One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target." The International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist." At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated.
Dr. David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honor Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as they might be to Israel."
He received no reply.
The atrocity was reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11 Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan Johnston's now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big Brother.)
While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened... It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
The media wailing over the BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted misdemeanors provide the perfect straw man. They complement a self-serving BBC internal inquiry into news bias, which dutifully supplied the right-wing Daily Mail with hoary grist that the corporation is a left-wing plot. Such shenanigans would be funny were it not for the true story behind the facade of elite propaganda that presents humanity as useful or expendable, worthy or unworthy, and the Middle East as the Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't matter, was of no interest.
The other day, I turned on the BBC's Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass voice announce a program about Iraqi interpreters working for "the British coalition forces" and warning that "listeners might find certain descriptions of violence disturbing." Not a word referred to those of "us" directly and ultimately responsible for the violence. The program was called Face the Facts. Is satire that dead? Not yet. The Murdoch columnist David Aaronovitch, a warmonger, is to interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule.
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four lexicon of opposites pervades almost everything we see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are "the British coalition forces," surely as benign as that British institution, St. John Ambulance, who are "bringing democracy" to Iraq. BBC television describes Israel as having "two hostile Palestinian entities on its borders," neatly inverting the truth that Israel is actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally colonizing Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the invaders.
"The great crimes against most of humanity," wrote the American cultural critic James Petras, "are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and thought... [that] have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviors, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms" designed to disguise a state terror that is "a gross perversion" of democracy, liberation, reform, justice. In his reinauguration speech, George Bush mentioned all these words, whose meaning, for him, is the dictionary opposite.
It is 80 years since Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, predicted a pervasive "invisible government" of corporate spin, suppression and silence as the true ruling power in the United States. That is true today on both sides of the Atlantic. How else could America and Britain go on such a spree of death and mayhem on the basis of stupendous lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, even a "mushroom cloud over New York"? When the BBC radio reporter Andrew Gilligan reported the truth, he was pilloried and sacked along with the BBC's director general, while Blair, the proven liar, was protected by the liberal wing of the media and given a standing ovation in parliament.
The same is happening again over Iran, distracted, it is hoped, by spin that the new Foreign Secretary David Miliband is a "skeptic" about the crime in Iraq when, in fact, he has been an accomplice, and by unctuous Kennedy-quoting Foreign Office propaganda about Miliband's "new world order."
"What do you think of Iran's complicity in attacks on British soldiers in Basra?" Miliband was asked by the Financial Times.
Miliband: "Well, I think that any evidence of Iranian engagement there is to be deplored. I think that we need regional players to be supporting stability, not fomenting discord, never mind death..."
FT: "Just to be clear, there is evidence?"
Miliband: "Well no, I chose my words carefully..."
The coming war on Iran, including the possibility of a nuclear attack, has already begun as a war by journalism. Count the number of times "nuclear weapons program" and "nuclear threat" are spoken and written, yet neither exists, says the International Atomic Energy Agency. On 21 June, the New York Times went further and advertised an "urgent" poll, headed: "Should we bomb Iran?" The questions beneath referred to Iran being "a greater threat than Saddam Hussein" and asked: "Who should undertake military action against Iran first... ?" The choice was "US. Israel. Neither country."
So tick your favorite bombers.
The last British war to be fought without censorship and "embedded" journalists was the Crimea a century and a half ago. The bloodbath of the First World War and the Cold War might never have happened without their unpaid (and paid) propagandists. Today's invisible government is no less served, especially by those who censor by omission.
However, there are major differences. Official disinformation now is often aimed at a critical public intelligence, a growing awareness in spite of the media. This "threat" from a public often held in contempt has been met by the insidious transfer of much of journalism to public relations. Some years ago, PR Week estimated that the amount of "PR-generated material" in the media is "50 per cent in a broadsheet newspaper in every section apart from sport. In the local press and the mid-market and tabloid nationals, the figure would undoubtedly be higher. Music and fashion journalists and PRs work hand in hand in the editorial process... PRs provide fodder, but the clever high-powered ones do a lot of the journalists' thinking for them."
This is known today as "perception management." The most powerful are not the Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton, which "sold" the slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the Sawyer Miller Group, which sold hated, pro-Washington regimes in Colombia and Bolivia and whose operatives included Mark Malloch Brown, the new Foreign Office minister, currently being spun as anti-Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is looted.
The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." The lone, honorable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw.
He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis:
Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to today?" "I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask." For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious.
What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege.
