Those Who Forget the Past Page 10

  This Mossad conspiracy is being endlessly recycled. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, reported this month that it was an article of faith in Indonesia, the pivotal Southeast Asia state with the world’s largest Muslim population. The week I was asked to give this talk, Dr. Y. Alaridi opined in the English language Syria Times: “Has the CIA asked the Israeli Mossad if they had any idea about the September 11 tragedy before it happened? Sir, please forgive my rudeness, by the way, who does rule America?” There is no end to the paranoia. In an interview with Arab television only last week, a British spokesman was asked to prove that the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by the CIA.

  How could people be so susceptible to misinformation? Well, conspiracy theories simplify a complex world. They have the advantage that the absence of evidence is itself proof of plot: missing records at Pearl Harbor, missing bullets in Dallas, missing bodies in Jenin. Preconceptions are outfitted in fantasy. Contradiction by authority is mere affirmation of the vastness of the plot: so he’s in it, too. Conspiracy and rumor bloom especially where the flow of news and opinion is restricted and especially where illiteracy is high, as it is in Pakistan where the madrassas (schools) devote all their attention to religious indoctrination—the only developing country, I think, where literacy rates are falling. Syed Talat Hussain, the prominent Pakistani journalist, was frank about it: “In a country where there is a void of information, newspapers resort to rumours. In addition, there is an abiding tradition in the Pakistani print media deliberately to prove that whatever goes wrong is the work of the Jews and the Hindus.” But there is another explanation for the potency of the poison today. It is the aura of authenticity provided by technology, by the Internet. John Daniszewski of the Los Angeles Times asked an editor of The Nation in Islamabad, Ayesha Haroon, why they blamed Israel. “It is quite possible that there was deliberate malice in printing it,” she admitted, but she went on: “I also think it has to do with the Internet. Somebody in Canada, the United States, or the UK is sitting there and makes up something and sends it to us. And when you see something on a computer, you tend to believe it is true.” Here in the new magic is a source of much of our misery. An Indonesian just back from visiting the Islamic fundamentalist stronghold of Jogjakarta told Friedman how alarmed he was by the tide running for Jihad against Christians and Jews. What is frightening, he said, is an insidious digital divide. “Internet users are only 5 per cent of the population—but these 5 per cent spread rumours to everyone else. They say, ‘He got it from the Internet.’ They think it’s the Bible.”

  But what about these 4,000 Jews? The figure of 4,000 got into circulation because some years ago somebody guessed that’s how many Israelis there were in the city. The fact is Jews and Israelis did what everybody did on September 11: they showed up for work and died along with Muslims and Christians and Buddhists. The four children of Deborah Kaplan, engineer, know too well that nobody tipped off their mother. Allan Schwartzstein, equities trader, and father of two, died wearing the watch he had received for his bar mitzvah fifteen years before. He was named after an uncle killed in Israel in 1948. The uncle’s body was never found and neither was Allan’s. His high-level connections in Israel did not help Hagay Shefi, the technologist son of the Israeli brigadier general Dov Shefi. He was speaking at the Risk Waters conference and never had a chance on the 106th floor.

  The smear that defiles the dead, that millions perceive as reality, owes its original currency, astonishingly, to one website. The story got legs because it fitted the story line of Jewish masterminds and because very few people in media regarded it seriously enough to take note of, still less, eviscerate. One dotcom reporter who did investigate, Bryan Curtis of Slate, first discovered the fiction surfacing on a site called Information Times on September 12. It began tentatively saying the “terrorist government of Israel could not be ruled out as the suspect” and then supposition congealed. At 6:26 A.M. on September 17 it substantiated the plot with the headline that 4,000 Jews were spared execution by their compatriots. And the source for this devastating charge seems to be Al-Manar Television in Lebanon, which exists “to stage an effective psychological warfare with the Zionist enemy” and gives frequent airtime to the terrorist group Hezbollah. So I thought I would call Information Times in Washington to ask whether they had the slightest qualms about making such a play of an unchecked story from such a source. They were hard to find. Directory assistance had no entry for Information Times, Info Times, or the editor listed on its website, a Wizard of Oz by the name of Syed Adeeb. Mr. Curtis also tried. The Press Club told him it had no such tenant; email messages were bounced back. When I spoke to Curtis this week, he told me he had been bombarded by anti-Semitic responses. He also got a threatening legal letter but when Slate’s lawyers tried to reply, the evanescent litigants were on the lam again. But Information Times is still peddling its wares on the web and you will get the flavor if I read you a few of the thirty-one stories I found at the top of their list on May 16:

