“What should we do about Saudi Arabia?” asks Sean Hannity, the right-wing extremist, on his syndicated radio show. He is frothing at the mouth about the Riyadh telethon to raise funds for Palestinian “martyrs or murderers as I like to call them,” he quips.
The last time I had dialed up his show, I found him soliloquizing about the benefits of alternative energy so “we can cut our dependence on Arab oil and kiss all of them, except our only ally in the Mideast, Israel, goodbye.” Sean, a hardcore Republican, tilts at Israel.
On the left, there is Charles Krauthammer, who decorates his syndicated columns with visceral headlines: “Saudi Peace Sham,” “Arafat’s Harvest of Hate,” “Banish Arafat Now.” And listen to this: “Syria might then launch its missiles equipped with chemical weapons into Israeli cities. Israel was established so that never again would the gassing of Jews be permitted.” Cheapening the memory of the holocaust, indeed.
Some commentators blithely simplify or ridicule, or both, the Palestinian plight. Discussing Palestinian attacks on his CNBC show, Hardball, Chris Matthews asked, “How does Israel deal with an enemy who only asks that you let him die?”
Then there are those who will admit that the conflict is a complex onion to peel, before plunging in with both feet to cloud the issue. A Richard Cohen column in the Washington Post, in response to Prince Bandar’s op-ed piece on Israel’s inflammatory tactics, begins, “It’s not that simple, Bandar.” Then he spirals off into the neoclassic Israeli hyperbole that suicide bombing is a “weapon” far deadlier than anything in Israel’s glittering military arsenal: “As for the Palestinians, Bandar refers to them as if they were an order of monks. They are all ‘innocent’ or ‘unarmed.’ You can envisage them, heads bowed, filing into prayer — until, that is, you remember that they are armed to the teeth and have exploited one of the most formidable weapons of our time, the suicide bomber.”
Thomas Friedman, the first to report on the Abdullah peace proposal, likes to straddle all fences. Initially, he agreed with the proposal, but after the Arab states adopted it unanimously, Friedman returned to murky the waters. First, in a column titled “Suicidal Lies:” “Let’s be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilizations because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian strategy defeated.”
Then in a piece called, “The Hard Truth:” “Palestinians who use suicide bombers to blow up Israelis at a Passover meal and then declare “Just end the occupation and everything will be fine” are not believable. No Israeli in his right mind would trust Yasser Arafat, who has used suicide bombers when it suited his purposes, not to do the same thing if he got the West Bank back and some of his people started demanding Tel Aviv.”
People like Hannity, Cohen, and Friedman are the reason that Americans — despite having bankrolled decades of Israeli aggression with their tax dollars — remain woefully uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To the ever-growing number of Mideast commentators and self-appointed experts, in an industry driven by ratings and, of course, money, ensuring that the audience remains confused is job number one, heck it’s job security. The cliché “in search of Mideast peace” captions that permeate American media are a disgraceful proof of that. Far from considering America’s support for Israel for the Sept. 11 attacks, or fearing that further support will bring more attacks, Americans are now spasmodically hardened to the Palestinians.
It took a masterful coordinated campaign by both the conservatives and the liberals to make this happen. When the president and the Republicans were seeking to deflect the attention off the intelligence community for the failure to stop 9/11, the liberals, particularly those in the media, sprang to the rescue, giving the “War on Terror” two thumbs up and even took to elevating the absurd “with us or against us” mantra to the mantle of a doctrine. As the Al-Qaeda-Taleban death toll mounted, so did Bush’s ratings.
There was a price, of course, for the PR: Go easy on Sharon. Let him do what he wants. Contrary to popular belief, Bush is not dumb. He knows that his father got slung out for trying to push the Israelis too hard. Bush also realized that the same persuasive and seductive liberal media tactics that propelled his barely elected and mandateless presidency to unprecedented popularity could turn on him in no time at all.
With the fall of the Taleban, Bush’s deference to Muslim sensitivities went out the door. The tone in Washington was again Israeli. His officials began to speak critically of the Palestinian leadership, stopped talking about a “cycle of violence,” and began lecturing on Israel’s “right of self-defense against terror”. As Sharon set out to destroy Oslo, Bush did not protest, but instead insisted that Arafat had to “crack down on terrorist groups”.
In December, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg, and New York State Gov. George Pataki went to Jerusalem to light Hanukah candles and gushed, “the special bonds that connect our two peoples are stronger than ever before.”
In the blink of an eye, Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians had become America’s war on terror.
“We are all Israelis,” could be heard again on Capitol Hill and in the corridors of the Fourth Estate. The conservative media, grateful for the liberals’ support during the war on terror, are returning the favor by supporting Israel against the Palestinians.
Rush Limbaugh, on his radio show today, finds Israel “fighting on the front lines” of the “same battle” as America. He told a caller, supporting Israel’s murderous rampage, that that is the right thing to do, because we “share the same Judeo-Christian principles.”
So here we are, halfway into another clammy month in the parallel universe of American Mideast policy, each day more bizarre than the previous. Israel is America; Palestinian attacks are “simple terror;” Sharon is a “man of peace;” Joe Lieberman escorting the unspeakable Benjamin Netanyahu to a microphone to a standing ovation in the American Congress.
Meanwhile, in the real world, beyond the range of CNN’s cameras, another Sabra and Shatila unfolds in Jenin, but in hopeless irony, shaky footage of an attack on the Israelis draws the fieriest commentary.
— Nadeem Khan is a media analyst based in the US.
