America's
One-Eyed View Of War: Stars, Stripes, And The Star Of David
By Andrew Gumbel
15 August 2006
The
Independent
If these were normal times, the
American view of the conflict in Lebanon might look something like the
street scenes that have electrified the suburbs of Detroit for the past
four weeks.
In Dearborn, home to the
Ford Motor Company and also the highest concentration of Arab Americans
in the country, up to 1000 people have turned out day after day to express
their outrage at the Israeli military campaign and mourn the loss of
civilian life in Lebanon. At one protest in late July, 15,000 people
- almost half of the local Arab American population - showed up in a
sea of Lebanese flags, along with anti-Israeli and anti-Bush slogans.
A few miles to the north,
in the heavily Jewish suburb of Southfield, meanwhile, the Congregation
Shaarey Zedek synagogue has played host to passionate counter-protests
in which the US and Israeli national anthems are played back to back
and demonstrators have asserted that it is Israel's survival, not Lebanon's,
that is at stake here.
Such is the normal exercise
of free speech in an open society, one might think. But these are not
normal times. The Detroit protests have been tinged with paranoia and
justifiable fear on both sides. Several Jewish institutions in the area,
including two community centres and several synagogues, have hired private
security guards in response to an incident in Seattle at the end of
July, in which a mentally unstable 30-year-old Muslim walked into a
Jewish Federation building and opened fire, killing one person and injuring
five others.
On the Arab American side,
many have expressed reluctance to stand up and be counted among the
protesters for fear of being tinged by association with Hizbollah, which
is on the United States' list of terrorist organisations. (As a result,
the voices heard during the protests tend to be the more extreme ones.)
They don't like to discuss their political views in any public forum,
following the revelation a few months ago that the National Security
Agency was wiretapping phone calls and e-mail exchanges as part of the
Bush administration's war on terror.
They are even afraid to donate
money to help the civilian victims of the war in Lebanon because of
the intense scrutiny Islamic and Arab charities have been subjected
to since the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration has denounced 40
charities worldwide as financiers of terrorism, and arrested and deported
dozens of people associated with them. Consequently, while Jewish charities
such as the United Jewish Communities are busy raising $300m to help
families affected by the Katyusha rockets raining down on northern Israel,
donations to the Lebanese victims have come in at no more than a trickle.
Outside Detroit and a handful
of other cities with sizeable Arab American populations, it is hard
to detect that there are two sides to the conflict at all. The Dearborn
protests have received almost no attention nationally, and when they
have it has usually been to denounce the participants as extremists
and apologists for terrorism - either because they have voiced support
for Hizbollah or because they have carried banners in which the Star
of David at the centre of the Israeli flag has been replaced by a swastika.
The media, more generally,
has left little doubt in the minds of a majority of American news consumers
that the Israelis are the good guys, the aggrieved victims, while Hizbollah
is an incarnation of the same evil responsible for bringing down the
World Trade Centre, a heartless and faceless organisation whose destruction
is so important it can justify all the damage Israel is inflicting on
Lebanon and its civilians.
The point is not that this
viewpoint is necessarily wrong. The point - and this is what distinguishes
the US from every other Western country in its attitude to the conflict
- is that it is presented as a foregone conclusion. Not only is there
next to no debate, but debate itself is considered unnecessary and suspect.
The 24-hour cable news stations
are the worst offenders. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has had reporters
running around northern Israel chronicling every rocket attack and every
Israeli mobilisation, but has shown little or no interest in anything
happening on the other side of the border. It is a rarity on any of
the cable channels to see any Arab being tapped for expert opinion on
the conflict. A startling amount of airtime, meanwhile, is given to
the likes of Michael D Evans, an end-of-the-world Biblical "prophet"
with no credentials in the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.
He has shown up on MSNBC and Fox under the label "Middle East analyst".
Fox's default analyst, on this and many other issues, has been the right-wing
provocateur and best-selling author Ann Coulter, whose main credential
is to have opined, days after 9/11, that what America should do to the
Middle East is "invade their countries, kill their leaders and
convert them to Christianity".
Often, the coverage has been
hysterical and distasteful. In the days following the Israeli bombing
of Qana, several pro-Israeli bloggers started spreading a hoax story
that Hizbollah had engineered the event, or stage-managed it by placing
dead babies in the rubble for the purpose of misleading reporters. Oliver
North, the Reagan-era orchestrator of the Iran-Contra affair who is
now a right-wing television and radio host, and Michelle Malkin, a sharp-tongued
Bush administration cheerleader who runs her own weblog, appeared on
Fox News to give credence to the hoax - before the Israeli army came
forward to take responsibility and brought the matter to at least a
partial close.