  1306: Expose Lobbyists who Support Israeli Terrorism 1307: Powell cunningly encourages Genocide of Arabs 1309: Thomas Friedman is a violent extremist 1310: US REP Says Bush Junta behind 9/11 attacks 1313: Dumb Foxy Blonde Utters Israeli Propaganda 1316: Hindu Terrorists Raped and Burned Women 1322: Bush Imposes Criminal Dictator on Pakistan 1325: Bush Changes Our Name to US of Israel 1334: Israelis with bomb material arrested in Washington

  Once upon a time Mr. Adeeb, and his shy sponsors, would be sending out smudged cyclostyled sheets that would never see the light of day. But now the mysterious Mr. Adeeb and others like him have a megaphone to the world, with this spurious authenticity of electronic delivery. Mr. Cordell Hull in the thirties of print and radio complained that a lie went halfway round the world before truth had time to put its trousers on; nowadays it has been to Mars and back before anyone is half awake. It is extraordinary how seductive it is. After 9/11, I heard that Palestinians had been filmed dancing joyously in the street, but that AP had for some reason not circulated the video.

  Then I came across “the truth” on the Web. Here is what I read, capitalization as in the text:

  All around the world we are subjected to 3 or 4 huge news distributors and one of them is CNN. One set of images showed Palestinians celebrating the bombing out on the streets, eating some cake and making funny faces for the camera. Well THOSE IMAGES WERE SHOT BACK IN 1991. THOSE ARE IMAGES OF PALESTINIANS CELEBRATING THE INVASION OF KUWAIT! It is simply unacceptable that a super power of communications as CNN uses images which do not correspond to reality. This is a crime against public opinion. The truth is that the U.S. has shown no respect for other countries in the last decades.

  Sounds right. One recalls Yasser Arafat led the Palestinians in support of Saddam in the Gulf War so perhaps the film in 2001 was indeed of 1990 celebrations of his invasion of Kuwait, or perhaps they erupted on the street when he launched Scud missiles against the hated Israelis.

  What was CNN doing airing a decades-old film? Didn’t it realize it would make Americans angry with the Palestinians?

  Well, they weren’t doing anything of the kind.

  The web site exposé was itself a fraud. The film was not archive footage misapplied to a current event. It was shot on Black Tuesday, September 11, by a Reuters TV crew in East Jerusalem and supplied to CNN in the normal way—as testified both by Reuters and CNN. The internal evidence supports CNN’s rebuttal: the video included comments from a Palestinian praising Osama Bin Laden, unknown on the Jerusalem street in 1990, and in the background were automobiles made after 1991.

  So how did the lie get round the world? A student named Marcio A.V. Carvalho, at Universidad Estatal de Campinas-Brasil (Unicamp), was told by someone that a professor at another university had the CNN tape and could prove it false. Carvalho plugged the news into the email list of a discussion group he joined on the web. When members of the group got excited for more details, he went back to his contact and to the professor—who denied having the tape. C
arvalho told his email list he had no more details. Later, following the CNN rebuttal, both the university announced regrets that one of its students had promulgated a falsehood, but by this time it had assumed an inflated life of its own. Carvalho disowned his Frankensteins; a hacker, he said, attacked his email domain and sent out distorted articles under his name.

  I have reported this fragment in a little detail to show what we are up against today. We could be in this tent the rest of the week if we tried to find our way through the labyrinth of cognitive dissonance to assess the potential repercussions. On those who ingested the fraud alleging fraud, on those who caught up with it, on the different interpretations likely to be made by a viewer in America, in Europe, in the Middle East. But one thing is certain: whatever else they do, allegations of misreporting like this aggravate the dangers for journalists and TV crews—like Christiane Amanpour, who is with us tonight—bravely venturing into areas of tension, risking arrest by the authorities, a stray bullet, or violence from the street, the asylum of ignorance. I have lost three colleagues and friends this way. At the end of the line of incendiary lies, there is the life of a reporter, just trying to do his job, like Danny Pearl tortured and butchered because he was a Jew and a reporter, led into a trap by a graduate of a British university.

