LOS ANGELES, 11 May — Whoever said Americans have lost all sense of humor after Sept. 11 is not listening to radio jocks such as Don Imus whose show is televised on MSNBC. Yes, Americans can still tell and enjoy a joke.
Of course, some of them may be shocking, or may appear weird and sickening to outsiders or even to those Americans who have not lost their sense of decency and decorum, but to the average Americans the unsolicited advice given by Don Imus to President Bush during Crown Prince Abdullah’s recent visit to the United States was routine stuff.
And this is not all. Some of America’s most esteemed thought leaders — Don Imus, Sean Hannity, Alan Keyes, Rush Limbaugh — are pushing a media culture whose mission is to deliberately cloud the fundamentals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and legitimize, through heated but ultimately vacuous debates, Israel’s occupation of Arab land. What started off as a campaign to portray the Arab and Muslim world as a medieval society incapable of mastering modernity has now climaxed into a call for the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank.
Wrote John Derbyshire in the National Review: “The Palestinians are Arabs and the Arabs, whatever their medieval achievements (as best I can understand, they were mainly achievement of transmission of Arabic numerals, which by the way came from India) are politically hopeless. Being Arabs, they are incapable of constructing a rational polity, so their future is probably hopeless whatever happens.”
His solution to the conflict? Ethnic cleansing, of course. “I am starting to think that this might be the best option. I’m not the only one,” he says and cites Dick Armey, Republican leader in the US House of Representatives who earlier in the week casually prescribed Palestinian expulsion from the West Bank.
African-Americans, an important demographic factor in the opinion wars, have their own pro-Israel opinion maker in Alan Keyes.
An African-American Republican and a magnificent orator, Keyes and his silver tongue are firmly in Sharon’s service.
But America’s premier fact massager is Sean Hannity, a flag-waving conservative who, if he ever decides to leave behind his radio and TV career, will find gainful employment at one of Tel Aviv spin tanks for his ability to make Sharon-like noises. Last week, he dutifully talked up the 150-page Sharon-assembled manuscript that,Israel claims, proves Yasser Arafat’s link to terrorism. Bush officials have dismissed the document’s worth, but that has not stopped this lazy broadcaster from baying for Arafat’s expulsion.
Here is how sloppy Hannity really is. A few weeks ago he declared that Saudi Arabia was sponsoring terrorism through donations to Hamas. For several days, he unleashed tirades against the murderers’ fund only to find that the funds were distributed through reputable charities like the Red Cross. Hannity mocks the blood libel story published in a Saudi newspaper, but he still flogs the Saudi-Hamas “terror connection”.
Keyes and Hannity rewrite history daily, claiming Arabs never inhabited the land known today as Israel. In fact, Hannity scoffs at the term occupation, and finds it unbelievable that President Bush would even use it. Hannity believes that the word unbelievable, if spoken with enough outrage, is a capable substitute for reason: It is unbelievable that Bush ordered Sharon’s restraint. It is unbelievable that Arafat’s house arrest is over. It is unbelievable that Bush would receive Crown Prince Abdullah. It is unbelievable that Israel has not moved to permanently annex the West Bank.
With the elections looming over the horizon, a pro-Israeli resolution sailed through the Senate last week and shattered once and for all the myth of Washington’s evenhandedness. S. Amendment 3389 is truly fashionable. It declares that the United States and Israel are “engaged in a common struggle against terrorism,” and condemns homicidal Palestinian bombings.
Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat, was a rare voice against the resolution. Hollings uncorked a devastating critique of Ariel Sharon calling the Israeli prime minister “a rejectionist who provocatively egged on the Palestinians,” and that Sharon “must learn the lessons of the past. He is making more terrorists than he is getting rid of.” Hollings also compared Sharon with Saddam Hussein.
Not surprisingly Hollings’ statements triggered an immediate backlash from the Israel lobby. Hannity called Hollings’ gesture unbelievable. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Times, Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican and a member of the House Israel Caucus, described Hollings vote as unconscionable. Wilson wrote: “With the Israeli prime minister scheduled to meet with President Bush this week, Mr. Hollings should publicly apologize for the insults hurled at Ariel Sharon and the insensitivity he has shown toward Israel’s struggle against terrorism.” Wilson then bent over to spin Israel as a democracy. Wilson’s sickly sycophancy won him an invitation from Hannity to join in on a primitive witch-hunt against Hollings on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes show.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity, Martin Luther King once said. Dangerous and self-defeating, too as we learnt from the civil rights movement. The storm of hatred whipped up by America’s premier broadcasters and its leading politicians is destined to bring down the anti-Palestine campaign and its backers. The signs are all there. The same liberals who supported Bush’s war on Afghanistan are now rising up against the president. Conservative commentators, mortified that Bush has abandoned the so-called moral clarity of his doctrine, are struggling to fend off liberal critics. (It is surreal to see Springer and Hannity spar and then agree that Bush has lost his way.) The conservatives and the liberals will soon turn the guns on each other. This is the perfect opportunity for influential Arab officials to guide Bush into delivering a Palestine.
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(Nadeem Khan is a media analyst based in Los Angeles)
