRECTIONS:

Take the N, R to Canal St, enter from Broadway side. Take the A, C to Canal St., enter from Church St. side.

ON THE CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Perhaps because I am a journalist, the defining moment in the carnage reporting from Ramallah last night was a in a minute of so of tape, shot by a Carlos Handel, a cameraman for Egypt’s Nile TV who was cruising in a car clearly marked as a press vehicle with the letters TV plastered over it ( I have been in similar vehicles in other conflicts.) The camera on the car itself came under Israeli fire. Carlos had been hit in the mouth in this unprovoked attack, since condemned by the Paris-based Reporters Without Frontiers. The camera kept rolling as his colleague, the driver, screaming to himself and all in the range of his voice, to stop, stop as he carried his comrade away. He ended up in the local hospital condition unknown. Other journalists reported being told not to shoot certain operations by Israeli forces involved in the surrounding and trashing of the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority.

ARAFAT TO CNN: “SHUT UP”

You probably have seen the TV reports. CNN, to its credit did an hour live from Jerusalem last night in which the footage I have described was shown, and reports details of the invasion and its effects. Christianne Amanpour tried to challenge an Israeli government spokesperson who kept denouncing Arafat in the same way that our leaders used to personalize the “terror war” as all Osama’s doing. Having someone to demonize is always the best way to sell a policy. His was a practiced performance, and CNN did not offer any reporting that cast doubt on the thesis that Arafat is the source of all evil, and responsible for the suicide bombings. That issue was debated again the next morning with General Wesley Clark (who has never served in the area to my knowledge) defending Israel while admitting that there were doubts about his command and control capacities.

What a joke. What command and control? The man has been reduced to clutching a cell phone as bulldozers nibble what is left of his supposedly sovereign terrritory. How is he supposed to do anything but beg for outside help? Amanpour did get an enraged Arafat on the phone, and as she hectored him with questions, he screamed at her to shut up, then paused to let her hear the sounds of machine guns fire hitting his headquarters building and hung up — a measured response in my view in light of the circumstances. In Washington, Colin Powell was unwilling to publicly demand that the Israel withdraw, although the US did vote for such a UN resolution, later calling for them to do so, a bit late in the day. Down on the ranch, President Bush was equally quiet, criticizing terrorists and trading Easter presents with his dad.Activists are sending me accounts like this on what is happening on the ground, much of it not visible in any of the TV reports I was watching: ”

ON THE GROUND BUT RARELY ON THE AIR

“Two Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances carrying a doctor and two foreign international volunteers American citizen Adam Shapiro and Irish national Caoimhe Butterly have been held up for over 3 hours trying to reach the injured in the compound.Adam reported the ambulances being stopped and completely searched and everybody was being forced out of the ambulances.

- At the time of this writing one ambulance carrying the doctor and the two foreign civilian volunteers have been let in. One ambulance was turned back. Two injured are being removed from the compound now.

- Al-Jazeera satellite channel was showing people bleeding and lying dead on the floor of the compound as the ambulances were held at the gate and the volunteers waiting to be let in to assist the injured could see smoke rising from the compound

- Electricity throughout Ramallah has been cut in all neighborhoods and water tanks have been shot up causing them to leak precious water. Israeli forces have been shooting at anything moving in the streets as their tanks are positioned throughout Palestinian neighborhoods.”

THE SAD HISTORY OF SCUTTLED PEACE PLANS?

This predictable long-planned well executed intervention was an event looking for a pretext and defensible provocation. It was also Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s response to the Arab League’s peace proposal. Many Palestinians have been killed, wounded and rounded-up. There were pictures of men being marched with their hands up, a scene that was eerily familiar to images we all know from the days of World War ll. Media amnesia and lack of contextualization was in full bloom once again as no analysts I saw echoed the views of Uri Avnery, the Israeli journalist, who explained that scuttling peace initiatives is often what Israel has done over the years, often in league with the commandos and crazies who provide the convenient pretext for their pre-planned overreactions. This does not minimize the horror of atrocities like the Passover terror attack in Natanya, but rather argues that Israel uses them to implement well planned “counter measures.” Read this analysis from a former member of the Israeli Knesset to see what I am talking about, and to discover a point of view you are not hearing:

AN ISRAELI VIEW

“If, in May 1967, an Arab prince had proposed that the whole Arab world would recognize Israel and establish normal relations with it, in return for Israel’s recognition of the Green Line border, we would have believed that the days of the Messiah had arrived. Masses of people would have run into the street, singing and dancing, as they did on November 29, 1947, when the United Nations called for the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine.