  THE TIDAL WAVE OF ANTI-SEMITISM

  We have to look very hard in the distorting mirrors of the Middle East for the absolute knowledge of Enlightenment presumptions. But the Internet, for all its elephant traps, does enable us at least to know to an unprecedented degree what is being retailed, what people are thinking and being told. Before I lift the lid an inch or two on this Pandora’s box, you are entitled to know where I am coming from. I see Israel, for all its warts, and its origins in terrorist violence against the British, as the parliamentary democracy envisaged by the famous editor of The Guardian, C. P. Scott, when in 1917 he introduced Chaim Weizmann to Lloyd George and A. J. Balfour. That led to the Balfour declaration for a Jewish national home. At the same time, I have never hesitated whenever I thought Israel was failing to live up to its ideals or being intransigent in negotiation. At the Sunday Times, I was the subject of a great deal of criticism for documenting in detail cases of ill treatment of Arabs held prisoner on the West Bank by the Israeli military. I believe occupation is inevitably an ugly and humiliating thing. Israel would be well advised to stop building settlements; indeed as some peace groups in Israel suggest, it might be possible to break the cycle of violence by formally withdrawing from an abandoned settlement and letting it be known that more will follow if the gesture is reciprocated.

  But none of the Palestinians’ grievances can justify what they are doing today. Nothing, I believe, nothing, can justify that random murder of Israeli citizenry, wherever they are—in pre-’67 Israel, or the West Bank or Gaza. And nothing can justify the anti-Semitism that foments such terrorism. It is a big dark shadow on the world, and it is not simply a consequence of the Palestinian conflict, as conventional media portrays it— insofar as it portrays it at all, which is scandalously little. The leading authority on anti-Semitism, the author and scholar Professor Robert Wistrich, Neuberger Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, judges that today’s level of antiSemitism is unprecedented, and anyone who makes the most cursory examination cannot fail to be stunned. The effluent is from official sources and newspapers in Arab states, from schools and government-funded mosques, from Arab columnists and editorial writers, cartoonists, clerics, and intellectuals, from websites that trail into an infinity of iniquity. Hostility to Israel is pumped into millions of homes every day by the pan-Arab TV satellite channel, Al-Jazeera. It is said to be “objective.” At the start of the Afghan campaign, it gave twice as much airtime to Bin Laden and his supporters as the coalition. Recently, it showed its priorities very clearly by giving an easy ride to the anti-Semitic Le Pen and a rough ride to Tony Blair. The appearance of modernity in the Arab media is illusory. More important than the presence of the hardware is the absence of the software, the notion of a ruggedly independent self-critical free press. CNN will film American bomb damage in Afghanistan. Al-Jazeera and the Middle East stations would never dream of talking to the orphans and widows whose loved ones were blown apart by a suicide bomber. An Arab critic of America and the coalition is always given the last word.

  Wherever you apportion the balance of blame on the emotive issue of Palestine, vertigo is surely induced by seeing the ghost walk again: the specter of anti-Semitism that haunted Europe in the thirties to its ghastly fulfillment is now revived whole in the Arab media and in some of the European press, too. Certainly, in too much of European dialogue, Israel is supported, in Lenin’s words, like a rope supports a hanging man. Outright anti-Semitism is not a common feature, and there may be a token gesture to the right of Israel to exist, but much Middle East reporting falls into the impartiality trap. It gives equal weight to information from corrupt police states and proven liars as to information from a self-critical democracy. The pious but fatuous posture is that this is somehow fair, as if truth existed in a moral vacuum, something to be measured by the yard like calico. Five million Jews in Israel are a vulnerable minority surrounded by 300 million Muslims, who for the most part are governed by authoritarian regimes, quasi–police states, that in more than fifty years have never ceased trying to wipe it out by war and terrorism. They muzzle dissent and critical reporting, they run vengeful penal systems, they have failed in almost every measure of social and political justice from the rights of women to fair trials and freedom of the press, they deflect the frustrations of their streets to the scapegoat of Zionism, and they breed and finance international terrorism. Yet it is Israel that is regarded with skepticism and sometimes hostility. Take the battle of Jenin. The Guardian was moved to write the editorial opinion that Israel’s attacks on Jenin were “every bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York on September 11. Every bit? Every bit as repellent? Did we miss something? Was there some American provocation of Osama comparable to the murder of nineteen Israelis at Passover? Was something going on in the World Trade Center as menacing as the making of bombs in Jenin, known to Palestinians as Suicide Capital?