As the conflict has gone
on, the media interpretation of it has only hardened. Essentially, the
line touted by cable news hosts and their correspondents - closely adhering
to the line adopted by the Bush administration and its neoconservative
supporters - is that Hizbollah is part of a giant anti-Israeli and anti-American
terror network that also includes Hamas, al-Qa'ida, the governments
of Syria and Iran, and the insurgents in Iraq. Little effort is made
to distinguish between these groups, or explain what their goals might
be. The conflict is presented as a straight fight between good and evil,
in which US interests and Israeli interests intersect almost completely.
Anyone who suggests otherwise is likely to be pounced on and ripped
to shreds.
When John Dingell, a Democratic
congressman from Michigan with a large Arab American population in his
constituency, gave an interview suggesting it was wrong for the US to
take sides instead of pushing for an end to violence, he was quickly
- and loudly - accused of being a Hizbollah apologist. Newt Gingrich,
the Republican former House speaker, accused him of failing to draw
any moral distinction between Hizbollah and Israel. Rush Limbaugh, the
popular conservative talk-show host, piled into him, as did the conservative
newspaper The Washington Times. The Times was later forced to admit
it had quoted Dingell out of context and reprinted his full words, including:
"I condemn Hizbollah, as does everyone else, for the violence."
The hysteria has extended
into the realm of domestic politics, especially since this is a congressional
election year. Republican have sought to depict last week's primary
defeat of the Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, one of
the loudest cheerleaders for the Iraq war, as some sort of wacko extremist
anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli stand that risks undermining national security.
Vice-President Dick Cheney said Lieberman's defeat would encourage "al-Qa'ida
types" to think they can break the will of Americans. The fact
that the man who beat Lieberman, Ned Lamont, is an old-fashioned East
Coast Wasp who was a registered Republican for much of his life is something
Mr Cheney chose to overlook.
Part of the Republican strategy
this year is to attack any media that either attacks them or has the
temerity to report facts that contradict the official party line. Thus,
when Reuters was forced to withdraw a photograph of Beirut under bombardment
because one of its stringers had doctored the image to increase the
black smoke, it was a chance to rip into the news agency over its efforts
to be even-handed. In a typical riposte, Michelle Malkin denounced Reuters
as "a news service that seems to have made its mark rubber-stamping
pro-Hizbollah propaganda".
She was not the only one
to take that view. Mainstream, even liberal, publications have echoed
her line. Tim Rutten, the Los Angeles Times liberal media critic, denounced
the "obscenely anti-Israeli tenor of most of the European and world
press" in his most recent column.
It is not just the US media
which tilts in a pro-Israeli direction. Congress, too, is remarkably
unified in its support for the Israeli government, and politicians more
generally understand that to criticise Israel is to risk jeopardising
their future careers. When Antonio Villaraigosa, the up-and-coming Democratic
Mayor of Los Angeles, was first invited to comment on the Middle East
crisis, he sounded a note so pro-Israeli that he was forced to apologise
to local Muslim and Arab community leaders. There is far less public
debate of Israeli policy in the US, in fact, than there is in Israel
itself.
This is less a reflection
of American Jewish opinion - which is more diverse than is suggested
in the media - than it is a commentary on the power of pro-Israeli lobby
groups like Aipac, the American-Israeli Political Action Committee,
which bankrolls pro-Israeli congressional candidates. That, in turn,
is frustrating to liberal Jews like Michael Lerner, a San Francisco
rabbi who heads an anti-war community called Tikkun. Rabbi Lerner has
tried to argue for years that it is in Israel's best interests to reach
a peaceful settlement, and that demonising Arabs as terrorists is counter-productive
and against Judaism.
Lerner is probably right
to assert that he speaks for a large number of American Jews, only half
of whom are affiliated with pro-Israeli lobbying organisations. Certainly,
dinner party conversation in heavily Jewish cities like New York suggest
misgivings about Israel's strategic aims, even if there is some consensus
that Hizbollah cannot be allowed to strike with impunity.
Few, if any, of those misgivings
have entered the US media. "There is no major figure in American
political life who has been willing to raise the issue of the legitimate
needs of the Palestinian people, or even talk about them as human beings,"
Lerner said. "The organised Jewish community has transformed the
image of Judaism into a cheering squad for the Israeli government, whatever
its policies are. That is just idolatry, and goes against all the warnings
in the Bible about giving too much power to the king or the state."
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited