Monday, August 23, 2004
Middle East "Reporting"
In this morning's Sydney Morning Herald there are at least two articles where the expression "war on terrorism" appears just like that, in scare quotes wherever it is referred to.
It's hard to know if this is simply a prerogative exercised by the editor of this publication only, or otherwise an initiative taken in unison by left and liberal editors wherever thay can, but one suspects it is something like the latter.
We have, unfortunately, become too used to such sinister double-standards.
The perspective of Occidental-Islamic conflict gleaned through big Western media - through much film, television, newsprint and comedic Internet - is that any strong or confrontational position undertaken by George W. Bush or his allies is to be ridiculed or treated with suspicion.
Thus the concept of "war on terrorism" neatly fits into scare quotes, invoking the supposition that there may be no need for war, or no such thing as terrorism; that there was no 9/11 and no need to respond; that all would be well as long as the United States did nothing, receded in power, let other states fill that vacuum, let nuclear weapons and their like proliferate in countries with hostile ambitions.
That the United States and it's allies are responsible for murderous actions that are taken in this world, and that the actual perpetrators may be thus excused. Nowhere is such duplicitous reportage more evident than in relation to the Middle East.
We see, in recent times, the growing media consciousness that something rotten is afoot in Sudan. That 50,000 people may have been murdered there as a result of an ethnic cleansing campaign that has also resulted in the displacement of an estimated 1,000,000 (now impoverished, suffering and homeless) persons (see for example this Telegraph report).
Such figures and the supposition of intense immorality begetting their achievement dwarf what is happening in the Palestinian intifada.
Yet the latter continues, as it has always done in the face of many travesties over the last 50 or 60 years, to disproportionately figure in our news intake replete with such devices and bias as referred to hereinabove.
Molly Moore's recent effort in The Washington Post (Refuge Is Prison For Hunted Palestinian - De Facto Sheriff Is Wanted by Israelis) is typical.
