Showing posts with label Yellow journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yellow journalism. Show all posts

Saturday, 13 November 2021

البرغي

البرغي - أنواع وقياسات مختلفة من البراغي
إبراهيم الأمين كما عرفته..وأعرفه! – الحوار نيوز

سياسة  ابراهيم الأمين 

لم أكن يوماً مضلَّلاً، أو تعرضت للغش ولم أكن أعرفك. بل كنتُ أرى فيك صحافياً ناجحاً، وأقبلُك كما أنت. صحافياً نمت علاقاته المهنية والشخصية كغيره في ظل هذا النظام الذي تقول اليوم إنك ضده.

لكنني أعرف، ولا ينتقص ذلك منك شيئاً، أنك لم تكن يوماً رأس حربة، لا ضد الوصاية السورية، ولا في مواجهة الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، كما لم تكن يوماً رأس حربة في مواجهة الظلم والتعسّف والدولة الأمنية اللبنانية والعربية والدولية التي حكمت لبنان باسم التحقيق في جريمة اغتيال رفيق الحريري. ولا في مواجهة الفساد الذي أطل برأسه قبل وأثناء وبعد رحيل رفيق الحريري.

ولم أكن، كغيري، لأطالبك بما لا تريده أو لا قدرة لك عليه. لم يسألك أحد، في «الأخبار»، لا قبل 17 تشرين ولا بعده، عن علاقاتك الوطيدة بكل أركان النظام، من رؤساء جمهورية وحكومات ورئيس مستمر لمجلس النواب وحاكم دائم لمصرف لبنان، ولا عن علاقاتك الوثيقة بكل نادي الوزراء والنواب وقادة الجيش ورؤساء الأجهزة الأمنية وأركان «الاقتصاد الحر»، وبكل زعماء القبائل اللبنانية، والقيادات الحزبية على اختلافها. كما لم يسألك أحد عن نفوذك القوي في قلب الدولة العميقة التي أدارت البلاد ولا تزال، والتي قرّرت أنت، في لحظة ما، الثورة ضدها.

حتى في سياق عملك المهني مع بيار الضاهر، الرجل الذي حار ودار ولم يتوقف عن القيام بكل ما يقنع أو لا يقنع، لحماية المؤسسة، كنت أنا ممن يحترمون حقّك في الحفاظ على مسافة تقيك شرّ الظلم المهني، وتمنحك عدلاً حتى في العقد المالي المجحف مع هذه المؤسسة، وما كان أحد يلومك على كل أنواع التسويات التي أبرمتها باعتبارها حقاً لك.

وعندما كتبتُ دفاعاً عنك في «الأخبار»، قبل تسع سنوات، في وجه من أراد النيل من حريتك، لم أفعل ذلك محاباة أو مراضاة، وأظنّك تعرفني جيداً، وتعرف أنني ما كنت لأقف صامتاً عندما يصيب الظلم أياً كان. أنت شخصياً، تعرف، عن قرب، موقف سعد الحريري مني شخصياً ومن الجريدة. مع ذلك، وحْدنا في «الأخبار» دافعنا عنه يوم اعتقله الدبّ الداشر، بطل العروبة الأغرّ كما تصورونه في قناتكم اليوم. فعلنا ذلك عن قناعة، بينما ران الصمت على كل المنصات، بما فيها حيث كنت تعمل، وحيث تعمل اليوم.

لكن، ثمة ما تغير فيك يا عزيزي، ومنذ ما قبل مغادرتك المؤسسة اللبنانية للإرسال. ما تغير لم يكن (فقط) تعبيراً عن طموح مهني محقّ في تطور تطمح إلى تقديمه، بل هو أنك قررت في لحظة سياسية ومهنية ومالية – وهذا خيارك الحر أيضاً – أن تنتقل إلى ضفة لها وجهها الأكثر وضوحاً في الإعلام، وفي السياسة والاقتصاد والاجتماع أيضاً. قرّرت أن تطلّ، هذه المرة، من بوابة مفتاحها في يد شاب تعرف، وأعرف، ما الذي جرّب فعله في العديد من المحطات، حتى إبان اعتقال صديقك الحريري الذي لم تنتفض يومها من أجل حريته الشخصية أو دفاعاً عن كرامة بلدك. مع ذلك، لن ألومك على عدم الإقدام على فعل لست مقتنعاً به، أو لا قدرة لك عليه.