” But then disaster struck: we conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Labor and Likud governments filled them up with settlements, and today this offer sounds to many like a malicious anti-Semitic plot.

The leaders of Israel tell us: Don’t worry. Just as we survived Pharaoh, so we shall survive Emir Abdallah.*

————

? This is an allusion to a famous Israeli song.

————-

So what will happen?

In Israel, every international initiative designed to put an end to theconflict passes through three stages: (a) denial, (b) misrepresentation, (c)liquidation. That’s how the Sharon-Peres government will deal with this one,too. It can draw on 53 years of experience, during which both Labor and Likudgovernments have succeeded in scuttling every peace plan put forward.

(We must nor suspect, God forbid, that the successive Israeligovernments were opposed to peace. Not at all. Every one of them wantedpeace. They all longed for peace. “Provided peace gives us the whole country,at least up to the Jordan river, and lets us cover all of it with Jewishsettlements.” Until now, all peace plans have fallen short of that.)

WHAT ABOUT THE RECENT SAUDI LAND FOR PEACE DEAL?

And about today. Avnery almost forecast how the Saudi proposal would be half embraced in public by Israel and then undermined by new assaults that would outrage the Arab World and, thus ensure that it would lose its enthusiasm for peace because of the hostile reaction in their own streets. Avnery comments on this in a way that no pundits on the air have. (Would someone send CNN’s bookers his phone number?)

“Can the Saudi initiative be scuttled in the same way? If the Saudis stay their course, it will not be easy to intercept it. This time the target is not a small frigate, not even a destroyer, but a mighty aircraft carrier. A great effort will be needed to torpedo it.

“But Shimon Peres and his foreign office are experts at this kind of job; they have been at it for decades. Ariel Sharon will push them. The pitiful Labor party, under the leadership of a small-time copy of Sharon, will join the chorus. Faced with the terrible threat of having to end the occupation, the Israeli media will rally behind the government.

“Nobody revolts, nobody cries out. In Israel, real public discourse has died long ago. The national instinct of survival has become blunted. Thirty five years of occupation and settlement have eroded the nation’s abilty to reason, leaving instead a mixture of arrogance and folly.

A great, perhaps unique opportunity may be missed. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands may pay for it with their lives”

SOLDIERS ARE REVOLTING– BUT THE RESPONSE IS REVOLTING TOO

Yesterday, in this column, I cited Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine’s call for peace. I mentioned that he has to take out newspaper ads to get his views across in newspapers. I didn’t know that his ad supporting Israeli soldiers who are refusing to fight Sharon’s war has provoked a major split within the organization itself. I learned that from a letter from one of the “refuseniks,” Assaf Alon writing from Israel. Again, these are voices that rarely percolate into the media coverage just as American soldiers opposing US wars get little coverage. He wrote:

“I was informed of an interesting phenomenon: apeace-supporting Jewish organization called Tikkun published an ad in favor of us, the Israeli reservist refuseniks, and was immediatelybombarded with hate mails and phones from other American Jews. What̳ more interesting is that even other Jews considering themselves supporters of peace have denounced the Tikkun ad, to the extent that some of the Tikkun Advisory Board members are resigning in order to minimize the personal damage to themselves. This has so saddened, alarmed and angered me, that I find myself setting aside a half-day at the eve of Passover, and writing this open letter to you all?.

“Most of the ‘civilized’ attacks, so I understand, were seeminglyaimed at this or that detail of the Tikkun ad. This is nothing new to me. Over the past two months since we came out with our own ad, I̶e heard and read so many specific arguments about specific aspects of our act. They range from petty nit-picking to plain ludicrous, and each and every one of them can be refuted to dust in a matter of minutes. But the moment you refute them, new specific arguments sprout up like mushrooms. ?.

