Fear and Learning in America By Robert Fisk

[المر]

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.

Towards the end of each talk, I apologised for the remarks I was about to make. I told audiences that the world did not change on 11 September, 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 11 September - but the world did not change 20 yearsago. There were no candles lit then, no memorial services. And each time I said this, there was a nodding of heads - grey-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 per cent 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 per cent of the 22 per cent 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 headline, "Fisk: Who really are the terrorists?" in the Daily Iowan last week at least caught the gist of my message, and included my own examples of American press bias in the Middle East, although it failed on the facts, wrongly reporting that it was the United Nations (rather than the far more persuasive Israeli Kahan Commission) which concluded that Sharon was "personally responsible" for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. The Des Moines Register's account of one of my talks was intriguing. It concentrated on my interviews with Osama bin Laden - which I had indeed mentioned in my lecture - and then referred to my account of how an Afghan crowd beat me up last December. I had told the American audience that the Afghans were outraged by US bombing raids that had just killed their relatives around Kandahar and how important it had been to include this fact in my own report of the fray - to give context and reason to the Afghan attack on me. The Register used my words to describe the attack but then itself made no mention of the reasons. Long live, I thought, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, whose own headline - "Middle East reporter slams media" - got the point.

It's not that Iowans have any excuse to be unaware of the Middle East. In the small town of Davenport, Israelis have been trained in the systems of the Apache AH-64 attack helicopters used to assassinate Palestinians on Israel's wanted list. According to one local journalist, several Iowa companies, including the regional office of Rockwell, have been involved in military contracts worth millions of dollars with Israel. CemenTech of Indianola supplies equipment to the Israeli air force. The day I arrived in Iowa City, John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, was telling Iowans that a hundred foreign nationals "from countries known as home to terrorists" had been interrogated in the state. Another hundred were likely to be "interviewed" soon. There was no editorial comment on this.

So Iowa University classes were absorbing. One young woman began by announcing that she knew the American media were biased. When I asked why, she said that "it has to do with America's support for Israel..." and then, red-faced, she dried up. Not so the student in Rex Honey's global studies class. After I had outlined the military trap into which the Americans had been lured in Afghanistan - the supposed "victory" followed by further engagements with al-Qa'ida and then, inevitably, daily battles with Afghan warlords and sniping attacks on Western troops - he put his hand up. "So how do we beat them?" he asked. There was a gentle ripple of laughter through the room. "Why do you want to 'beat' the Afghans," I asked? "Why not help them build a new land?" The student came up to me afterwards, hand outstretched. "I want to thank you, sir, for all you told us," he said. I had a suspicion he was a military man. Are you planning to join the army, I asked? "No, sir," he replied. "I'm going to join the Marines."