COMMENTARY When 'news' is
harmful to your health By Ian
Williams
"Do not pander to the
unappeasable." The United Nations this week showed
that it has not learned this elementary lesson
from the Swift-boating of John Kerry, let alone
from the Swift-boating of Kofi Annan himself over
the alleged UN oil-for-food scandal.
Senator Kerry, of course, saw his Vietnam
War exploits as a Swift boat commander turned
against him during his failed campaign for the US
presidency.
As I went into the UN this
week, the Fox broadcast truck was there, and I
groaned as I suspected what had brought it on a slow
real-news day. I had read the
Jerusalem Post, the New York Sun, and the more
rabidly frothy edges of the blogosphere and knew
that, well, they were at it again.
On the
General Assembly-mandated day of solidarity for
the Palestinian people six weeks ago, Annan had
made his mandatory appearance, and an enterprising
photographer took a picture of the UN secretary
general in front of a map of mandatory Palestine
in 1948. Some time around the biblical 40 days and
40 nights later, the usual care-in-the-community
cases noticed the picture and raised a storm
because the map did not show Israel.
The
UN apologized, but was wrong to do so, both in
principle and tactics. Of course the map did not
show Israel. The country did not exist in 1948,
which is the year the map was drawn. What existed
was the UN trusteeship of Palestine, which did
exist.
Let's hope the Greeks or Italians
do not have an exhibition on Mediterranean
civilization with maps of Alexander's or Hadrian's
empire. Just imagine how many countries they would
have to apologize to, from Afghanistan to Britain,
that would not appear on the map.
US
Ambassador John Bolton lent the dwindling
diplomatic faith and credit of the US to the furor
and sent a letter to Annan complaining, "It was
entirely inappropriate for this map to be used. It
can be misconstrued to suggest that the United
Nations tacitly supports the abolition of Israel."
Excuse me; this is malicious distortion,
not misconstruction. The crowd that started baying
about this is not "misconstruing". They think the
UN is an anti-American and anti-Israeli plot, and
have never been shy of saying so. Indeed, Bolton's
own words would suggest that he is in this camp.
It is possible that the Likudniks of the
New York Sun and Jerusalem Post may want to deny
history with all that guff about eternal capitals,
but there is no reason whatsoever for the UN
Secretariat to pander either to their anti-UN
venom or their ahistorical hysteria. They are
looking for any excuse, no matter how feeble, to
whip up a storm against the organization and its
secretary general, whoever that should be.
Of course, there is an understandable
diffidence to combating their slanders, since one
of the best pieces of advice is still "Never argue
with an idiot, bystanders can't tell you apart."
But times may be a-changing and in any case,
apologizing to idiots only encourages their
stupidity - and in this case overlooks their
malice. The appropriate response is to sink the
Swift boats preemptively on the first signs of
launch.
In the real world, Annan has done
more to accommodate Israel in the organization
than any of his predecessors for decades. In fact,
there are a lot of Third World, Muslim and Arab
diplomats who will tell you that he has gone too
far in that respect.
It is also a matter
of record that with the exception of Israel, and
the US recently, and a few "independent" Pacific
coral reefs totally dependent on US funding, the
nations of the world think the Palestinians have
had a raw deal, and that Israel is illegally
occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and indeed the
Golan Heights. The secretary general of the UN
cannot and should not ignore the views of the
world simply because a band of right-wingers want
to blog him to death on the subject.
The
UN Secretariat should be handing out a press kit,
showing the map again, and listing the resolutions
by which the United Nations created Israel and
partitioned the mandate and those since, supported
by the US, that declared the West Bank and Gaza
occupied territories. Ironically, by questioning
the legitimacy of the organization, Annan's
persecutors are implicitly undermining the state
of Israel's own legal standing.
Of course.
it is bad enough when the Rupert Murdoch echo
chamber amplifies the fact-checker-free world of
the conservative fringe, but now there is another
player. In the wonderfully wacky world of the
blogosphere, most postings should come with a
government health warning cautioning that the
contents have almost certainly not been edited,
fact-checked, or lawyered.
However,
government health warnings are different in the
modern world: they are usually warnings
about the government rather than from it.
So it should not really be any surprise
that the US Department of Defense has contracted a
Detroit subsidiary of, and please have a wry grin,
the giant French public relations company
Publicis, to get a favorable view of the
department's work launched into the blogosphere.
The company normally publishes weblogs for such
clients as Ford and General Motors and is now
tasked with recruiting bloggers prepared to
present the war in Iraq through a rose-colored
screen. [1]
British
political-communications specialist Tim Pendry of
TPPR says of the Swift-boating process that "the
use of the Internet for these political purposes
is as logical as the adaptation of the pornography
industry to new technologies. Indeed, wealthy
foundations and individuals supported by
government technical advice, as well as
disinformation units, move with the times."
He cautions, "The next development is
so-called 'citizen journalism' or what my network
calls 'real news'. This should be about ordinary
people transmitting material direct into the Web
at crisis points (like showing the police beating
up a demonstrator live) but, again, you can expect
events now to be constructed at which 'citizen
journalists' will magically appear to deliver
coverage by feed to gullible broadcasters."
Here I must respectfully disagree with
Pendry, who is not exposed to Fox or MSNBC. Those
broadcasters are by no means gullible. They are
cynical and malicious. I can already see a horde
of "citizen journalists" financed by conservative
foundations, out there launching Swift boats.
Note [1] Intelligence
Online No 515, January 13.
Ian
Williams is author of Deserter: Bush's War
on Military Families, Veterans and His Past,
Nation Books, New York.
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2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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