Monday, May 01, 2006

Israeli Lobby

If you've seen the documentary about Al Jazeera, Control Room, you may remember an acerbic "independent journalist" arguing with a blue-eyed marine press liaison. I had the opportunity to see the acerbic journalist, Ahhmahed Schleifer, give a talk here at UGA recently. (That blue-eyed marine, Joshua Rushing, incidentally, has joined Al Jazeera and now hosts his own show. Also at this talk I met the 2003-2006 CNN Arabic translator. I recognized his voice from 2003 news clips that I'm editing right now into a video/documentary about consuming war. Small world.)

Anyway....
Schleifer gave a somewhat nonconfrontational presentation regarding reporting tendencies of the U.S. press when it comes to Middle Eastern politics. His rather simplistic analysis argued that two filters determine the western press picture of the Middle East. The first, he said, is access. We have more sympathy toward westernized states due to access and sheer point of view of the camera. Second, he said that suicide bombings create good news because, essentially, if it bleeds, it leads. I found his analysis rather conventional and unsatisfying given that he has had so much experience covering Middle Eastern conflict. So I asked him this question: "Americans do not seem to have a point of reference for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no sense that there is even an occupation, that Israel has all the guns, and that anywhere from 4 to 7 times as many Palestinians are dying of F16 strikes and bombs than Israelis getting blown up in pizza parlours. What accounts for this? It can't be 'access,' because Israel has a relatively free press. And there is plenty of violence to satisfy the blood thirstiness of the camera, so this can't be the reason either. What is it?"

His soft, hand-wringing answer was: "There is a very powerful Israeli lobby in the U.S., and this puts a tremendous amount of pressure on journalists to report the right things lest they be labeled anti-semitic. But this fact is so obvious that it goes without saying."

Afterward, many people thanked me for asking the question, even though the answer was "so obvious" that I didn't need to ask. I have run into this "Israeli lobby" argument in a few places, notably in the Media Education Foundation's wonderful documentary, Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, where they cite organizations like CAMERA and AIPAC as comprising important filters alongside corporate/state strategic interests in the Middle East (i.e. Israel as U.S. mililtary outpost). I have been a little hesitant to grant much credence to this argument. Who wants to be labeled an anti-semite and end up like Norman Finkelstein, shunned? Only he can't be an anti-semite because of his Jewish ethnicity. For him, they bring out the old Christian epithet "self-hating Jew." You might check out his book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.

Here's what I'm leading up to. Recently a couple of reputable professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, published a little piece about the Israel lobby in the London Review of Books. It had been turned down at several other publications. The piece has received attention of all kinds. Here's an article about its impact in The Nation. The politics surrounding the bare mentioning of an Israeli lobby are quite enough to make your head spin. But this fact, strangely, does not keep Fox News from writing a story about it, even though they have adopted the language of these lobby groups in their insistant use of "homicide bombers" among other things.

NeoCon CrackUp

I heart Stephen Colbert. Two very gutsy moments. Wanna see?

Stephen at the White House Correspondent's Dinner giving the keynote speech.
Quicktime Vid.

Stephen putting William Kristol's feet to the flames.
Comedy Central Vid.

On a side note...
I don't want to be dropping names or anything, but a very strange thing happened to me a few days ago. William Kristol apparently paged through my reading packet for my special topics course "Exploring Media and the War on Terror." I wasn't there, but he reportedly "liked it." I was very disappointed to hear this since I have been campaigning like mad to get on David Horowitz's Most Dangerous Professors List.