How can you trust the cowardly BBC?
April 16th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Ladies and Gentlemen: the long-awaited day has arrived. The BBC is finally admitting that its coverage of Israel-Palestine was misleading. In response to Israel Lobby pressure the BBC Trust has carried out a review of its Middle East coverage and concluded that it is…too pro-Palestinian!
Welcome to the BBC’s world of the unreal (Yes, the BBC of the Gaza appeal-denial fame). Black is white, war is peace, up is down, and Jeremy Bowen is ‘pro-Palestinian’. This has led Bowen for once to admit the truth. He told the Independent: ‘It’s certainly the case that many Israelis and … many people in the British Jewish community regard us as, if not anti-Israel actively, then certainly pro-Palestinian. I think it’s unfortunate because it’s not true.’
But as the great Robert Fisk correctly points out, The BBC Trust is nothing more than ‘a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby‘.
The BBC Trust’s report on Jeremy Bowen’s dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest.
But I am mincing my words.
The cult of irrelevance
April 15th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Steve Walt reflects on the chasm between the worlds of IR theory and policy.
A year or so ago, I read a news story where a well-known IR scholar explained the silence of many academics about the Iraq war by saying that “I don’t think all the academics in the world could have had much impact on American public opinion…I don’t think academics matter.”
Even if true in this particular case, this is a self-fulfilling world-view. If you basically believe that what scholars write and say doesn’t really matter for major national policy decisions, you’re unlikely to write or say anything that might actually shape those decisions. And for many academics, that’s ok with them.
As Laura Rozen noted earlier this week, my colleague Joseph Nye offered a candid and critical assessment of the growing gap between academia and the policy world in a Washington Post column on Monday. Joe’s own career demonstrates that it is still possible combine serious scholarship, government service, academic leadership, and public commentary, but his warnings that this combination is becoming rarer is almost certainly correct. Michael Desch makes some related points in a recent article in Notre Dame Magazine, noting that the policy world is increasingly indifferent (or hostile) to academic advice. Together, the portrait they paint is more than a little disturbing.
Alastair Crooke on BBC Radio 4
April 14th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Alastair Crooke recently appeared on Start the Week, presented by Andrew Marr, where he discussed his recently published book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution.
Alistair Crooke on BBC Radio 4 (13:10): MP3
The complete broadcast can be heard here (in RealAudio).
‘Shame On You’
April 14th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
George Galloway writes to the Charity Commission. Once again the ‘charity’ commission which gives its imprimatur to organizations such as the JNF, Israel’s main agency of ethnic cleansing, has intervened against those in need.
To the Charity Commission,
I have been travelling for many weeks in North Africa and the Middle East, Europe, and North America. I have returned to a London address I seldom visit to find a blizzard of correspondence from you. Your correspondence, when read together, as I have just done, seems to represent a wildly disproportionate and inappropriate reaction to our recent delivery of aid to the suffering Palestinians in Gaza, and must raise the question: Why?
The peremptory letters from you, and by you I mean the Charity Commission, are full of bluster and threat, issuing absurd deadlines to people it does not seem to occur to you are not even receiving your letters, either because they are working abroad (Ms Razuki and Mr Al-Mukhtar), travelling abroad on high profile political business (myself), or you are writing to them at the wrong address.
Resistance is fertile
April 14th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
John Berger’s experience at the National Gallery highlights the zeitgeist of the age of GWOT.
The novelist and art critic recalls an Easter visit to the National Gallery and a strange and violent encounter with an attendant
I was in London on Good Friday, 2008. And I decided, early in the morning, to go to the National Gallery and look at the Crucifixion by Antonello da Messina. It’s the most solitary painting of the scene that I know. The least allegorical.