«صار الوقت»: هدية مصرفية إلى «الديمقراطية» اللبنانية

ما حدث، يا عزيزي، أنك انضممت إلى ماكينة تعرف مسبقاً إلى أين تقود. وصدمتي أنك قبلت بأن ينتهي بك الأمر مجرد «برغي» في ماكينة صدئة لا تملك فكرة أو قولاً أو عملاً أصيلاً، وقبلت الانضواء في برنامج قاده أنطون الصحناوي الذي رتّب كل عملية انتقالك إلى محطة الـ«مر تي في». وأنت تعرف، أيضاً، أن آل المر لا يفعلون سوى بيع الهواء. ويسرقون الأفكار مما هو رائج في الغرب، كما سرقوا الإنترنت والاتصالات أيضاً بحسب التحقيقات والأحكام القضائية. وهم اليوم يعرضون منصتهم لمن يدفع أكثر. ولا مانع لدى ابن المر في أن يختار الشاري الآلية التي تناسبه للتمويل، مباشرة أو عبر رعاية إعلانية أو غيرها. فالمهم، بالنسبة إليه، هو أن يحتل الموقع الأول في عالم «التتفيه» لا «الترفيه»، على ما كان يقول الراحل رمزي نجار. لكن الرجل لم يعد يكتفي بذلك. ولو أنك قرأت تفاصيل مفاوضاته مع السعوديين لبيعهم حصصاً في قناته، لكنت عرفت، وأعتقد أنك تعرف جيداً، مع من تعمل. فالرجل اليوم مصاب بعارض أصاب كثيرين في لبنان. من المخلّص سمير جعجع الذي أرسله الله لتطهيرنا من خطيئتنا الأصلية والمستمرة فينا، مروراً بالمحقق العدلي الذي نزل عليه وحي إلهي بإنقاذ لبنان من الفاسدين والزعران، وصولاً إلى «الثائر» ميشال المر الذي لن يقبل بأقل من كتلة نيابية يقودها من أجل تحرير لبنان من الاحتلال الإيراني، بعدما قاد عملية تحرير لبنان من الاحتلال السوري… ألم يقل هو ذلك؟

لم أكن يوماً مضلّلاً حيالك. تعلم جيداً أنني أعرفك، وأعرف من أي بيت خرجت، لذلك أحزن على ما آلت إليه أمورك، وعلى أنك صرت واحداً ممن يرى فيهم الناس بومة تحرض على الفتنة. كما أحزن كيف تعطينا درساً في أصول العمل الصحافي، من دون أن تكلّف نفسك التدقيق قليلاً قبل استقبال «شاهد» مسكين أنقذه تقرير طبي من ورطة كان برنامجك مدخلاً لها.

مارسيل غانم إعلامي جريء ينتظره اللبنانيون كل خميس | صلاح تقي الدين | صحيفة  العرب

وحْدنا في «الأخبار» دافعنا بقناعة عن سعد الحريري يوم اعتقله الدبّ الداشر، بطل العروبة الأغرّ كما تصورونه في قناتكم اليوم، بينما ران الصمت على كل المنصات


ثم، هل أنت مقتنع حقاً بأن السعودية وسفارتها في بيروت ومخابراتها المتخلفة لا تقرّر كل كبيرة وصغيرة ليس في قناتك فحسب، بل في كل النادي السياسي الذي انضممت إليه من دون مقدّمات؟

ألا تعرف أنت، وتفصيلياً، عن دور السفارة الأميركية في عوكر، ومسؤولين في واشنطن من أصدقاء الصحناوي، في رعاية «إعلام التغيير»، ومنه القناة التي تعمل فيها، وتوفير التمويل، رغم أن بين الأميركيين، في بيروت وفي واشنطن، من لا يستهضم ابن المر نفسه. ومع ذلك، يساهمون في تمويل ودعم «التدريب على الديموقراطية» في الإعلام اللبناني، وفي برنامجك بالتحديد. وهل تعتقد أن الوثائق التي تكشف عمليات التمويل والتجنيد، ولو صُنّفت على أنها فائقة السرية، عصية على أن تصبح متاحة بفعل قوانين وقواعد وأعراف… وفوق ذلك بقدرة وإصرار من يريد أن يعرف أيضاً…

ألم تسأل نفسك يوماً، أو هل حاولت أن تعرف، عن مصير الداتا التي تخص كل من يريد المشاركة في البرنامج حضوراً أو مساهمة في صفوف الجماهير – عفواً الجمهور. لن أسألك عن كيفية الاختيار بينهم، لكنني أسألك إن كنت تعلم بمصير الداتا – وما هو أكثر – التي تحوي الأسماء وأرقام الهواتف وعناوين البريد الإلكتروني الخاصة بهم، والتفاصيل الخاصة بميولهم السياسية وطوائفهم ومذاهبهم وتعليمهم وأين يعيشون وماذا يعملون؟

هل فكرت من يستعمل هذه الداتا، وكيف صُرف جزء منها في حراك تشرين وما بعده في المجموعات التي نبتت كالفطر، و«صودف» أن الثائر الأممي ديفيد شينكر، ومن سبقه وخلفه، ظلوا يعملون على الاستثمار فيها؟

ألا تعرف أن كل البرنامج الأميركي عندما تقرر تفعيله في لبنان وتمت ترجمته إعلامياً عبر أشكال مختلفة في مقدمها رعاية «قنوات الفتنة»، كانت المهمة وحيدة، وعنوانها أوضح من الشمس: شيطنوا حزب الله وما يسمى المقاومة وأنصارها، واضربوا التيار الوطني الحر من ميشال عون وجبران باسيل إلى آخر نصير لهم، واصرخوا عالياً، ولو شمل سبابكم غالبية الشعب اللبناني.

لماذا يهتاجون لتحقيق هذا الهدف، وهل من مشكلة عندهم مع المقاومة غير أنها تهزم إسرائيل وتقاوم بقية الهيمنة الأميركية في بلادنا، وتتصدى لشياطينهم؟

وهل أنت مقتنع فعلاً بأن برنامجك لم يتحول منصة لشعارات وأحقاد تعيدنا إلى أيام المحافظين الجدد الذين أرادوا تغيير وجه الكون بعد 11 أيلول؟ ولا بأس لو سُمح لك، نعم لو سُمح لك، بتلوين المشهد بأصوات «الرأي الآخر»، على طريقة ما فعلته القنوات التي فتحت باب التطبيع مع العدو. أم أنك تصدق الرواية عن تدريب الشباب اللبناني على الحوار والديموقراطية، وصرت تعتقد فعلاً أنك صاحب دور استثنائي لا يقتصر دوره على صداقة الطبقة السياسية، بل على صناعة بديلها أيضاً.

اقرأ الفقرة التالية وابحث عن مصدرها – وأعتقد أنه ليس مستحيلاً عليك العثور عليه، أما بقيتها فجرّب حظك – وفيها يرد الآتي: «يأمل مارسيل غانم والـ mtv بأن نشر ثقافة المناظرة في لبنان وإثبات قدرة التلامذة على النقاش سيفسحا المجال لاستضافة أولى المناظرات في لبنان بين القيادات السياسية الوطنية قبيل الانتخابات النيابية القادمة التي يفترض أن تقام في عام 2022».

أسفي عليك كبير لأنك قبلت أن تكون «برغياً» في ماكينة صدِئة، لن تنفع أموال الدنيا في إعادتها إلى العمل. وإذا كنت لا تجيد القراءة، وهذا أمر غريب عليك، فتذكّر بأن ما أشرتُ إليه في مقالتي عن دور وليد البخاري لا صلة له بالفيديو الذي وُزّع بعد الحلقة. وأنت تعرف أنني لست بالخفة التي تجعلني أصدق كل ما يشاع من هنا أو هناك، ولديّ مثلك، أو أقل منك، خبرة في كيفية إدارة الحلقات عن قرب أو عن بعد. ويمكنك أن تسأل العزيز جورج، الذي حدثته عن الحلقة وعن الفيديو نفسه، وكررتُ على مسامعه ما قلتُه له مرات ومرات من ملاحظات كنت أشعر دوماً أنني ملزم بها من باب الحرص. وأقرّ هنا، علناً، بأنني أهملت من تسريبات «أقبية السوء» في ممالك القهر والإذلال، ما كتبه سفراؤهم أو نسبوه إلى غيرهم، قولاً وتوصيفاً وتقديرات… أهملتُ عن وعي كل ما قد يشكّل إساءة لك، وخاصة أنني أحفظ للراحلة والدتك، ولو عن بُعد، مكانتها الخاصة، كما حفظت الودّ لجورج ودوللي، ولك أيضاً.

أما وأنك تلبّستَ دور البطل القادر على هزم جيوش وتحرير البلاد وقيادة العباد إلى الصالح، وقررتَ دخول معركة تستخدم فيها ما تعتقد أنه حق لك، واستلّيت من الكلام سيوفاً أثقل من قدرتك على حملها، وشتمت وحقّرت واستخدمت ما وجدته مناسباً في القول والنبرة والاتهام… فلا مانع من المنازلة.

لكن، نصيحتي لك، احصر معركتك معي ومع «الأخبار»، ولا تقحم حزب الله في الأمر. وأنت، كما جورج، والبقية، تعرفون جيداً على أي أرض أقف أنا ورفاقي. كل ما أنصحك به هو التالي: واجهني مباشرة، وها أنا أبلغك مسبقاً بأن ليس في مقدورك اختيار المسرح والتوقيت والطريقة. وبما أننا نعمل في منصات تمثل كل أسلحتنا، فدعوتي لك بأن تكون في المرات المقبلة أقل توتراً وأكثر استعداداً!


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Saturday, 5 December 2020

The Smearing of Robert Fisk…Now That He Can’t Defend Himself


DECEMBER 3, 2020

Jonathan Cook: the View from Nazareth - www.jonathan-cook.net
Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism [ MORE ]

BY JONATHAN COOK

Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly a fraud, a fabulist, a fantasist, a liar.

What is most ironic is that the journalists doing this are some of the biggest frauds themselves, journalists who have made a career out of deceiving their readers. In fact, many of the crowd attacking Fisk when he can no longer defend himself are precisely the journalists who have the worst record of journalistic malpractice and on some of the biggest issues of our times.

At least I have the courage to criticise them while they are alive. They know dead men can’t sue. It is complete and utter cowardice to attack Fisk when they could have made their comments earlier, to his face. In fact, if they truly believed any of the things they are so keen to tell us now, they had an absolute duty to say them when Fisk was alive rather than allowing the public to be deceived by someone they regarded as a liar and fantasist. They didn’t make public these serious allegations – they didn’t air their concerns about the supposedly fabricated facts in Fisk’s stories – when he was alive because they know he would have made mincemeat of them.

Most preposterous of all is the fact that the actual trigger for this sudden, very belated outpouring of concern about Fisk is a hit-piece written by Oz Katerji. I’m not sure whether I can find the generosity to call Katerji a journalist. Like Elliot Higgins of the US government-funded Bellingcat, he’s more like an attack dog beloved by establishment blue-ticks: he is there to enforce accepted western imperial narratives, disguising his lock-step support for the establishment line as edgy, power-to-the-people radicalism.

