MEDIA ALERT
The Media Is Tough On Terrorism But Not Tough On The Causes
Of Terrorism
October 1, 2001
The great rallying cry of New Labour on entering office in 1997 was that
they would be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime". The liberal
media were of one voice in applauding the logic - what could be more
sensible than focusing, not merely on punishing criminals, but also on
identifying the contributory social and political factors that cause
crime?
Merely ratcheting up punishment of the criminals, everyone agreed,
would do little to actually solve the problem.
Following the
September 11 terrorist atrocities in New York and Washington - "a crime
against humanity", as journalist Robert Fisk and Mary Robinson, UN
commissioner for human rights, among others, have rightly called it - the
British Government and media remain determinedly tough on crime, but are
less interested in being tough on the causes of crime.
The media has
consistently denied the public access to authoritative voices that
predicted, and could help explain, the causes of bitter opposition to
Western policies in the Middle East. By suppressing these insights, the
media is denying the public access to credible alternatives for ridding the
world of terrorism that do not involve the slaughter of untold numbers of
people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 1999, Denis Halliday, the former UN
Assistant Secretary-General, issued a prophetic warning:
"We are
likely to see the emergence of those who may well regard Saddam Hussein as
too moderate and too willing to listen to the West. Such is the desperation
of [Iraqi] people whose children are dying in their thousands and who are
bombed almost every day by American and British planes."
This warning
came three years after U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's infamous
reply to a question posed on a US TV programme in May
1996:
Questioner: "We have heard that a half a million children have died
[because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean that's more children than
died in Hiroshima. And - you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright:
"I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is
worth it."
In September 1998, Halliday resigned after 34 years with the
UN, describing US and British policy towards Iraq "genocidal". Halliday,
who managed the UN 's 'oil for food' programme in Iraq, had first- hand
knowledge and was unequivocal that Western-led sanctions truly were
responsible for the deaths of fully 500,000 Iraqi children under five. In an
interview last year, Halliday said:
"Washington, and to a lesser extent
London, have deliberately played games through the Sanctions Committee with
this programme for years - it's a deliberate ploy... That's why I've been
using the word 'genocide', because this is a deliberate policy to destroy
the people of Iraq. I'm afraid I have no other view at this late
stage."
Five months after Halliday resigned, his successor at the UN,
Hans von Sponeck, also resigned, asking, "How long should the civilian
population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have
never done?" In December 1999, von Sponeck told a British
audience:
"My friends, your country is trying to cage a wild tiger.
But you are killing a rare and beautiful bird. In twenty years your fine
universities will be using the sanctions on Iraq as an example of how
+not+ to pursue foreign policy."
Two days after von Sponeck's
resignation, Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, also
resigned, saying privately that what was being done to the people of Iraq
was intolerable.
Despite the extraordinary gravity and urgency of what
these senior UN diplomats had to say - not least for our own security -
Halliday and von Sponeck were all but blanked by the British media,
receiving a tiny number of mentions in the mainstream press. Since the
atrocities in New York and Washington, Halliday's views have been mentioned
(as of 1.10.01) exactly once - by John Pilger in the Guardian. There have
been no other mentions in the Guardian, zero mentions in the
Independent, zero mentions in the Times and zero mentions in the New
Statesman. Over the same period Hans von Sponeck has not been mentioned
in any of these media.
In a September 19th appearance on the David
Letterman show, ABC journalist John Miller stated that Osama bin Laden had
told him in an interview several years ago that his top three issues were:
the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia; U.S. support for Israel; and
U.S. policy toward Iraq." In a September 30 interview, Tony Blair declared
that he had seen "powerful, incontrovertible evidence" that bin Laden
was linked to the attacks. It seems likely, then, that these issues
+are+ a source of the hatred that has been so successfully exploited by
bin Laden - surely they should at least be debated. Unfortunately
commentators have almost completely ignored the issue of
Iraq.
Writing in the Guardian, Hugo Young suggested that a possible cause
might be "the continuing air war against Iraq" ('American values can
defeat the terrorism of the mind', 20.9.01). When asked if he was aware
of Halliday and von Sponeck's condemnations of sanctions, Young replied,
"You can't imagine I'm unaware of these key utterances about Iraq", but
failed to explain why he chose to ignore them while mentioning the
comparatively trivial issue of bombing. In the same paper, Richard Dawkins
wrote simplistically: "Religion is also of course, the underlying source of
the divisiveness in the Middle East." ('Religion's Misguided Missiles',
15.9.01)
Also in the Guardian, Jon Snow focused on the devastating
consequences of US foreign policy "ordained and executed in the highest
interests of the US" ('The war against hatred', 19.9.01) in places as
far-flung as Cambodia, Chile and Guatemala. But, strangely, of the Middle
East, Snow wrote merely, "Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were befriended
by America in the interests of estabilising 'wrong-headed' Iran and Russia
respectively. Each stirred a vat of hatred that boiled over." No mention was
made of sanctions against Iraq, declared the West's very own "genocide" by
some of the UN's most senior and respected diplomats, who predicted dire
consequences as a result.
Some argue that to criticise Western policy is
to rationalise, or justify, the attacks on the United States. We strongly
disagree. Seeking to understand background conditions that enable terrorists
to capitalise on hatred is simply a rational approach to ridding the
world of the disease of terrorism and has nothing at all to do with
justifying it. Media Lens condemns these monstrous attacks unreservedly,
as it does all resort to violence. Writing in the Guardian, David Clark
summarised the point well:
"A mature debate will depend on our ability to
separate issues of cause and effect from questions of moral responsibility.
Historians have correctly identified the punitive terms of the treaty of
Versailles as a factor in the rise of Hitler. That does not turn them
into Holocaust deniers... We will need to understand and address the
deep-rooted alienation from which terrorists derive legitimacy and
support in order to deny them their life-stream: tough on terrorism,
tough on the causes of terrorism, if you like."
Interestingly, the
'rationalisation' argument has generally not deterred commentators from
seeking possible contributory causes, only causes that are most embarrassing
to establishment interests.
We urge readers to ask journalists and
editors to seek honestly the causes of hostility towards the West, so that
that hostility might be understood, undermined and removed. It is in
nobody's interests to do otherwise.
SUGGESTED ACTION
CONTACT: The
Guardian
--Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor
email: alan.rusbridger@g...
--Letters
page
email: letters@g...
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