*MIDDLE EAST MISCOVERAGE*

*IS ARAFAT EVIL?*

*ISRAELI CRITICS CRITIQUE*

I wish we could just say April Fool, on this Easter Sunday, and LAST day of the third month of the second year of a century that has so far been consumed by terrorism and conflict. We might then pretend that the horror is not happening. There was another suicide bombing this morning, 16 dead, in a café in Haifa. And I have been watching three cable networks report it, all the same way, by LOOPING the same footage from the scene of the bedlam, over and over again. The viewer is not told that this BREAKING NEWS is not breaking, is not live, but rather edited material from an event that occurred hours earlier. The footage is used as what we used to call “wallpaper” or B-roll for commentary, and voice over “reporting.” All you see are the same dreadful pictures over and over again, an assault of imagery that drills itself into the mind. 96% of the commentary just repeats the Israel government perspective, although the viewer emails on CNN remain far more critical and interesting than the questions posed by the anchors, who include the weatherman this morning. Fox News has a person on insisting that the Palestinians must recognize Israel’s right to exist. No one at the network seems to remember that they did that as far back as l988. Maybe, that is because Fox didn’t exist back then.

MSNBC does offer an interview with a legal advisor to the PLO who keeps being interrupted with barrage of argumentative questions and hectoring. She is asked when Arafat will condemn terrorism. She insists that he did that on December 16, 2001 and that there were no attacks on Israel for a month afterwards. The resistance movement revived only after January 14, she claims, when Israel assassinated an activist on the West Bank. The MSNBC reporter says he doubts this can be true and leaves it at that. The PLO woman keeps trying to talk about the siege of the towns on the West Bank, and the total repression. She keeps getting cut off.

Back to looped footage.

PORN ON TV?

And what of what is happening on the ground. I saw few reports on TV that capture what the wires like AP are detailing:

“Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information, said late tonight that Israeli troops had announced over loudspeakers that they were preparing to storm the office itself in pursuit of wanted men. Israeli officials have repeatedly said that Mr. Arafat harbored fugitives in his compound.

“Troops and tanks also surrounded the hilltop headquarters of Jibril Rajoub, the chief of security in the West Bank for the governing Palestinian Authority. Palestinian officials said that the army was also demanding that Mr. Rajoub hand over any militants imprisoned or hiding there.

“Armored vehicles rolled through Ramallah’s emptied streets, broadcasting calls over loudspeakers for men and boys between the ages of 15 and 45 to turn themselves in for interrogation. Gunfire sounded throughout the day, and among numerous indignities Palestinians accused Israeli forces of capturing a television station and using it to broadcast pornography.

“A United States consulate employee who was in Ramallah confirmed that the programs were on the air. The Israeli Army said soldiers interrupted the station’s broadcasting but had not substituted pornography for the usual programming.”

“SHOT THROUGH THE HEAD?”

“The English press is carrying reports this morning of executions of Palestinian policeman. This is from the OBSERVER: “What happened on the third floor of the Cairo-Amman bank at midnight on Friday during Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian city of Ramallah can only be surmised. But in the few minutes after Israeli soldiers stormed the Palestinian position, five men were wounded and five men were put to death by the Israelis, each with a single coup de grace to the head or throat.

“Maher Shalabi, bureau chief of Abu Dhabi television in Ramallah, was in his office in the same building when he heard several bursts of heavy shooting on the floors below. ‘I heard heavy shooting; maybe it was an exchange of fire. But I believe this was an execution. This is what I understand.’

“Hassan Asfour, a senior Palestinian negotiator, added: ‘They were executed in cold blood. This is a clear example of the collective execution policy adopted by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people.’

“According to local residents, the dead men were part of a large group of Palestinian policemen who had taken shelter in the building, which also houses the offices of the British Council, when the Israeli army entered their area of Ramallah.”

HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS MENACED

The Israeli Army also invaded the offices of El Haq, the Palestinian human rights organization that frequently works with its Israeli counterpart to credibly report on human rights abuses by all parties. Human rights groups are sending out chilling reports with information like this, that may or may not be overstated:

“The house-to-house searches and indiscriminate detaining of civilians present an imminent threat to the lives of many Palestinians. It is also becoming obvious that Israel intends to re-occupy the whole of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Furthermore it appears Sharon is preparing to execute Mr. Arafat, a move which will cause an explosion in the whole region.

MISSING CONTEXT: ROOTS OF THE CRISIS

“How did it come to this, asks an analyst in the Observer:

“…how did it come to this? One partial answer is a prediction from the years before the Oslo peace process collapsed. Both sides expected the greatest danger to arise when the leaders sat down to discuss the most difficult issues that had been put carefully to one side: a final settlement that would resolve once and for all whether (and how many) Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return, the status of Jerusalem and its holy sites, and how much of the territories still under Israeli occupation would be returned.

