To sustain
a fundamental lie over the long term, a propagandist must do more than
disseminate false or misleading information; he must also wage a perpetual
war against truth.
No lie can
long survive without frequent censorship and intimidation of critics,
because lies are like radioactive atoms—highly unstable.
When no
amount of censorship can prevent the release of uncomfortable truths, the
fundamental lie implodes, and the credibility of everyone associated with
it gets sucked into the resulting black hole.
Such is
the danger hanging over the head of Israel like the proverbial Sword of
Damocles, only in this case, intimidation and censorship have to sustain
multiple lies, such as: Israel was created by the UN; Arabs are
responsible for the continuing violence; Israel is a peace-loving
democracy; Jews have a biblical right to a homeland in Palestine; and
Israel’s critics are anti-Semites.
This last
lie, fatuous and inane though it may be, is particularly important because
it forms the basis for virtually all censorship and intimidation. Because
propaganda is based on deception, rational criticism must be stigmatized
as a moral insult deserving of unfettered ad hominem attacks.
We saw
such an example on June 29 when a spokesman for the Israeli government
condemned the BBC for demonizing Israel “in a way reminiscent of
anti-Semitic tracts published in Nazi Germany.”
The cause
of the uproar was a June 28 trailer on BBC World promoting a
“Correspondent” series documentary called Israel’s Secret Weapon.
It showed pictures of Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona, and its
chemical and biological weapons headquarters at Nes Ziona. The
accompanying narrative asked: “Which country in the Middle East has not
declared the nuclear and biological weapons in its possession?”
Danny
Seaman, the Israeli spokesman, admitted that the content of the trailer
wasn’t the problem. “The BBC didn't raise anything that has not already
been on Israeli television,” he told the Guardian. “It’s the tone
not the facts we’re worried about. … We’re used to journalistic garbage as
a cover for anti-Israeli propaganda. But it was not only this program. We
feel this was the culmination of a decision by the BBC to show Israel as
some kind of criminal country, a rogue police state. There’s an
insensitivity to the state of Israel and the Jewish people, and their
history.”
Well,
Israel is a criminal country, and it is a rogue police
state—see July’s column
Hamas a principled defender of Palestine —but that’s just the sort
of truth Zionist propaganda is designed to obscure. Because the trailer
showed pictorial evidence of illegal weapons development, the propaganda
had to be defended, so the BBC was slagged, and the show denigrated.
But the
danger to Israel goes deeper than the trailer. Since 1969, the U.S and
Israel have had a duplicitous “understanding” designed to hide these
illegal weapons programs from worldview. The U.S. permits Israel to
maintain a nuclear program so long as Israel does
not hold nuclear tests or publicly declare
that it possesses nuclear weapons. In return for this calculated
policy of “nuclear ambiguity,” the U.S. does not pressure Israel to sign
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and uses its Security Council veto
to ensure that UN weapons inspectors are kept out.
This same
U.S. interference also insulates Israel’s chemical and biological weapons
facilities from international scrutiny. For example, from Feb. 12 to March
30, 2001, Israel attacked Palestinians with an unknown poison gas that
sent 180 people to hospital with severe convulsions. The gas was
manufactured at
Nes Ziona and the suffering it caused has been documented. At the time
of the attack, Israel denied using gas. Israel’s Secret Weapon
debunked that claim.
In
response, Israel has severed all co-operative relations with the BBC, and
Sharon had the effrontery to ban Britain’s national broadcaster from
attending a meeting
this month in London. Seaman also pressured the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation not to show Israel’s Secret Weapon,
but to no avail.
Israel’s
reaction was desperate and ham-fisted. The
location of Israel’s illegal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction has
been available to anyone with a computer since at least March 17, when
Israel’s Secret Weapon aired in
Britain on BBC2.
Also, the page
“Strategic Israel” from Islamonline.net has
an interactive map showing the location of WMD plants, air bases and
missile facilities, including the main command and control centre beneath
the ministry of defence in Tel Aviv. MSNBC’s website also had such a map,
but it has disappeared.
This
incident is not the first time Israel has attacked the BBC for doing its
job. On June 17, 2001, BBC1 aired the “Panorama” documentary The
Accused, which investigated the 1982 massacre of up to 2,000
Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps,
and whether then-Defence Minister Ariel Sharon could be indicted for it.
In fact,
the best witness for the affirmative comes from Israel. On Feb. 8, 1983,
the
Kahane Commission found that Sharon bore indirect “personal
responsibility” for the massacre by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist allies:
“It is our
view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defence for
having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the
Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed
to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists
enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the
Minister of Defence for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing
or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists’
entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a
duty with which the Defense Minister was charged.”
To defend
the lie that Israel does not commit war crimes, The Accused had to
be denounced as one-sided; an attack on the state of Israel; and
“anti-Semitic,” even though it was accurate and thoroughly researched.
Israel even threatened legal action, but of course it had no case.
In the war
against propaganda, an unflinching willingness to tell the truth and to
resist mounting intimidation is the only defence. If only all media were
as courageous as the BBC.
Mr. Greg
Felton is a Canadian writer on the Middle East, and the author of an
upcoming book on Osama bin Laden. His “Mind over Media” column appears
every month in the Greater Vancouver Arabic/English newspaper al
Shorouq. He can be reached at
gfelton@mediamonitors.org
Source:
by courtesy & © 2003 Greg Felton
by the same author:
