[WCUSP] Banality & barefaced lies, Robert Fisk

[yvonne simmons]

With all the commentary on Carter's book I think we
would be wise to pass these on  to the branches to
think about.  Yvonne

Banality and barefaced lies Robert Fisk

Here in America , I stare at the land in which I live
and see a landscape I do not recognise 

By Robert Fisk

12/23/06 "The Independent" -- -- 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 ".

But well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? This is no
tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the
lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend
of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be
a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's
book is now a best-seller - and applause here, by the
way, for the great American public that bought the
book instead of believing Mr Foxman.

But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't The New
York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers
in the United States mention Israel's cosy
relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in
South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention
in his book? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond
trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa ? Didn't
Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship
with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-
like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime
Minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the
architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid
- paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with
an official reception from Israeli prime minister
Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel
prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This of course, certainly
did not become part of the great American debate on
Carter's book.

At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer
volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report -
which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a
few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from
this disaster without too much blood on his shirt.
After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of
Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate title -
there are a few worthy suggestions (already
predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of
serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli
withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the
same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks - the
language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings
Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York
Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of "porous"
borders and admonitions that "time is running out".

The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at
the back of the report where it lists the "experts"
consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many
of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution and
there is Thomas Freedman of The New York Times.

But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the
post-Baker debate among the great and the good who
dragged the United States into this catastrophe.
General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the
US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in
Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not losing".
Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced
that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not
winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped
into the same nonsense pool by asserting: "I don't
think you can say we're losing. By the same token
(sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point,
Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "we're not
winning, we're not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.

I pondered this madness during a bout of severe
turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado . And that's
when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique
round of the Iraq war between the United States of
America and the forces of evil. It's a draw! 

 

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