“This was made explicit to me in the first few weeks of the intifada. In autumn 2000 I ran into the Tanzim militia leader, Marwan Bargouti, at a funeral in the main cemetery in Ramallah.

“I found him standing beneath a tree to one side of a group of mourners, a little way from a line of a dozen open graves, dug in anticipation of the dead to come. He told me then, with what I regarded as a strange optimism, that violence ‘could stop tomorrow’. He was not alone. Leaders of the uprising told me the same story. So too did Israeli army officers and political advisers, though with a different slant. The message was that the violence and the rioting were part of a negotiating process for a final settlement that stalled at Camp David. No one wanted, or expected a wider war. But it has come.”

FISK: “TERROR, TERROR, TERROR”

And why is it continuing? Here is veteran Middle East observer Robert Fisk in London’s Independent yesterday. I quote all these analysts to make a larger media point about the analytical frame that is missing from most of the American coverage which bipolarizing the reporting between the Israeli position on the one side, and the Palestininan on the other. This simplistic formulation serves certain interests but it distorts a more complicated many-sided truth.

“How much longer can Ariel Sharon pretend that he’s fighting in the ‘war against terror’? How much longer are we supposed to believe this nonsense? How much longer can the Americans remain so gutlessly silent in the face of a vicious conflict which is coming close to obscuring the crimes against humanity of 11 September? Terror, terror, terror. Like a punctuation mark, the word infects every Israeli speech, every American speech, almost every newspaper article. When will someone admit the truth: that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a dirty colonial war which will leave both sides shamed and humiliated?

“Just listen to what Sharon has been saying in the past 24 hours. “Arafat is an enemy. He decided on a strategy of terror and formed a coalition of terror.” That’s pretty much what President Bush said about Osama bin Laden. But what on earth does it mean? That Arafat is actually sending off the suicide bombers, choosing the target, the amount of explosives? If he was, then surely Sharon would have sent his death squads after the Palestinian leader months ago. After all, his killers have managed to murder dozens of Palestinian gunmen already, including occasional women and children who get in the way.

“The real problem with Arafat is that he has a lot in common with Sharon: old, ruthless and cynical; both men have come to despise each other. Sharon believes that the Palestinians can be broken by military power. He doesn’t realise what the rest of the world learned during Sharon’s own 1982 siege of Beirut: that the Arabs are no longer afraid. Once a people lose their fear, they cannot be re-inoculated with fear. Once the suicide bomber is loose, the war cannot be won. And Arafat knows this.”

BLAMING YASSIR

I was shocked to find my colleague Greg Palast of the Observer in London dismissing many of his own colleagues in the British press as antisemitic* and biased towards the Palestinians. But I kept pressing him and others about evidence. Is Arafat the evil mastermind behind the suicide bombers, the man calling the shots, who can simply turn off the violence with a statement in Arabic as many in the US government and media keep saying? President Bush says he believes this. New York Times headline: “As Israeli Troops Tighten Grip, Bush Says Arafat Must Do More.” The essence of the story: “The Bush administration indicated qualified approval of the Israeli invasion. Before dawn, it backed a resolution by the United Nations Security Council calling on Israel to withdraw. But later, President Bush placed the blame for Mr. Arafat’s predicament squarely on the Palestinian leader.”(*anti-Jewish anti-Semitism is spelled sans hyphen according to Prof. Yehuda Bauer, and that’s the way I do it, jf.)

BUT WAIT A MINUTE, DANNY

“Our friend Janet in Washington is convinced that this is the case and writes to say so: “Arafat has put it in his own words now Danny. Via cell phone in an interviewto al Jazeera, “We have chosen the path, we will either be a martyr or oursons and daughters will raise the flag of Palestine over the churches andmosques of Jerusalem. We are all potential martyrs, the whole Palestinianpeople.” When referring to the Netanya suicide bomber, he said, “Oh Godgive me martyrdom like this.” He was also quoted as saying, “I want to be amartyr, martyr, martyr, martyr.” All of this reported in today’s WashingtonPost. Are these cease fire words??? Are these the words of a man who seekspeace? Is he listening to the offers at the Arab summit? Are these thewords of a man who seeks solutions - just solutions??? Does a real man, aleader of his people, offer his children to step up to the sacrificialaltar???? He can no longer be defended. Look what he is doing to hispeople.