THE “TRIBAL THEME”

“The general theme is the tribal theme. A very very loud voice (and in Israel nowadays, it is the only voice that is allowed to be fullyheard) keeps shouting that we are in the midst of a war between twotribes: a tribe of human beings, of pure good ? the Israelis’ anda tribe of sub-human beings, of pure evil ?the Palestinians.’ This voice is so loud, that it has found its way even to the op-ed pages of the New York Times (William Safire, March 24 or 25). To those whofind this black-and-white picture a bit hard to believe, the samevoice shouts that this is a war of life and death. Only one tribe will survive, and so even if we are not purely good, we must laymorality and conscience to sleep, shut up and fight to kill–orelse, the Palestinians will throw us into the sea.

“Does this ring a bell to you? It does to me. As a little child growing up in Israel under Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, all I heard was that the Arabs are inhuman monsters who want to throw us intothe sea, they understand only force, and since our wonderful IDF has won the Six Day War they know not to mess with us anymore –orelse. And of course, we must keep the Liberated Territories toourselves, because there̳ no one to talk with. Then came the Yom Kippur war, and for a child of 7 it was the perfect proof that indeed the Arabs want to throw us into the sea, and what a great opportunity it was for our glorious IDF to teach them a lesson. I prayed for the war to continue to its natural and final end –the complete surrender of all Arab armies. I was too small to evaluate, then, how the war really ended; all these cease-firesand talks were too complicated and boring, much more boring than a war. And it seemed humiliating that WE should withdraw in thesecease-fires; I remember that the re-opening of the Suez Canalwas portrayed in our mass media as a kind of defeat?..

WILL THE ISRAELI PUBLIC WAKE UP?

“In truth, I have little hope that the Israeli public will wake up. The Israeli public, in its fear and confusion, has made a decision (aided by the politicians and mass media) to go to sleep and wake up only after it is all over. But it won’t be over, because while our mind sleeps our muscles tighten the death grip, instead of doing the only sensible thing (which requires an open mind) which is to let go. Will you guys join the hypocrite mobs who sing lullabies to Israel and pounce upon the refuseniks, upon Tikkun,to shut us up? Or will you finally take responsibility and be thetrue friends that Israel needs now Ҡeven if it means not being “nice”to Israel for a while?

“As you sit tonight at the Seder table, please remember the dozen orso refuseniks that spend this Seder in a military jail. Moreimportantly, please remember the thousand or so people, three quarters Palestinians and one quarter Israelis, who were here with us a year ago and have been murdered. Most of them could have been here with us, if you and we had acted sooner. We have nowacted, done what little we can do. Please think of the many thousands that may be doomed soon, if you continue sitting onthe fence.”

WHO IS WINNING..AND LOSING?

From the TV coverage, you would think Israel is winning this war because of its superior military might. You would be wrong because this is, at its base, a political conflict. A longer view is needed argues James O. Goldsborough writing in the San Diego Union Tribune yesterday

“The measure of the failure of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is this: The Palestinians are stronger today than they ever have been. It is strange to think that these bedraggled people, living in squalid refugee camps under the gun muzzles of Israeli tanks, could be gaining in strength, but it is a fact. The dynamic of this awful conflict has changed dramatically in a single year. The Palestinian strength grows from evidence that an entire generation is ready to die for the cause. And another generation is ready to follow, for the Palestinian birth rate and population under 5 years old are twice that of Israel.

“Warfare by collective immolation is not something that can be defeated by a conventional army. When Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon’s critic on the right, calls for “complete military victory,” he can only be thinking of re-occupation of all the West Bank and Gaza, the bankrupt policy Israel abandoned a decade ago. The Bush administration has much to answer for in the Middle East collapse. Bush blamed Clinton for being too involved in the Middle East, and so decided to do nothing. Sept. 11 is no excuse for the failure, for Bush did little before that date to deal with the Palestinian powder keg.

“Carte blanche was given to Sharon to “fight terrorism,” with the results we see today. Obsessed with Iraq, Bush failed to see that the real threat to U.S. security lay in the festering Palestinian problem and its potential to radicalize the entire Middle East.

