Osama Bin Laden once told me that Americans did not understand the Middle East. Last week, in a little shuttle bus shouldering its way through curtains of rain across the Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the Des Moines Register and realized that he might be right. “BIG HOG LOTS CALLED GREATER THREAT THAN BIN LADEN,” announced the headline. Iowa’s 15 million massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure that the state waterways are polluted. “Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and US democracy than Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F Kennedy Junior, president of... a New York environment group... ‘We’ve watched communities and American values shattered by these bullies,’ Kennedy said...” I took out my pocket calculator and did a little maths. Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000 miles from Afghanistan. Another planet, more like.
I’ve been traveling to the United States for years, lecturing at Princeton or Harvard or Brown University, Rhode Island, or San Francisco, or Madison, Wisconsin. God knows why. I refuse all payment and take just a business-class round trip from Beirut because I can’t take 14 hours of screaming babies in each direction. American college students are tough as nails and bored as cabbages, and in some cities — Washington is top of the list — I might as well talk in Amharic. If you don’t use phrases like “peace process”, “back on track” or “Israel under siege”, there’s a kind of computerized blackout on the faces of the audience. Total Disk Failure. Why should my latest bout of Americana have been any different?
Sure, there were the usual oddballs. There was the old black guy whose first “question” on the Middle East in a Chicago University lecture theater was a long and proud announcement that he hadn’t paid taxes to the IRS since 1948 — a claim so wonderful that I forbore the usual threat to close down on him. There were the World Trade Center conspiracists who insisted that the US government had planted explosives in the twin towers. And a Native American Indian in Los Angeles who ranted on about a Jewish plot to deprive his people of their land. A bespectacled man with long white hair in a ponytail shut him up before declaring that the Israeli-Palestinian war was identical to the American-Mexican war that deprived his own people of... well, of Los Angeles. I began to calculate the distance between LA and Jenin. A galaxy perhaps.
And there were the little tell-tale stories that showed just how biased and gutless the American press has become in the face of America’s Israeli lobby groups. “I wrote a report for a major paper about the Palestinian exodus of 1948,” a Jewish woman told me as we drove through the smog of downtown LA. “And of course, I mentioned the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang and other Jewish groups — the massacre that prompted 750,000 Arabs to flee their homes.
Then I look for my story in the paper and what do I find? The word ‘alleged’ has been inserted before the word ‘massacre’. I called the paper’s ombudsman and told him the massacre at Deir Yassin was a historical fact. Can you guess his reply? He said that the editor had written the word ‘alleged’ before ‘massacre’ because that way he thought he’d avoid lots of critical letters.”
By chance, this was the theme of my talks and lectures: The cowardly, idle, spineless way in which American journalists are lobotomizing their stories from the Middle East, how the “occupied territories” have become “disputed territories” in their reports, how Jewish “settlements” have been transformed into Jewish “neighborhoods”, how Arab militants are “terrorists” but Israeli militants only “fanatics” or “extremists”, how Ariel Sharon — the man held “personally responsible” by Israel’s own commissioner’s inquiry for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians — could be described in a report in The New York Times as having the instincts of “a warrior”. How the execution of surviving Palestinian fighters was so often called “mopping up”. How civilians killed by Israeli soldiers were always “caught in the crossfire”. I demanded to know of my audiences — and I expected the usual American indignation when I did — how US citizens could accept the infantile “dead or alive”, “with us or against us”, axis-of-evil policies of their president.
And for the first time in more than a decade of lecturing in the United States, I was shocked. Not by the passivity of Americans — the all-accepting, patriotic notion that the president knows best — nor by the dangerous self-absorption of the United States since Sept. 11 and the constant, all-consuming fear of criticizing Israel. What shocked me was the extraordinary new American refusal to go along with the official line, the growing, angry awareness among Americans that they were being lied to and deceived. At some of my talks, 60 percent of the audiences were over 40. In some cases, perhaps 80 percent were Americans with no ethnic or religious roots in the Middle East — “American Americans”, as I cruelly referred to them on one occasion, “white Americans”, as a Palestinian student called them more truculently. For the first time, it wasn’t my lectures they objected to, but the lectures they received from their president and the lectures they read in their press about Israel’s “war on terror” and the need always, uncritically, to support everything that America’s little Middle Eastern ally says and does.