“Are we to interpret this as Arafat’s final leadership solution? He isoffering his people to the sacrificial altar of suicide solutions for hiscause, rather than meet anyone or anything half way. He is not a victim, heis a perpetrator of an inhumane war tactics, using his own people as pawns.The victims are the Palestinians and the Israeli’s. No one talks about thegizzilions of aid dollars he has absconded with rather than build his peoplea country. No one puts the textbooks of his schools on the front pages ofthe newspapers to show the hatred that is being taught to these innocentchildren. He leads with futility and is now asking someone to destroy themall.

“The Arafat statements leave little doubt that he wants his allies to knowthey are welcome to take them all out if necessary if it means a finalvictory over Israel. At all costs…martyrdom… if it means victory.Have we ever heard him scream STOP!!!!!??????????”

OTHER VOICES FROM ISRAEL ARE NOT HEARD

On the face of it, judging by the media coverage, you would think that this is a one side good, the other side bad situation with Jews supporting Israel and all Palestinians waiting for the word from Mount Arafat. Not true. Listen to Yossi Beilin, who was in Barak’s cabinet and helped negotiate the Oslo agreement, writing yesterday in the New York Times. He, incidentally, supports the interpretation of the PLO legal advisor quoted above:

“Each escalation of violence has fueled the next. Mr. Arafat’s periodic instructions for a cease-fire were not unequivocal. But Mr. Sharon did not accept Mr. Arafat’s cease-fire declaration of Dec. 16, 2001, which was largely implemented. He has rejected the Saudi initiative that promises normal relations with Israel in exchange for the withdrawal of Israel from the territories it occupied in 1967. And he seems to interpret the low American profile on the crisis so far as a green light for making war, just as he did in Lebanon 20 years ago.

“The only way out of this crisis is for the two sides to agree to a cease-fire to be supervised by the United States; build on the Saudi initiative; and use the assistance of the American mediator, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, to ensure that the Palestinian Authority’s security forces are restored. Implementation of existing agreements and resumption of peace talks are essential.

“The Israeli war against the terrorist infrastructure will give birth to more terrorists because the terrorist infrastructure lies within people’s hearts. It can be uprooted only if there is hope for a different kind of life in the Middle East. I believe a different life is still possible, but each day that passes without some gesture by both sides toward that future makes peace ever more elusive.”

ISRAELI WAR CRIMES?

Other views not in the Times from Israel are much stronger and go unreported in mainstream media. Meet Lev Grinberg, director of the Humphrey Institute for Social Research at Ben Gurion University, who indicts his own government for war crimes:

“….responsibility for Israeli war crimesis being completely ignored. Who should be arrested for the targetedkilling of almost 100 Palestinians? Who will be sent to jail for thekilling of more than 120 Palestinian paramedics? Who will be sentencedfor the killing of more than 1,200 Palestinians and for the collectivepunishment of more than 3,000,000 civilians during the last 18 months?And who will face the International Tribunal for the illegalsettlement of occupied Palestinian Lands, and the disobedience of UNdecisions for more than 35 years?

“Suicide bombs killing innocent citizens must be unequivocallycondemned; they are immoral acts, and their perpetrators should be sent to jail. But they cannot be compared to State terrorism carriedout by the Israeli Government. The former are individual acts of despair of a people that sees no future, vastly ignored by an unfairand distorted international public opinion. The latter are cold and “rational” decisions of a State and a military apparatus of occupation, well equipped, financed and backed by the only superpowerin the world.”

HOW PR AND MEDIA SPIN INFLUENCES EVERYTHING

Why do we get one point of view far more pervasively than others? There are various conspiracy theories around that argue that the Jews run the people and therefore…I don’t think so. We live in the age of sophisticated media campaigns that run alongside wars…and the truth is that the Israelis are much better at that than they even seem to be on the battlefield where their ‘over-reactions’ always fuel the cycle of violence. Here is an AP report that makes the critical point we at the Mediachannel are always focused on:

Interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and diplomats here and in Washington provide a picture of a sophisticated Israeli government campaign to influence General Zinni to view the conflict through their eyes.

“They were very clever, very persuasive,” said a senior diplomat here involved in the talks. By all accounts, Palestinian officials were ineffectual, even ham-handed at presenting their case, and anything they had to say was loudly overridden by the bombings and attacks by their followers. That violence set the agenda for everyone almost every day.

What the Palestinians were trying to say was that a cease-fire was not enough.Any cease-fire without some movement toward a political solution, the Palestinians and others said, was bound to fail. The cycle of violence would start again.

“At this point it is more difficult than ever to achieve a cease-fire without political underpinnings,” said Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations envoy here.”

Please read this paragraph again because it speaks to the cycles of spin and disinformation that are influencing all of us.

