Today’s lead editorial in the Globe and Mail is yet another in a series of propaganda offerings from Canada’s “national newspaper”. The editorial starts with an attack on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for his claim that Israeli forces “apparently deliberately” targeted the UN post in south Lebanon, killing four peacekeepers including one Canadian. The Globe has leapt to the conclusion, even before there has been an investigation, that “there is nothing to suggest that Israel attacked the UN men on purpose.” Maybe---but couldn’t the editorial writers wait for some hard evidence? It’s no secret that there has been bad blood between Israeli forces and the UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon for many years. And it’s passing strange that the attack occurred after the UN called in warnings to the Israelis alerting them to the danger of hitting their men.
The central point of the editorial comes in its depiction of Hezbollah as an organization whose leaders “almost revel” in the killing of innocent men, women and children, while Israel is a country that never “deliberately targets civilians.” Is this a thoughtful editorial in a respected Canadian newspaper, or a screed put out by one side in a bitter war?
There was a time when I regarded being in a place where the Globe and Mail could be delivered daily as an essential aspect of the good life. Today, in a period of war and political tension, Canadians are very badly served by their daily newspapers. The National Post, and its siblings in the Southam chain, seem to be published with Dick Cheney as the target audience. But the decline of the Globe and Mail really troubles me. So much of the paper is taken up with the offerings of those who write first and think later (maybe)---Margaret Wente, Christie Blatchford, and Marcus Gee---that you have to feel for all the trees being felled to get out their stuff. The paper has moved so far to the right that I now regard Jeffrey Simpson, who is a good, thoughtful conservative journalist, as a radical, whose column I relish daily.
The trouble is that Canadians who rely on the Globe and Mail and the other daily newspapers in English Canada for information and intelligent commentary have to sift through mountains of crap to glean the odd useful fact or insight. A few decades ago, Herbert Marcuse called this kind of thing the “repressive tolerance” of the press in the democratic world. Not a bad phrase for these terrible times.
During this time of war, and war propaganda, it’s useful to consider the role that Canada, blessed by not being in the front line, can play in the world. Before the United States was drawn into the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson gave an interview to a reporter from the New York World in which he outlined with prescience what it would mean to be draw into war: “It would mean that we should lose our heads with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong. It would mean that a majority of the people in this hemisphere would go war-mad, and quit thinking and devote their energies to destruction….Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fibre of our national life…”
Wilson’s and America’s tragedy was to be sucked into that war and the subsequent consequences were exactly as the president had warned that they would be.
Canada has a great choice to make today. We can allow ourselves to be pulled into bloody conflicts half a world away, either through direct participation in wars, or by giving up our capacity for critical thought about what is going on. The first is worse than the second, but the second is debilitating as well, and there are serious signs that we are far along this path. A country that is “neutral in fact as well as in name…impartial in thought as well as in action” again words from Woodrow Wilson on how America should relate to the war in Europe, can play a crucial role in these perilous times. Canada can strive to be a place where men and women can think about the questions that roil the world and can offer a space where those from war-torn countries can come and consider alternatives. Canada can offer its humanitarian aid and assistance to war torn lands, and Canada can send its forces to participate in genuine peace-keeping missions.
Let us not allow ourselves to be drawn into uncritical support for one side or another in the terrible ethnic and religious conflicts that are the curse of our time. A decade or maybe a century from now, after much more blood has been shed, it is likely that in the Middle East, a sovereign Israel will stand beside a sovereign Palestinian State. Neither side is capable of destroying the other. Seeing the broad outlines of the solution is easy enough. Getting there will require immense ingenuity and courage from people in many countries. At least, let us range Canadians on the side of those in the world who are trying to contribute to that positive outcome, however long it takes to achieve it.
While we are not getting much from the English language press in Canada on the Middle East crisis, the CBC offers some reporting that is useful, when the network is not hiding from its own shadow because it fears that the Harper government will privatize it if they win a majority in the next election. (With a majority Conservative government, the CBC will be privatized no matter how timorous they are.) Radio-Canada is better. The BBC newscasts on CBC TV have been excellent on the Middle East crisis---much better than their gutless reporting on Iraq. France 2, whose newscasts can be seen on TV 5, at 6.30 p.m. offers superb coverage of the Middle East.