In The Serpent, Marc Karlin's dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media and coerce the industry's liberal elite. There are clips from a keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. "This is the silence of the democrats," says the voice-over, "and the Dark Prince could bathe in their silence."
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@AeroSharkTech well this is seriously the last thing I'm going to say to you
1/ If Israel has a right to exist, so does Palestine
2/ You support Genocide, and MAY even have been a party to it
3/ Calling someone a Jew isn't racist, it's like calling me a Catholic
What Israels doing is as bad, if not worse than what the Nazis did, so Nazi Jews fits, your not standing up for other cultures your standing up for whoever PAYS you the most, did you consider that?
sidious1977 4 weeks ago
@AeroSharkTech I am SOOOOO fucking concerned for them, but unlike you I'm not into killing people, it's against my CATHOLIC religion, something I follow apart from the odd swear word here and there, if you love Israel so much, why are flying relief in Africa instead of Jets for them? tired of dropping bombs? concience getting the better of you as you mature and realise it may not have been such a good idea in the first place?.... no shame in admitting it, what's done is done.
sidious1977 4 weeks ago
@sidious1977 And if your SOOOOOO fucking concerned for the Palestinians, stop wasting valuable time on youtube and go fight for them. Go stand up with them, side by side, and fight. Your youtube posts aren't saving lives or even helping. They need people, they need action, they need results. Go fight for what you believe in and show the world how important the Palestinians are to you. For there is no greater love than a man to lay down his life for another. OR STFU YOU PUSSY!!!!
AeroSharkTech 4 weeks ago
@sidious1977 Okay, this is seriously the last thing I'm going to say to you.
1. You're against multi-ethnic societies.
2. You support gencide
3. You keep using racially offensive hoping to offend me
And you're calling me a fucking Nazi? Dude...really...go fuck your hypocritical self. I'm standing up for other cultures. You're just a fucking racist. Its obvious to me and everybody else who reads your posts. You sound more like Hitler than anyone. Did you consider that?
AeroSharkTech 4 weeks ago
@AeroSharkTech Yeah the truth hurts doesn't it, It's not about what I want, it's about what the people of Palestine want that matters to me......to live in fucking peace from Israel.....I couldn't give a fuck about you or what you do in Ongobongoland for a living, but if your gonna come on here and try to defend Israel, then I'm gonna defend Palestine, Ron Paul 2012, Israels money is getting cut off, lets see how they do on a more level playing field.....I pity you more!
sidious1977 4 weeks ago
@sidious1977 So for the last time, I'm advising you to stop making an ass of yourself and speaking of things you don't know. You're trying to tell me about my life, where I've been, what I did there, why I was there, but the truth is you don't even know my fucking name. Really, find something else to do. You're showing how silly you are. You want the last word, then have it. I'm not wasting anymore of my time on such a small minded, ignorant individual. I honestly pity you.
AeroSharkTech 4 weeks ago
You help the Red Cross/paid by the red cross, yet you happily defend Israel and all of it's actions, a couple of rockets that have no guidance systems against tanks and jets and apaches etc.......I don't need to know fuck all about you as you keep saying, your nothing but another Jewish Nazi sympathiser who's trying to buy his stairway to Heaven.......ain't gonna happen!
sidious1977 4 weeks ago
@sidious1977 Yeah right, its obvious by your lack of tolerance for multi-ethnic societies that you don't get around. If you ever go to the Kongo you'll learn that its spelled with a "K" in Kongolese. Its only "C" in English. I have enough respect for them to say it according to their tongue. After all, it is their country and their language. My father was a commercial pilot so naturally I grew up flying. I'm also an ERAU graduate. You have such a small, little mind buddy.
AeroSharkTech 4 weeks ago
@sidious1977 LOL Like I said dude, you don't know shit about me. Just because somebody is a contractor doesn't mean they're an evil gun for hire. You're so stupid and its obvious you watch way too much tv. I'm a relief pilot. I fly villagers and medical equipment back and forth between villages in the Kongo and Red Cross emergency centers and hospitals. You need to come back down to earth you preachy little faggot. Its obviously been a while since your last visit. Jackass.
AeroSharkTech 4 weeks ago
@sidious1977 And you should really stop talking about me like you know me because you clearly don't. You don't know where I've fought or for what reasons. I'm a contractor numbnuts, and I choose my battles. Nobody "sends" me to war. Just like you don't determine my rules of my salvation. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." You think you know better than God asshole?
AeroSharkTech 4 weeks ago