Anyone who challenges Katerji’s establishment-serving agenda gets called names – sometimes very rude ones. Fisk is just the latest target of a Katerji hatchet job against any journalist (myself, of course, included) who dares to step outside of the Overton Window. That these “serious” journalists think they can hang their defamation of Fisk on to anything said by Katerji, most especially the thin gruel he produces in his latest article, is truly shameful. If their concerns really relate to journalistic integrity and reliability, Katerji would be the very last person to cite.

Katerji’s prime area of western narrative enforcement is the Middle East – perhaps not surprisingly, as it is the place where there is an awful lot of oil that western states and corporations are desperate to control. But one should not ignore his wide-ranging efforts to boot-lick wherever he is needed on behalf of western establishment narratives.

Here he is desperately trying to breathe life into two fairytales: that the election of the leftwing Evo Morales as Bolivia’s president was fraudulent, and that Morales was forced to resign last year rather than that he was ousted in a CIA-backed military coup. Notably, Katerji was clinging to these discredited story lines as late as last month, long after even the liberal corporate media had abandoned them as no longer tenable.

Katerji was also, of course, an enthusiastic recruit to evidence-free establishment smears that Labour was overrun with antisemitism under the leadership of the leftwing Jeremy Corbyn, the very same anecdotal claims promoted by the entire corporate media.

Not only that, but he even had the gall to argue that he was speaking on behalf of Palestinians in smearing Corbyn, the only leader of a major European party ever to champion their cause. Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer, like most other politicians in the wake of the Corbyn episode, has all but disappeared the Palestinians from the political agenda. Katerji must be delighted – on behalf of Palestinians, of course.

But Katerji’s beef with Fisk derives chiefly from the fact that the Independent’s foreign correspondent broke ranks with the rest of the western press corps over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.

Katerji is part of what – if we were being more brutally honest about these things – would be called the west’s al-Qaeda lobby. These are a motley crew of journalists and academics using their self-publicised “Arabhood” to justify the intimidation and silencing of anyone not entirely convinced that ordinary Syrians might prefer, however reluctantly, their standard-issue dictator, Bashar al-Assad, over the head-chopping, women-stoning, Saudi-financed jihadists of Islamic State and al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria; or who question whether the western powers ought to be covertly funding and backing these extremists.

Exercise any doubt at all on either of these points and Katerji will lose no time in calling you an “Assadist”, “war crimes denier”, “antisemite”, “9/11 truther” and worse. Then in yet more evidence of a circle jerk, those establishment blue ticks, even ones beloved by much of the left, will cite his smears as proof that you are indeed an Assadist, war crimes denier, and so on.

Here are just a few examples of Katerji engaging with those critical of the imperial western narrative on Syria, so you get the idea:

Back in 2011 and 2012, in what looked like the possible eruption of an Arab Spring in Syria, the arguments of Katerji and co at least had an air of plausibility. But their real agenda – one that accorded with western imperialism rather than an Arab awakening – became much clearer once local protests against Assad were subsumed by an influx of jihadi fighters of the very kind that had been labelled “terrorists” by the western media everywhere else they appeared in the Middle East.

Inevitably, anyone like Fisk who adopted a position of caution or scepticism about whether the majority of Syrians actually wanted a return to some kind of Islamic Dark Age incurred the wrath of Katerji and his cohorts.

But Fisk infuriated these western al-Nusra lobbyists even further when he visited the town of Douma in 2018 and raised serious questions about claims made by the jihadists who had been ruling the town that, just before Assad’s forces drove them out, the Syrian military had bombed it with chemical gas, killing many civilians. The story, which at that stage was based exclusively on the claims of these head-chopping jihadists, was instantly reported as verified fact by the credulous western media.

Based solely on claims made by the al-Qaeda franchise in Douma, President Donald Trump hurriedly fired off missiles at Syria, in flagrant violation of international law and to cheers from the western media.

Fisk, of course, knew that in discrediting the evidence-free narrative being promoted by the western press corps (who had never been in Douma) he was doing himself no favours at all. They would resent him all the more. Most of his peers preferred to ignore his revelations, even though they were earth-shattering in their implications. But once the official watchdog body the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued its report into Douma many months later, implicitly backing the jihadists’ version of events, Fisk’s earlier coverage was snidely dismissed by fellow journalists.

Sadly for them, however, the story did not end there. Following publication of the OPCW’s Douma report, a number of its senior experts started coming forward as whistleblowers to say that, under pressure from the US, the OPCW bureaucracy tampered with their research and misrepresented their findings in the final report. The evidence they had found indicated that Assad had not carried out a chemical attack in Douma. More likely the jihadists, who were about to be expelled by Assad’s forces, had staged the scene to make it look like a chemical attack and draw the US deeper into Syria.

Of course, just as the corporate media ignored Fisk’s original reporting from Douma that would have made their own accounts sound like journalistic malpractice, they resolutely ignored the whistleblowers too. You can scour the corporate media and you will be lucky to find even an allusion to the months-long row over the OPCW report, which gained enough real-world prominence to erupt into a major row at the United Nations, including denunciations of the OPCW’s behaviour from the organisation’s former head, Jose Bustani.

This is the way frauds like Katerji are able to ply their own misinformation. They sound credible only because the counter-evidence that would show they are writing nonsense is entirely absent from the mainstream. Only those active on social media and open-minded enough to listen to voices not employed by a major corporate platform (with, in this case, the notable exception of Peter Hitchens of the Daily Mail) are able to find any of this counter-information. It is as if we are living in parallel universes.

The reason why Fisk was so cherished by readers, and why there was a real sense of loss when he died a month ago, was that he was one of the very few journalists who belonged to the mainstream but reported as though he were not beholden to the agenda of his corporate platform.

There were specific reasons for that. Like a handful of others – John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Chris Hedges among them – Fisk made his name in the corporate media at a time when it reluctantly indulged the odd maverick foreign correspondent because they had a habit of exposing war crimes everyone else missed, exclusives that then garnered their publications prestigious journalism awards. Ownership of the media was then far less concentrated, so there was a greater commercial incentive for risk-taking and breaking stories. And these journalists emerged in a period when power was briefly more contested, with the labour movement trying to assert its muscle in the post-war decades, and before western societies were forced by the corporate elite to submit to neoliberal orthodoxy on all matters.

Notably, Pilger, Hersh and Hedges all found themselves struggling to keep a place in the corporate media. Fisk alone managed to cling on. That was more by luck. After being forced out of Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper for breaking a disturbing story in 1989 on the US shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane, he found a new home at Britain’s Independent newspaper, which had been recently founded. As a late-comer to the British media scene, the paper struggled not only to make money but to create a distinctive identity or gain any real visibility. Fisk survived, it seems, because he quickly established himself as one of the very few reasons to buy the paper. He was a rare example of a journalist who was bigger than the outlet he served.

Readers trusted him because he not only refused to submit to his peers’ herd-think but endlessly called them out as journalistically and intellectually lazy.

Those now trying to tarnish his good name are actually inverting the truth. They want to suggest that support for Fisk was cultish and he was hero-worshipped by those incapable of thinking critically. They will say as much about this piece. So let me point out that I am not without my own criticisms of Fisk. I wrote, for example, an article criticising some unsubstantiated claims he made during Israel’s massive bombardment of Lebanon in 2006.

But my criticism was precisely the opposite of the blue-tick crowd now traducing him. I questioned Fisk for striving to find an implausible middle ground with those establishment blue ticks (before we knew what blue ticks were) by hedging his bets about who was responsible for the destruction of Lebanon. It was a rare, if understandable, example of journalistic timidity from Fisk – a desire to maintain credibility with his peers, and a reluctance to follow through on where the evidence appeared to lead. Maybe this was a run-in with the pro-Israel crowd and the corporate journalists who echo them that, on this occasion, he did not think worth fighting.