The central point of the editorial comes in its depiction of Hezbollah as an organization whose leaders “almost revel” in the killing of innocent men, women and children, while Israel is a country that never “deliberately targets civilians.” Is this a thoughtful editorial in a respected Canadian newspaper, or a screed put out by one side in a bitter war?
There was a time when I regarded being in a place where the Globe and Mail could be delivered daily as an essential aspect of the good life. Today, in a period of war and political tension, Canadians are very badly served by their daily newspapers. The National Post, and its siblings in the Southam chain, seem to be published with Dick Cheney as the target audience. But the decline of the Globe and Mail really troubles me. So much of the paper is taken up with the offerings of those who write first and think later (maybe)---Margaret Wente, Christie Blatchford, and Marcus Gee---that you have to feel for all the trees being felled to get out their stuff. The paper has moved so far to the right that I now regard Jeffrey Simpson, who is a good, thoughtful conservative journalist, as a radical, whose column I relish daily.
The trouble is that Canadians who rely on the Globe and Mail and the other daily newspapers in English Canada for information and intelligent commentary have to sift through mountains of crap to glean the odd useful fact or insight. A few decades ago, Herbert Marcuse called this kind of thing the “repressive tolerance” of the press in the democratic world. Not a bad phrase for these terrible times.
During this time of war, and war propaganda, it’s useful to consider the role that Canada, blessed by not being in the front line, can play in the world. Before the United States was drawn into the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson gave an interview to a reporter from the New York World in which he outlined with prescience what it would mean to be draw into war: “It would mean that we should lose our heads with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong. It would mean that a majority of the people in this hemisphere would go war-mad, and quit thinking and devote their energies to destruction….Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fibre of our national life…”
Wilson’s and America’s tragedy was to be sucked into that war and the subsequent consequences were exactly as the president had warned that they would be.
Canada has a great choice to make today. We can allow ourselves to be pulled into bloody conflicts half a world away, either through direct participation in wars, or by giving up our capacity for critical thought about what is going on. The first is worse than the second, but the second is debilitating as well, and there are serious signs that we are far along this path. A country that is “neutral in fact as well as in name…impartial in thought as well as in action” again words from Woodrow Wilson on how America should relate to the war in Europe, can play a crucial role in these perilous times. Canada can strive to be a place where men and women can think about the questions that roil the world and can offer a space where those from war-torn countries can come and consider alternatives. Canada can offer its humanitarian aid and assistance to war torn lands, and Canada can send its forces to participate in genuine peace-keeping missions.
Let us not allow ourselves to be drawn into uncritical support for one side or another in the terrible ethnic and religious conflicts that are the curse of our time. A decade or maybe a century from now, after much more blood has been shed, it is likely that in the Middle East, a sovereign Israel will stand beside a sovereign Palestinian State. Neither side is capable of destroying the other. Seeing the broad outlines of the solution is easy enough. Getting there will require immense ingenuity and courage from people in many countries. At least, let us range Canadians on the side of those in the world who are trying to contribute to that positive outcome, however long it takes to achieve it.
While we are not getting much from the English language press in Canada on the Middle East crisis, the CBC offers some reporting that is useful, when the network is not hiding from its own shadow because it fears that the Harper government will privatize it if they win a majority in the next election. (With a majority Conservative government, the CBC will be privatized no matter how timorous they are.) Radio-Canada is better. The BBC newscasts on CBC TV have been excellent on the Middle East crisis---much better than their gutless reporting on Iraq. France 2, whose newscasts can be seen on TV 5, at 6.30 p.m. offers superb coverage of the Middle East.
Tags: Harper Globe and Mail Israel Lebanon Middle East
9 comments:
Good analysis, James (and welcome to ProgBlog, by the way). I addressed the "Hezbollah kills without compunction, Israel with regret" meme at my place today.
Simpson has usually been surprisingly reasonable on foreign policy, and awful on domestic politics. But his reference to the "Armenian 'genocide'" yesterday, putting the word in quotation marks, certainly raised my eyebrows a notch. Holocaust-denial--in 2006? Say it isn't so.
I don't think we're to the point yet where we're giving "uncritical support" to one side over the other. That being said, given that one side is a democracy surrounded by enemies and the other is a terrorist organization, I'd say the media (the Globe and Mail included) have been REMARKABLY balanced.