There was, for example, the crinkly-faced, ex-naval officer who approached me after a talk at a United Methodist church in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. “Sir, I was an officer on the aircraft carrier John F Kennedy during the 1973 Middle East war,” he began. (I checked him out later and he was, as my host remarked, “for real”.) “We were stationed off Gibraltar and our job was to refuel the fighter jets we were sending to Israel after their air force was shot to bits by the Arabs. Our planes would land with their USAF and Marine markings partly stripped off and the Star of David already painted on the side. Does anyone know why we gave all those planes to the Israelis just like that? When I see on television our planes and our tanks used to attack Palestinians, I can understand why people hate Americans.”
In the United States, I’m used to lecturing in half-empty lecture halls. Three years ago, I managed to fill a Washington auditorium seating 600 with just 32 Americans. But in Chicago and Iowa and Los Angeles this month, they came in their hundreds — almost 900 at one venue at the University of Southern California — and they sat in the aisles and corridors and outside the doors. It wasn’t because Lord Fisk was in town. Maybe the title of my talk — “September 11: Ask who did it, but for heaven’s sake don’t ask why” — was provocative. But for the most part they came, as the question-and-answer sessions quickly revealed, because they were tired of being suckered by the television news networks and the right-wing punditocracy.
Never before have I been asked by Americans: “How can we make our press report the Middle East fairly?” or — much more disturbingly — “How can we make our government reflect our views?” The questions are a trap, of course. Brits have been shoving advice at the United States ever since we lost the War of Independence, and I wasn’t going to join their number. But the fact that these questions could be asked — usually by middle-aged Americans with no family origins in the Middle East — suggested a profound change in a hitherto docile population.
Toward the end of each talk, I apologized for the remarks I was about to make. I told audiences that the world did not change on Sept. 11, that the Lebanese and Palestinians had lost 17,500 dead during Israel’s 1982 invasion — more than five times the death toll of the international crimes against humanity of Sept. 11 — but the world did not change 20 years ago. There were no candles lit then, no memorial services. And each time I said this, there was a nodding of heads — gray-haired and balding as well as young — across the room. The smallest irreverent joke about President Bush was often met with hoots of laughter. I asked one of my hosts why this happened, why the audience accepted this from a Briton. “Because we don’t think Bush won the election,” she replied.
Of course, it’s easy to be fooled. The first local radio shows illustrated all too well how the Middle East discourse is handled in America. When Gayane Torosyan opened WSUI/KSUI for questions in Iowa City, a caller named “Michael” — a leader of the local Jewish community, I later learnt, though he did not say this on air — insisted that after the Camp David talks in 2000, Yasser Arafat had turned to “terrorism” despite being offered a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem and 96 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. Slowly and deliberately, I had to deconstruct this nonsense. Jerusalem was to have remained the “eternal and unified capital of Israel”, according to Camp David. Arafat would only have got what Madeleine Albright called “a sort of sovereignty” over the Haram Al-Sharif mosque area and some Arab streets, while the Palestinian Parliament would have been below the city’s eastern walls at Abu Dis. With the vastly extended and illegal Jerusalem municipality boundaries deep into the West Bank, Jewish settlements like Maale Adumim were not up for negotiation; nor were several other settlements. Nor was the 10-mile Israeli military buffer zone around the West Bank, nor the settlers’ roads, which would razor through the Palestinian “state”. Arafat was offered about 46 percent of the 22 percent of Palestine that was left. I could imagine the audience of WSUI/KSUI falling slowly from their seats in boredom.
Yet back at my folksy, wooden-walled hotel, the proprietor and his wife — P Force volunteers in the Kennedy era — had listened to every word. “We know what is going on,” he said. “I was a naval officer in the Gulf back in the Sixties and we only had few ships there then. In those days, the Shah of Iran was our policeman. Now we’ve got all those ships in there and our soldiers in the Arab countries and we seem to dominate the place.” Osama Bin Laden, I said to myself, couldn’t put it better.
How odd, I reflected, that American newspapers can scarcely say even this. The Daily Iowan — there are no fewer than four dailies in Iowa City, press freedom being represented by the number of newspapers rather than their depth of coverage — had none of my hotel landlord’s forthrightness. “The situation in the Middle East is one that many Americans do not adequately understand,” it miserably lamented, “nor can they be reasonably articulate about it.” This rubbish — that Americans were too dumb to comprehend the Middle East bloodbath and should therefore keep their mouths shut — was a pervasive theme in editorials. Even more instructive were the reports of my own lectures.
(The Independent)