WASHINGTON’S COMPLICITY

And what about US policy? That, too, goes is not examined in the TV coverage I have been watching. (I keep coming back to TV because that is where most news consumers get their information and have their opinions shaped.) Two stories in the Washington Post are as scathing of the Bush Administration policy as any I have seen and show how inaction on Washington’s role has resulted in an abandonment of all even handedness, and contributed to the carnage:

Story l: A Grudging U.S. Policy

Reluctance Has Resulted in Sporadic, Superficial Engagement

By Alan Sipress

“President Bush’s national security team decided in the days after inauguration not to send an American envoy to Taba, Egypt, for last-ditch peace talks before the election of hard-liner Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister. And as violence mounted — though those early months of the Palestinian uprising were mild compared with today’s relentless bloodletting — the White House tarried in announcing whether it would assemble a new Middle East peace team.

“In the following weeks, the administration pulled the plug on the CIA’s high-profile role as a broker between Israeli and Palestinian security services, setting a pattern of sporadic and superficial American engagement.

“Now in its second year, the policy of leaving the Middle East conflict largely to the two sides has failed to stem the dizzying descent of the peace process and, with it, American standing in the region.

Story 2: The Catastrophe of U.S. Inaction .

By Jackson Diehl

“It now looks as if the Israeli-Palestinian fighting will be remembered as the Yugoslavia of this Bush administration — a dangerous situation that, through timidity and willful inaction, the United States allowed to become a catastrophe….Now, as Israelis and Palestinians slaughter each other with a ferocity unimaginable only 15 months ago, this Bush administration looks to be haunted by a similar failure in the Middle East. Though Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon brought on their war, so did the administration’s irrational insistence on retreating to the sidelines in a region where the United States has been an indispensable broker for decades…

“…There, two months before Sept. 11, the administration committed itself to an unworkable strategy. Rightly, it had isolated Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and mobilized considerable international pressure on him to rein in the violence. But it failed to take the two harder steps that might have made that tactic work. First, it refused to offer any vision of a serious political process — like the Madrid peace conference organized by the first Bush administration — that might have given the Palestinian peace camp leverage over Arafat. Even more important, President Bush refused to pressure Sharon, ignoring and sometimes even blessing his increasingly destructive tactics….

“Sharon proceeded to make a mockery of the pressure-Arafat plan. Each period of Palestinian restraint was greeted with Israeli assassinations, home demolitions or incursions into Palestinian territory; each terrorist attack launched by Arafat’s extremist rivals was answered by devastating Israeli assaults on Arafat’s own security forces. State Department spokesmen sometimes protested, but the White House did and said nothing.

WHY ISN’T THE TV MEDIA PICKING THIS UP?

Ok, so there you have it, centrist US analysts saying the same thing as the Israeli critics and even many of the Palestinians. But who is listening? Why is the TV media NOT picking up on this when so many voices are critical of the Israeli and US policy? It goes back to the larger reluctance on the part of the Democrats and the media to challenge Bush’s foreign policy agenda, as long as the word “terrorism” is invoked to defend it.

Ironically, this is occurring despite the fact that American public opinion has not fully embraced President Bush, but Bush has managed to position himself above politics with foreign policy debate all but muzzled. William Schneider, who is on CNN all the time, is a leading expert on public opinion. He writes about this in the LA Times today, but doesn’t deal with the ways media management has factored in to the image positioning that has gone on. He writes today in the LA Times:

“WASHINGTON — Politically speaking, it’s still Nov. 7, 2000. The two parties remain deadlocked. The red state/blue state division of America persists, with the red (Bush) states like Texas getting redder and the blue (Gore) states like California getting bluer.

“That’s because the division enshrined in the 2000 election map wasn’t a division over policy. It was a division over values: liberal America and conservative America. Nothing has happened in the last year and a half to heal that division. No, not even Sept. 11, which was widely expected to break the stalemate in U.S. politics.

“Yes, there is widespread agreement on the war. And broad support for President Bush. But those things are above politics. Even Bush is above politics.” Above politics!

Perhaps we should be anticipating the end of politics as we have known it. That is a thought for another day.

AND NOW “MILI-TAINMENT”

The Pentagon is working hard to keep it this way according to the New York Times report on how the military is working with entertainment producers to sell its policies through show biz. My partner Rory O Connor calls this “mili-tainment.”

Sorry, I can’t just jump a day ahead and say April Fool to turn this all into a joke. If I could, I’d be on Politically Incorrect and have a bestseller. Ironically, if I was funnier about all these developments, I would be taken more seriously by many media outlets. Weird, but true. What does that say?

If you are in New York City, come meet Greg Palast and myself at the Walker Stage Theater at 64 Walker Street (south of Canal) tomorrow at 7 PM for a book discussion and film preview. Share your views with me at dissector@mediachannel.org. Happy Easter Sunday.