Also, you want the Globe to wait for "hard evidence" before suggesting that the Israelis don't deliberately target civilians, but you make no mention of wanting Koffi Annan to wait for "hard evidence" before stating that they did. I realize calls were made to the Israelis to ask them to stop bombing near the outpost, but I wonder if anyone called Hezbollah to ask that they stop attacking the Israelis from positions next to the outpost? I rather doubt it, given that it is pretty useless to politely ask a terrorist organization to stop acting like a terrorist organization.
I know the Israelis are supposed to just grin and bear it when their troops are being attacked by terrorists who are deliberately attacking from areas next to civilians and peacekeepers. Hezbollah deliberately trys to make themselves immune from counter-attack and to force the Israelis to withdraw and give the position up to terrorists, or counter-attack and risk killing civilians. However at a certain point one decides to fight the terrorists and take the risk of killing innocent civilians in the process. Sometimes you have to shoot down the passenger jet that's been highjacked. Sometimes you have to call in artilery on a friendly position that's been over-run. In a war against a terrorist enemy, sometimes one needs to fire very closely to the innocent civilians the terrorists are hiding behind. It's a tactical necessity, and it means that sometimes innocent people die.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I don't know how much longer I can read the posts I find at Progressive Bloggers. I'm becoming infuriated at people who think that it's passing strange that anyone would suggest that perhaps democratic Israel might be morally superior to the terrorist group on their border that is bent on destroying them utterly and completely, and feel that perhaps we're being too hard on Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is a terrorist group, Israel is a democracy. Period. Talking about Hezbollah as though they are a terrorist group, and talking about Israel as though they are a democratic state seems like logic to me, not bias. If some people truly believe that Hezbollah is not a terrorist group (or Israel not a democracy) they can argue those points. But I don't need convincing on either count, so I'll side with the democratic state over the terrorists until I have good reason to do otherwise. And I don't see that happening any time soon.
Let me just end with a quote from an email Major Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener (the Canadian soldier killed at the UN outpost) wrote to his regimental comrades recently about the situation at the outpost:
"The closest artillery has landed within two metres of our position and the closest 1,000-pound aerial bomb has landed 100 metres from our patrol base. This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity.”
It's rather too bad that the Lebanese people are paying collectively for Hezbollah's having "kidnapped" two Israeli soldiers. This followed the "kidnapping" of one Israeli soldier by Hamas, after Israel had "captured" (or is it "detained") two Palestinians in Gaza a couple of days before...
In any case, these "kidnappings," actions against military targets, are called "terrorist," while the wholesale destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and the killing of hundreds of civilians is called "self-defence." Here is what a fairly conservative blogger has to say about that:
The Arab "terrorists" attack military units, destroy at least one tank, and are therefore terrorists. Israel retaliates by launching aerial, naval, and artillery bombardments of civilian areas and they are engaging in self-defense. If we are unable to recognize the hypocrisy of this construct then we ourselves are so enveloped by propaganda and emotion that, like the Israelis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, we can't think rationally. We can only think in terms of tribalism and revenge.
Amen to that. As for the UN observer issue, this report causes concern, and goes to the issue of Israel's culpability in the affair:
Briefing the Council behind closed doors, assistant chief of U.N. peacekeeping operations Jane Hull Lute suggested the attack on the observer outpost may have been deliberate.
She said 21 strikes had occurred in the immediate vicinity of the U.N. position before it collapsed, killing the four military observers. She said that unlike in other areas, there had been no firing by Hezbollah militia units around the U.N. base.
The last sentence goes to the heart of the matter.
I wonder, if there had been no Hezbollah attacks coming from the area around the UN outpost then why would Major Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener (the Canadian soldier killed at the UN outpost) write about the IDF bombardments in an email that, "This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity"?
"Tactical necessity" certainly seems to mean that the Israelis HAD to bomb close to the outpost becuase there were Hezbollah fighters all around it who were engaging them. These kind of discreprencies are why we need an investigation first, and conclusions second.
Is there not a significant time period between the email and the eventual destruction of the post? In afct, about a week or so?
WE may not giving uncritical support support to one side of this situation, but Mr. Harper certainly is. And as the voice of our nation that implies that WE are supporting Israel.
An idea we need to get past is that because a nation subscribes to a democratic process of government it is in fact a 'democracy'. The US has proved this a complete fallacy through two botched federal election and Mr. Harper is following suit in following his own priorities and by engaging in attempted media control.