In Antonello’s work – and there are fewer than 40 paintings which are indisputably his – there’s a special Sicilian sense of thereness which is without measure, which refuses moderation or self-protection. You can hear the same thing in these words spoken by a fisherman from the coast near Palermo, and recorded by Danilo Dolci a few decades ago in Sicilian Lives (1981):
“There’s times I see the stars at night, especially when we’re out for eels, and I get thinking in my brain. ‘The world is it really real?’ Me, I can’t believe that. If I get calm, I can believe in Jesus. Badmouth Jesus Christ and I’ll kill you. But there’s times I won’t believe, not even in God. ‘If God really exists, why doesn’t He give me a break and a job?’”
Empire and Agency
April 14th, 2009 § 2 Comments
United States Middle East policy has been defined since World War II by the tension between two competing concerns: the strategic interests which require good relations with Arab-Muslim states, and domestic political imperatives which demand unquestioning allegiance to Israel. That the US interest in the region’s energy resources has remained consistent, as well as its support for Israel, leads some to conclude that somehow the two are complementary. They aren’t. US President Harry S. Truman recognized the state of Israel the day of its founding over the strenuous objections of his State Department in order to court the Jewish vote and, more significantly, Jewish money for his re-election campaign. Every president since — with the exception of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, who saw no cause to feign balance — has sought to address this tension with attempts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. All these efforts have so far foundered. A study of US policy in the region over the decades, then, is inevitably a study of the causes of these failures. While nowhere in his invaluable diplomatic history of eight presidencies, A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East, does Patrick E. Tyler use the phrase “the Israel lobby,” it nevertheless looms largest among the reasons why all these efforts have foundered. With the US Congress long since claimed by the lobby, the executive branch is where most of these battles have played out.
The Age of Might is over
April 14th, 2009 § 3 Comments
‘The adventure on the high seas is a blast from the past,’ writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft. ‘The US empire now faces the impotence of conventional force’
For the family of Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama, his rescue by special forces was the best possible Easter present. For Americans it was an exhilarating display of American power, and for Barack Obama it was a gratifying demonstration that he isn’t the wimpish pacifist the Republicans called him.
But to a detached observer, this gung-ho adventure in the Indian Ocean is the rule-proving exception. What we have recently seen far more often is what a New York Times headline on the piracy story said last Thursday: “US power has limit”. We’re dealing, that’s to say, with one of the most important discoveries of our time: the impotence of great might.
The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means
April 13th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
An important piece by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books on the ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody.
Download the text of the ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody by The International Committee of the Red Cross, along with the cover letter that accompanied it when it was transmitted to the US government in February 2007. This version, reset by The New York Review, exactly reproduces the original including typographical errors and some omitted words.
When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry…. These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.
If it hadn’t been for what we did—with respect to the…enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees…—then we would have been attacked again. Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the US….
—Former Vice President Dick Cheney, February 4, 2009[1]
1.
When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen. In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can “let the past be past”—whether or not we can “get beyond it and look forward.” Torture, for Dick Cheney and for President Bush and a significant portion of the American people, is more than a repugnant series of “procedures” applied to a few hundred prisoners in American custody during the last half-dozen or so years—procedures that are described with chilling and patient particularity in this authoritative report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.[2] Torture is more than the specific techniques—the forced nudity, sleep deprivation, long-term standing, and suffocation by water,” among others—that were applied to those fourteen “high-value detainees” and likely many more at the “black site” prisons secretly maintained by the CIA on three continents.
Egypt-Hezbollah relations strained
April 13th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The Egyptian government and the state media is frothing at the mouth over the revelation that Hizbullah had been trying to assist the besieged Gazans across the border which Egypt polices on Israel’s behalf. As usual, they were quick to resort to sectarian incitement invoking the inevitable ‘Persian’ plot. However, most Sunnis (here I would include myself) have nothing but admiration for Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the resistance, and nothing but contempt for the Egyptian collaborationist government.
For those who don’t know the Egyptian panelist Khalil al-Anani is a ‘visiting fellow’ at the Israel lobby’s key propaganda institution the Saban Center for Middle East Policy (run by Martin Indyk, and underwritten by Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban).
