🚀 go-pugleaf

skulduggery <nospam@newsranger.com> wrote in message news:<7CET6.1923$bA3.95928@www.newsranger.com>...
> � 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
> 07 June 2001 
> Independent 
> Robert Fisk: The internet threat to truly honest reporting
> 'In the States, the internet is challenging the monopoly of pro-Israeli news'
> 28 May 2001
> I don't use the internet. I've never sent an e-mail in my life. But I've got to
> admit a new political fact. The internet is changing the American view of the
> Middle East. For the first time in decades, the monopoly of pro-American,
> pro-Israeli news � in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles
> Times and the big US TV networks � is being challenged by the websites of dozens
> of European papers whose reporting on the tragedy in the Middle East is far less
> skewed towards the Israeli-US State Department point of view.
> 
> And the Israeli lobby groups in the States don't know how to react. Several
> papers, including The Independent, have been bombarded by hundreds of letters
> and e-mails from supposedly outraged American "readers" � most of them from
> parts of the United States where The Independent, for example, is not on sale �
> and many of them written in vitriolic, even violent language. A number have been
> written in answer to an appeal from an outfit called "honestreporting.com",
> which carries a series of misleading and, in some cases, untruthful statements
> about my own articles.
> 
> They are balanced, however, by large numbers of letters and e-mails asking why
> the American press doesn't give the full coverage of events found in The
> Independent and other European newspapers.
> 
> Among my recent mailbag has been a letter that wishes my swift departure for
> Hell and eternal punishment ("Dear Mr Shit Fisk," it begins), and another from
> an American law student at Oxford who addressed me as "You evil, fucking man".
> The student, who said he was Jewish, added his phone number to the letter and
> apologised for his language after I threatened to take his letter to the police.
> 
> Of course, it was ever thus. The Bahraini press has cartooned me as a rabid dog
> for revealing details of Arab secret- police torture � since rabid dogs have to
> be exterminated, this was a threat, not a joke � and the Egyptian press has
> called me a "black crow" for condemning Egypt's fraudulent elections. An Arab
> student in the American Midwest is e-mailing friends with the information that
> I'm a member of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, apparently because a
> Jewish family invited me to speak at a local university.
> 
> But honestreporting.com's supporters � whose letters often reveal that they've
> never actually read anything I've written � are in a class of their own. Only
> last month, I wrote a comment-page article in The Independent describing the way
> in which any serious journalist who criticised Israeli policy � the operation of
> death squads, for example, or the building of illegal Jewish settlements on
> stolen Arab land � was reviled as "anti-Semitic". This, the most disgraceful of
> the accusations made against Western journalists, permeates many of the letters
> provoked by honestreporting.com.
> 
> There's no doubt what prompted this revealing deluge of purple prose.
> Honestreporting.com urges its supporters to read The Independent's website. It
> would like, somehow, to close down The Independent's Middle East coverage � and,
> to be fair, The Guardian's as well � and return Americans to the bland,
> generally pro-American (and thus pro-Israeli) reports of the US press. Much of
> my ordinary mailbag � I'm not counting the lobby boys � now comes from the US.
> University departments are asking me and other European journalists to lecture
> in the States, where our discussions tend to be a lot more straight-talking than
> that of our American colleagues.
> 
> But honestreporting.com's methods are themselves revealing. In one "communiqu�",
> it manages to quote my 1982 description of a Palestinian woman's face as that of
> a Madonna and a Lebanese friend's (described by the outfit as a Palestinian)
> weeping at the departure of the PLO from Beirut. What they don't mention is that
> they were weeping because they feared that in the absence of Palestinian
> fighters, they would be massacred by Israel's brutal Lebanese allies � which is
> exactly what happened a few days later.
> 
> Then it quotes from my article of 17 April this year, in which I remarked that
> some Israeli leaders had been "bestializing" [sic] Arabs, referring to my
> account of how Palestinian taxi drivers are humiliated as they approach Israeli
> checkpoints on Arab land. But honestreporting.com � and the "honest" bit is a
> joke in itself � didn't mention that the quotes come from two different
> articles. The "bestialisation" story referred to Israeli leaders who had at
> various times called Palestinians "serpents", "two-legged beasts", "cockroaches
> in a glass jar", and "crocodiles". Of course, honestreporting.com erased all
> mention of that in its "communiqu�".
> 
> So, long live the internet. It certainly seems to be frightening the guys who
> want to prevent Americans from hearing our voice on http://www.independent.co.uk

Our domestic papers are scaled down versions of the "Jewish Times".

JWH