“The most perverse result of Bush fecklessness and Sharon’s intransigence has been the creation of a generation of Palestinian martyrs. Israelis, like most people, don’t want to die. Dealing with people who want to die, who regard dying as better than living, is not easy??

“Sharon’s failure can be seen in what his year in office has brought. For Israelis, there is no security anywhere, not on streets or buses, in cafes or malls. Death is everywhere. A generation of Palestinians without hope is robbing Israelis of their hope. Only through creation of a viable Palestinian state, where young Arabs can learn that living is better than dying, will the killing stop.”

AND WHEN WILL JOURNALISTS SPEAK UP?

In sharing these comments, and there are many others rocketing around the Internet, I am trying to suggest that the coverage itself must be broadened. We need to hear more voices from the region, and more analysts who are not retired American Generals or mainstream media reporters who are well trained to tell us what is happening, but rarely why or what might be done about the situation. What is hopeful is that some US journalists, a very few to be sure, but, a few nonetheless, may be willing to reexamine their own assumptions and biases to offer opinions outside the acceptable consensus.

In this respect, my respect this morning goes out to my old colleague Geraldo Rivera, who I had blasted in my book The More You Watch The Less You Know for making an inflamatory one-sided anti-Palestinian report back in 1982 which felt like it had produced by Israel’s Mossad. In his view back then, Israel could do no wrong, which is perhaps why he wore a star of David tattoo. Now, his tune has changed according to these quotes which sound Geraldo-ish but which, admittedly, I haven’t verified:

“I have been a Zionist my entire life. I would die for Israel. Butwatching the suffering of the Palestinian people, I’m also becoming aPalestinian.”–Geraldo

“You can’t round up Palestinian young menand put numbers on their arms to make it easier to identify them,” hesaid. “That reminds the world, that reminds Jews, of what Hitler and theNazi pigs inflicted on the Jewish race during the Second World War.”—Geraldo

NOW EUROPE HATES US TOO!

Funny isn’t it, that Americans find out how much US policy is outraging the rest of the world only when one of the top Washington based journalists gets his but out of the beltway. Here’s David Broder of the Washington Post writing from Rome, as carried in the International Herald Tribune:

“ROME The United States has been fighting a war in Afghanistan. It has troops in the field in the Philippines and in Colombia. It is trying to mediate the bloody Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. The last thing it needs is a quarrel with Europe.

” But that is exactly what has developed, as I was repeatedly reminded during a brief stay here for an international conference.

“The immediate irritant is steel. The looming and larger point of conflict is Iraq. And the underlying complaint is that the Bush administration, whose leader had gained significantly in standing since my last trans-Atlantic trip 11 months ago, has reverted to an earlier and unsettling pattern of behavior. From the European perspective, Washington looks unpredictable, erratic and impulsive - all the things that jar the allies’ nerves.

” It would be easy to dismiss European mutterings as the nattering of nervous Nellies. But when questioning comes not only from chronic critics such as the French but also from such friends as Germany and even Britain, it may behoove Washington to take heed.

The Europeans are not without power?..”

AND LET’S NOT FORGET THE NARCO WARS

And so, this is how we Americans discover, from time to time, that there is a world that has not be made over in our image or marching to the Bush doctrine. Covering that world on this website is incomplete too, I must admit.. My absence for a few days over the last weeks led me to miss some top notch reporting on Al Giordano’s Narco News Network from the conflicts in Colombia and other conflict zones in Latin America. Al sent me two such pieces that I happily call to your attention. One deals with “”Where is the Press in the Colombian War?”

http://www.narconews.com/whereisthepress.html

and the other is “Uribe vs. the Press”

://www.narconews.com/uribevsthepress.html

In the latter case, a courageous Colombian journalist might well get killed in the coming days because of the lack of attention to his case. His name is Fernando Garavito.” Thanks Al for the gentle and supportive way you called this to our attention. We will try to get these or similar stories on the front page soon. Mediachannel is growing rapidly with more than 940 affiliates, all chock full of great content. We are working on better ways to highlight more great material.

Ok, that’s the extent of my columnizing energy this morning. New Yorkers, please come to the event mentioned above next Monday. The rest of you may now take the weekend off. Or if you so chose, share your thoughts with us by writing dissector@mediachannel.org.