Amira Hass was spot on when she said last week that her lifetime women's award was an award for failure. The West Bank correspondent of the Israeli paper Haaretz eloquently explained herself on al-Jazeera's English channel. She received an award for failure, she said, because despite all the facts that she and her journalistic colleagues had explained about Israeli occupation in Palestine, the world still did not understand what occupation meant and still used words like "terror" and "war on terror". Amira was absolutely correct. Most of our Western press and television are as gutless as ever when they have to participate in what Noam Chomsky described as "the manufacture of consent".
Once government and editors and television management have decided on the "story", you can be sure that an Israeli "wall" will become a "security barrier" or a "fence", a pro-Western Arab dictator a "strongman" and "occupied" Israeli territory will become "disputed"; the unjustly treated will thus become generically violent, brutality softened and occupation legalised. Fred Halliday of the LSE is coming out next June with a book called Shocked and Awed about the artillery and minefields used in the battlefield of language. The "War on Terror" – yes, let's give this trash the capital letters it deserves, as in "South Sea Bubble" – has given us "Gitmo" and "extraordinary rendition" ("extraordinary" indeed!) and imported, as Halliday observes, perversions of imported words such as "jihad".
But I think the problem goes further than this. It's not just a White House-State Department-Pentagon-CNN-Downing Street-Defence Ministry-BBC military-political-journalistic complex. Our masters prefer us not to tangle with the bad guys as well as good guys. Years ago, a Time magazine reporter in Cairo packed his note-book with facts about the routine Egyptian police torture of prisoners. But the US ambassador in Cairo persuaded the bureau chief to hold off because he understood that Mubarak was going to "crack down" on such abuses. Ho ho! Time didn't run the story and, of course, the abuses got worse. Shortly afterwards, jail guards were forcing Egyptian prisoners to rape each other.
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