Israel should be judged on the character of their actions, not on whether or not they are a 'democracy'. Such an evaluation is the true measure of a democratic system. Anything esle is a white wash of words.
ISRAEL’S SUPERIORITY ISN’T MORAL
Lord Kitchener writes ..."given that one side is a democracy surrounded by enemies and the other is a terrorist organization, I'd say the media (the Globe and Mail included) have been REMARKABLY balanced." & “I'm becoming infuriated at people who think that it's passing strange that anyone would suggest that perhaps democratic Israel might be morally superior to the terrorist group on their border that is bent on destroying them utterly and completely, and feel that perhaps we're being too hard on Hezbollah."
Both of these statements are very much in keeping with what the punditocracy in Canada tries very hard to pass off as received opinion and the majority view. The following analysis will attempt to show that the facts argue that these views are neither balanced nor the majority view. And why instead these statements and their like mark LK and the pundits who share his sensibility as clearly as our PM's "measured response" marked him.
The claim of Israel's moral superiority to her neighbours is as common as America’s claim to being freedom’s champion and bears about as much relation to the "facts on the ground". That LK views this superiority as uncontestable fact goes a long way to explaining why he finds the G&M balanced. The irony for those of us who are interested in a non-partisan analysis of the Middle East and Israel’s difficult position there is of course that it is the very reasons that damn Israel morally that are the principal reasons for so many conflicts in the M.E. today and why she feels herself perpetually embattled.
Simply put Israel is an occupying force and until it ceases to be an occupying force it has no superior moral standing no matter how superior to its neighbours she may be in certain social justice areas. It is also not immaterial to note that over the last three decades Israel has militarized its economy to such an extent that she now qualifies in a very real sense as a modern day Sparta. During that time she has made a litany of very profound pro-corporate militarism and business decisions that have seriously eroded social justice within the country. The Israel of today bares less than a passing resemblance to the nation state that she was in the first three decades of her existence.
And as to balance on this issue it surely cannot be immaterial to anyone with an understanding of the history of the region that it was Israel that invaded Lebanon in 1982 and occupied it for 18 years not vice versa. Imagine if you can that the Americans had invaded Ontario because, oh I don’t know there was an Al Qaeda cell here that was responsible for 9/11 and was planning other attacks, and the American response was to smash Toronto and then occupy Southern Ontario for 18 years in order to create a “buffer for the purpose of defense”. Add to this that this military smashing of precious infrastructure was difficult for us to replace because well with the war and all we just didn’t seem to get as much tourism as we used to for one thing. And for another a whole lot of international capital that we used to be able to access no longer seems to find us such a safe haven for investment anymore. And then of course we would have to cope with the fact that a whole lot of our best and brightest and richest would decide that discretion is in fact the better part of valour and that “Vancouver isn’t really as rainy as they say it is you know.”
How would our citizenry react? Would perhaps some of us become radicalized to the point of committing irrational and likely, given the balance of forces, counterproductive acts? Would the grinding poverty that resulted from the massive destabilization of our society and economy not create a substantial minority of young and radicalized martial men? And what if you add to this equation that the Americans had also decided to take control of the vast majority of our water resources because well they very much needed them and this did irreparable harm to our economic fortunes and our ecosphere.
“Prior to the Six Day War, Israeli land encompassed only three percent of the Jordan River Basin, though in 1964, the enterprising state had already constructed an elaborate conveyance network of canals, pumping stations, reservoirs and pipelines, integrating them into a national water system which diverted 75 percent of the Jordan's flow for Israel's use. After the 1967 War, Israel claimed full control of the Jordan's headwaters. While Israel shares some of the flow with Jordan and Syria, the Palestinians are forbidden any water from the river, forcing them to rely on groundwater pumped from aquifers and springs or delivered, often sporadically, by truck.”-Richard Harth ‘Squeezing the last drops from Palestine’
How do you think our young males would react to our much reduced circumstance? How would the thinking be changed within our military? How would it change our political culture and the kind of people that could get elected? How would it tilt the platforms of every party including the NDP? (the Green’s would disappear overnight. Long term rationalism being the very first casualty of every war even ahead of truth.)