  The presumption in the Jenin feeding frenzy in print and in hours and hours of television was that the Palestinian stories of 3,000 killed and buried in secret mass graves must be true, yet the main spokesman Saeb Erekat has been shown time and time again to be a liar. Human Rights Watch now puts the death toll at a total of 54, and on their count 22 civilians—the Israelis say 3. Some Palestinian militants in fact claim Jenin as a victory in the killing of 23 Israeli soldiers.

  Of course, the press had a duty to report the Palestinians’ allegations; it was entitled to raise questions and express alarm in the editorial columns. But truth did not lie in the balance between competing statements, and it was ill-served by hysteria. Big stories like this demand rigor in the reporting, restraint in the language, scrupulous care in the headlining, proper attribution of sources, and above all a sense of responsibility: “Genocide” is too agonizing when real for it to be devalued by its use as small change. Benjamin Pogrund is one of the bravest journalists I have ever met. He has practiced and defended the freedom of the press with his life all his life. He risked prison and beating bringing blacks and whites together during apartheid; he is doing something like that now in Israel promoting dialogue between Jews and Arabs in the West Bank, and he told me last week that the unskeptical reporting of Jenin made his hair stand on end.

  LET ME REJECT the sophistry that to question such matters is to excuse everything done under the guise of protesting antiSemitism. It is not anti-Semitic to raise questions about Jenin, no more than it is anti-press to raise questions about the reporting. It is not anti-Semitic to protest ill treatment of Palestinians. It is not anti-Semitic to consider whether Sharon’s past belies his promises for the future. It is not anti-Semitic to deplore the long occupation, though originally brought by Arab leaders in instigating a
nd losing three wars.

  It is anti-Semitic to vilify the state of Israel as a diabolical abstraction, reserving tolerance for the individual Jew but not the collective Jew; it is anti-Semitic to invent malignant outrages; it is anti-Semitic to consistently condemn in Israel what you ignore or condone elsewhere; it is, above all, anti-Semitic to dehumanize Judaism and the Jewish people so as to incite and justify their extermination. That is what has been done thousands and thousands of times over on a preposterous scale.

  Anti-Semitism on the scale it is today is something relatively new in the Islamic world. There was more tolerance for Jews in the Islamic empire than ever there was in Christian Europe. I was aware, as we all are, that Israelis are unpopular because of the prolonged occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. What I did not realize until I began looking into it for this talk was how frenzied, vociferous, paranoid, vicious, and prolific— underscore prolific—the new anti-Semitism is, and how little this fact has been reported, analyzed, and commented on in the West by press, academia, church, and governments. Yes, everyone threw up their hands in horror about Le Pen—it is always satisfying to find fault with the French!—but Europe turns a blind eye to worse. A single skinhead assault on a synagogue in Europe is news, but not the unremitting daily assault on Jews waged from Morocco to Cairo to Damascus, from Baghdad to Teheran, the Gaza Strip to Karachi. The media in the Middle East is an open sewer. Let’s not get trapped in a game of moral equivalency. In terms of abuse Muslims altogether suffer nothing comparable to the incessant warfare now. Twenty years ago Israeli school textbooks were disfigured by stereotypes of Arabs as treacherous, mendacious, stupid, and murderous. But not now. They have cleaned up. Israelis and Arabs have worked to good effect together here.

  But the Palestinian Authority uses European money to run a stream of hate propaganda through the schools, the mosques, on television and radio, in political rallies and summer camps. They film little girls singing their dedication to martyrdom. The degree of infection was manifest at Al-Najah University in the city of Nablus where the students put on an exhibition entitled “The Sbarro Café Exhibition.”