- Behold Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, would-be graduation commencement
speaker at Emory University in the United States. She has made a big mistake.
She dared to criticise Israel. She suggested--horror of horrors--that "the
root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the occupation". Now whoah
there a moment, Mary! "Occupation"? Isn't that a little bit anti-Israeli?
-
- Are you really suggesting that the military occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israel, its use of extrajudicial executions
against Palestinian gunmen, the Israeli gunning down of schoolboy stone-throwers,
the wholesale theft of Arab land to build homes for Jews, is in some way
wrong?
-
- Maybe I misheard you. Sure I did. Because your response
to these scurrilous libels, to these slurs upon your right to free speech,
to these slanderous attacks on your integrity, was a pussy-cat's whimper.
You were "very hurt and dismayed". It is, you told The Irish
Times, "distressing that allegations are being made that are completely
unfounded".
-
- You should have threatened your accusers with legal action.
When I warn those who claim in their vicious postcards that my mother was
Eichmann's daughter that they will receive a solicitor's letter--Peggy
Fisk was in the RAF in the Second World War, but no matter--they fall silent
at once.
-
- But no, you are "hurt". You are "dismayed".
And you allow Professor Kenneth Stein of Emory University to announce that
he is "troubled by the apparent absence of due diligence on the part
of decision makers who invited her [Mary Robinson] to speak". I love
the "due diligence" bit. But seriously, how can you allow this
twisted version of your integrity to go unpunished?
-
- Dismayed. Ah, Mary, you poor diddums.
-
- I tried to check the spelling of "diddums"
in Webster's, America's inspiring, foremost dictionary. No luck. But then,
what's the point when Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines
"anti-Semitism" as "opposition to Zionism: sympathy with
opponents of the state of Israel".
-
- Come again? If you or I suggest--or, indeed, if poor
wee Mary suggests--that the Palestinians are getting a raw deal under Israeli
occupation, then we are "anti-Semitic". It is only fair, of course,
to quote the pitiful response of the Webster's official publicist, Mr Arthur
Bicknell, who was asked to account for this grotesque definition.
-
- "Our job," he responded, "is to accurately
reflect English as it is actually being used. We don't make judgement calls;
we're not political." Even more hysterically funny and revolting,
he says that the dictionary's editors tabulate "citational evidence"
about anti-Semitism published in "carefully written prose-like books
and magazines". Preposterous as it is, this Janus-like remark is worthy
of the hollowest of laughs.
-
- Even the Malaprops of American English are now on their
knees to those who will censor critics of Israel's Middle East policy off
the air.
-
- And I mean "off the air". I've just received
a justifiably outraged note from Bathsheba Ratskoff, a producer and editor
at the American Media Education Foundation (MEF), who says that their new
documentary on "the shutting-down of debate around the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict"--in reality a film about Israel's public relations outfits
in America--has been targeted by the "Jewish Action (sic) Task Force".
The movie Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land was to be shown at the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
-
- So what happened? The "JAT" demanded an apology
to the Jewish community and a "pledge (for) greater sensitivity (sic)
when tackling Israel and the Middle East conflict in the future".
JAT members "may want to consider threatening to cancel their memberships
and to withhold contributions".
-
- In due course, a certain Susan Longhenry of the Museum
of Fine Arts wrote a creepy letter to Sut Jhally of the MEF, referring
to the concerns of "many members of the Boston community"--otherwise,
of course, unidentified--suggesting a rescheduled screening (because the
original screening would have fallen on the Jewish Sabbath) and a discussion
that would have allowed critics to condemn the film. The letter ended--and
here I urge you to learn the weasel words of power--that "we have
gone to great lengths to avoid cancelling altogether screenings of this
film; however, if you are not able to support the revised approach, then
I'm afraid we'll have no choice but to do just that".
-
- Does Ms Longhenry want to be a mouse? Or does she want
to have the verb "to longhenry" appear in Webster's? Or at least
in the Oxford? Fear not, Ms Longhenry's boss overrode her pusillanimous
letter. For the moment, at least.
-
- But where does this end? Last Sunday, I was invited to
talk on Irish television's TV3 lunchtime programme on Iraq and President
Bush's support for Sharon's new wall on the West Bank. Towards the end
of the programme, Tom Cooney, a law lecturer at University College, Dublin,
suddenly claimed that I had called an Israeli army unit a "rabble"
(absolutely correct--they are) and that I reported they had committed a
massacre in Jenin in 2002.
-
- I did not say they committed a massacre. But I should
have. A subsequent investigation showed that Israeli troops had knowingly
shot down innocent civilians, killed a female nurse and driven a vehicle
over a paraplegic in a wheelchair. "Blood libel!" Cooney screamed.
TV3 immediately--and correctly--dissociated themselves from this libel.
Again, I noted the involvement of an eminent university--UCD is one of
the finest academic institutions in Ireland and I can only hope that Cooney
exercises a greater academic discipline with his young students than he
did on TV3--in this slander. And of course, I got the message. Shut up.
Don't criticise Israel.
-
- So let me end on a positive note. Just as Bathsheba is
a Jewish American, British Jews are also prominent in an organisation called
Deir Yassin Remembered, which commemorates the massacre of Arab Palestinians
by Jewish militiamen outside Jerusalem in 1948. This year, they remembered
the Arab victims of that massacre--9 April--on the same day that Christians
commemorated Good Friday.
-
- The day also marked the fourth day of the eight-day Jewish
Passover. It also fell on the anniversary of the 1945 execution by the
Nazis of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Flossenburg concentration camp.
Jewish liberation 3,000 years ago, the death of a Palestinian Jew 2,000
years ago, the death of a German Christian 59 years ago and the massacre
of more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children 56 years ago. Alas,
Deir Yassin Remembered does not receive the publicity it merits.
-
- Webster's dictionary would meretriciously brand its supporters
"anti-Semitic", and "many members of the Boston community"
would no doubt object. "Blood libel," UCD's eminent law lecturer
would scream. We must wait to hear what UCD thinks. But let us not be "hurt"
or "dismayed". Let's just keep on telling it how it is. Isn't
that what American journalism school was meant to teach us?
-
- - Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author
of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new
book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk04242004.html
|