A rchive Date
[ 08-11-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Israel ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/harris.html
Izzy right or Izzy wrong?
By MICHAEL HARRIS - For The Ottawa Sun
November 8, 2002
If Izzy Asper's spittle-flecked tirade on the media and the Middle East weren't so dangerously false, it would be almost funny.
After all, the proprietor of Southam and the Global Television Network owns a company which effectively censors columnists, dictates national editorials, and thinks of journalists as something between an itchy skin condition and a bad smell.
Citizen Asper and his company as the champions of responsible journalism is rather like Jean Chretien as the crusader for parliamentary reform - comedy in hot pursuit of farce. Just ask Lawrence Martin, Stephen Kimber, or Russell Mills.
I am not here to dispute Citizen Asper's right to his uncritical support of the government of Ariel Sharon or the bombastic way in which he expresses it. People who see only one side of a problem are even occasionally useful, if only because they remind everyone of the most extreme obstacles in the path of a resolution of the issue.
I am here, however, to reply to Citizen Asper's hopelessly skewed analysis of the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East and the related notion that anyone who doesn't agree is lazy, stupid, or anti-Semitic.
According to him, those of us who believe that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is about statehood for millions of refugees and peaceful coexistence for Israel with her Arab neighbours have been taken in by Big Lie No. 1.
Citizen Asper's view? It is a war of extermination conducted by Palestinians to kill, expel or subjugate the Jews. It is a view that ignores the last 15 years of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, just as Citizen Asper's analysis ignores the violent birth pangs of the state he champions.
In the late 1980s, Yasser Arafat and the PLO agreed to a "two-state" solution to this world crisis. It was precisely because of that shift recognizing Israel's right to exist (and repeated by all Arab nations at the recent Cairo Summit), that Israel in turn signed on to an agreement to implement Resolution 242 through negotiation.
And what was Resolution 242 all about?
Land for peace and the very things that Citizen Asper says have nothing to do with the situation: Jerusalem, the illegal settlements, and those 3.5 million "alleged" refugees.
On to the second Big Lie: Citizen Asper says that Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount was completely legitimate and should never have been swallowed as the reason for the latest intifada. (The Temple Mount shares the same site as the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.) That is not how the world saw it.
Just a few days after Sharon's ill-advised visit, the UN passed Resolution 1322, deploring "the provocation carried out at al-Haram al Sharif in Jerusalem" and the subsequent violence.
Everyone, except Citizen Asper it appears, knew exactly what Ariel Sharon the politician was doing: He was laying claim, in the most emotional and inflammatory possible way to the world's most controversial piece of religious real estate at the worst possible moment.
If nothing else, the results of his visit were predictable. As the White House has euphemistically put it so many times in the recent past with respect to the far-right-wing policies of the Sharon government, "It wasn't helpful."
Citizen Asper saved his strongest argument that the world is either anti-Semitic or merely stupid until the end of his commentary: "But if nothing else in this entire sad and sordid story irrefutably demonstrates the dishonest reporting and inherent media bias against Israel it is the Jenin massacre myth on which the herd of ravenous reporters descended with vulture-like hysteria."
As proof, Citizen Asper produced the findings of the United Nations Commission which claimed that "only" 54 Palestinians had died in the IDF's savage invasion of Jenin and Nablus, half of those armed combatants. What he did not say was that the Sharon government refused to allow a UN inspection team into the camps and its report was prepared from press clippings.
This week Amnesty International charged the Israeli Defense Forces with war crimes after three months of field investigations in Jenin and Nablus. And this time, according to Dr. Kathleen Cavanaugh, the findings were based on forensic autopsies of exhumed bodies, not press clippings.
There has been no response from the Israeli army - or for that matter, Citizen Asper.
SELECTIVE HISTORY
The truth is, Citizen Asper's outburst is just that, an Arab-bashing exercise in selective history in the service of a government he uncritically admires. According to his analysis, all Arabs are barbaric assassins just waiting for their chance to murder Jewish women, children and the elderly. As he puts it, "Any reportage or commentary that is not clothed in this context, is, at best, misleading or ignorant, or plain dishonest at worst."
The abiding irony of Citizen Asper's commentary, which passed without a single challenge from any of Southam's editors, is that the very debate he so desperately tries to stifle is taking place in Israel and with Jews around the world. Britain's chief rabbi, Jonathon Sacks, said that Israel's 35-year occupation of Arab lands after the 1967 war is corrupting Israel's culture. "I regard the current situation as nothing less than tragic. It is forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals."
President Bush, the Pope, Canada's foreign minister, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the European Union, the United Nations, and Amnesty International have all found grounds to criticize the right-wing policies of the Sharon government. And now that Israel has been plunged into an election over the issue of funding illegal settlements in the West Bank, several Israeli politicians have joined the fray.
Labour Chairman Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Sharon's former defence minister, told reporters that Prime Minister Sharon had "no political, social or economic achievements" to show for his 20 months in office. "Never has a prime minister enjoyed the support of so many, and done so little," Ben-Eliezer told a press conference at Labour headquarters in south Tel Aviv.
Meretz leader Yossi Sarid told Channel Two in Israel that "the national unity government was the worst in Israel's history and Ariel Sharon was an abject failure."
Finally, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, who is loudly calling for a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians, slammed the Sharon government for what he described as its duplicitous policy on expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank. "We cannot tell the Americans we are removing settlements and then carry on building them."
Appalling how many misleading, ignorant and dishonest folk are abroad these days, yes?
Author, broadcaster and investigative journalist Michael Harris can be heard Monday to Thursday, 1-3 p.m. on 580 CFRA. Letters to the editor should be sent to oped@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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