Is this difficult to see? Is it unbalanced to bring up that Lebanon has absolutely no, that is right none, zero, nada, zilch, possibility of being an existential threat to Israel but that the reverse is very much not true. A fact that is very precisely being borne out by the difference in damage being sustained by the two countries in the current conflict, just as it was in the last. I must say that I am also very much less sanguine than Mr. Laxer about Israel’s incapacity for eradicating Palestine. From what I can tell, in terms of viability at least, this has already been accomplished and there is now a strong probability that Palestinian society will never recover from the devastation that has been wreaked upon them by Israel’s occupation. What this will ultimately mean politically speaking twenty years down the line much less a hundred is unknowable. What is knowable is that for the children of Palestine, and now quite likely the children born to southern Lebanon, like the children of Iraq and Nicaragua, irreparable neurological damage for a great many is guaranteed.
Israel has spent countless billions of dollars to create a military superpower so vastly superior to her neighbours that no politician of any stripe in the region has even the slightest glimmer of a hope of support by his ruling elites if he does not campaign on the basis of doing something about this tremendously destabilizing imbalance. Israel’s leaders and apologists constantly bray about the existential threats that surround her but it was Iran not Israel that had her burgeoning secular and economic nationalism movement ground into dust under the jackboot heel of a military kleptocracy. This brought to her and her people “thanks” to Kermit Roosevelt’s CIA/MI5 engineering of the installation of the military thug that was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his terror police the SAVAK.
The ensuing 26 years of relentless repression, cruelty and inequality leading directly, just as it would here, to a radicalization of the youth of the country who as a result of the brooking of every other avenue took to religious zealotry as a way to galvanize opposition to the vicious injustices being perpetrated daily.. (It’s much easier to get people to throw away their lives if you first convince them A) there is a next one and B) this throwing will lead it to being vastly superior.) It is hard to say what form our youth’s rebellion would take here. Sufficed to say it wouldn’t likely end at leafleting.
Israel is the state that brought nuclear proliferation to the region and possesses somewhere on the order of 200 nuclear warheads mounted on missiles with a range sufficient to taking out any of the capitals of any of her neighbours. How can anyone, even those with only the tiniest tincture of balance on this issue, not see that this bit of martial planning on the part of the Israeli state guarantees that their will in perpetuity be at the very least cliques within the military of all of her neighbours who will do anything they possibly can to “balance” this equation. One second’s worth of thought about what Israel would do if the position was reversed is enough to confirm this obvious verity.
And again balance demands that one take note that there is one fact that has pierced straight to the heart of the region through the fog of this U.S. and now Israeli war. There is one thing and one thing only that can guarantee that the U.S. Marines or the IDF and the Coalition Provisional Whatever will not be setting up shop in your main palace: Nuclear Weaponry. If the invasion of Iraq was not enough to get this message across I am sure all concerned found it highly instructive how Pakistan has been treated even after it was found that the father of her nuclear arms industry has been spreading the technology for same into highly dubious hands. Not exactly the object lesson that Wolfowitz and Perle claimed would be raised along with a statue of GWB in the public square of Baghdad 1 year after the invasion.
Quite frankly there is very little high ground left to speak of morally speaking when it comes to the problems of the Middle East and the endless round of violence and repression that seems to be the tragic daily staple for its people. What is left if just barely is international law. And while America is able to shield Israel and herself from Security Council resolution after Security Council resolution and both America and Israel routinely ignore both the Security Council and the International Court of Justice with seeming impunity the facts and international judgement remain.
It is Israel and America that are the occupiers not Lebanon, not Syria, not Iran. It is Israel and America that are by far leading the arms race in the region and in the world and the only ones that present an existential threat to the countries of the region. It is Israel and America that are the ones that are using military might to gain access to extremely valuable resources and classifying the theft as “national interest”. It is Israel and America that are the rogue states in terms of international law and in terms of international opinion.
It is truly said that today there are only two superpowers in the world the U.S. and public opinion. And until Israel and America cease their occupations and rejoin the international community, until they decide to side with the angel’s wing instead of the Pentagon’s wings, both America and Israel no more have a right to claim moral superiority over Hamas or Hizballah than the British had a right to consider themselves morally superior to Michael Collins and the Sinn Fein or George Washington and the Continentalists.
This is a great post. I found it on www.thefilter.ca. The Globe must be trying to steal readers from the National post.
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