The discomfort Fisk aroused in his peers was all too obvious to anyone working in the corporate media, even in its liberal outlets, as I was during the 1990s. I never heard a good word said about Fisk at the Guardian or the Observer. His death has allowed an outpouring of resentment towards him that built up over decades from journalists jealous of the fact that no readers will mourn or remember their own passing.

Fisk’s journalism spoke up for the downtrodden and spoke directly to the reader rather than, as with his colleagues, pandering to editors in the hope of career advancement. In the immediate wake of his death, his colleagues’ disdain for Fisk was veiled in weaselly language. As Media Lens have noted, the favourite term used to describe him in obituaries, even in his own newspaper, was “controversial”.

“It turns out that the term ‘controversial’ is only applied in corporate media to political writers and leaders deemed ‘controversial’ by elite interests.

“This was unwittingly made clear by the big brains at the BBC who noted that Fisk ‘drew controversy for his sharp criticism of the US and Israel, and of Western foreign policy’. If Fisk had drawn ‘controversy’ from China, Iran or North Korea, the ‘weasel word’ would not have appeared in the Beeb’s analysis…

“In corporate media newspeak, ‘controversial’ can actually be translated as ‘offensive to power’. The term is intended as a scare word to warn readers that the labelled person is ‘dodgy’, ‘suspect’: ‘Handle with care!’ The journalist is also signalling to his or her editors and other colleagues: ‘I’m not one of “them”!’”

The journalists who now claim Fisk was a fraud and fantasist are many of those who happily worked for papers that readily promoted the gravest lies imaginable to rationalise an illegal attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. Those publications eagerly supported lies supplied by the US and British governments that Iraq had WMD and that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was colluding with al-Qaeda – claims that were easily disprovable at the time.

Journalists now attacking Fisk include ones, like the Guardian’s Jessica Elgot, who have been at the forefront of advancing the evidence-free antisemitism smears against Corbyn. Or, like the Guardian’s Hannah Jane Parkinson, have engaged in another favourite corporate journalist pastime, ridiculing the plight of Julian Assange, a fellow journalist who puts their craven stenography to shame and who is facing a lifetime in a US super-max jail for revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even the Guardian’s Jason Burke, who claims to have experienced Fisk’s lying first-hand while working for the Observer newspaper in 2001 (as was I at that time), has been unable to come up with the goods when challenged, as the pitiable Twitter thread retweeted here confirms:

Noticeably, there is a pattern to the claims of those now maligning Fisk: they hurry to tell us that he was an inspiration in their student days. They presumably think that mentioning this will suggest their disillusionment was hard-earned and therefore make it sound more plausible. But actually it suggests something different.

It indicates instead that in their youthful idealism they aspired to become a journalist who would dig out the truth, who would monitor centres of power, who would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. To do, in fact, exactly what Fisk did.

But once they got a footing on the corporate career ladder, they slowly learnt that they would need to adopt a more “nuanced” approach to journalism – certainly if they hoped to progress up that ladder, earning the right to their blue tick, and gaining a big enough salary to cover the mortgage in London or New York.

In other words, they became everything they despised in their student days. Fisk was the constant reminder of just how much they had sold out. His very existence shamed them for what they were too cowardly to do themselves. And now in death, when he cannot answer back, they are feasting on his corpse like the vultures that they are, until there is nothing left to remind us that, unlike them, Robert Fisk told uncomfortable truths to the very end.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/


River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Sunday, 1 November 2020

MUST SEE interview of Glenn Greenwald MUST SEE

Via The Saker

October 29, 2020

Note: listen to what a REAL progressive/Leftist thinks of the Dems and what they represent!


River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Saturday, 19 September 2020

Julian Assange trial: the mask of Empire has fallen


Julian Assange trial: the mask of Empire has fallen

Source

September 18, 2020

By Pepe Escobar with permission from the author and first posted at Asia Times

The concept of “History in the making” has been pushed to extremes when it comes to the extraordinary public service being performed by historian, former UK diplomat and human rights activist Craig Murray.

Murray – literally, and on a global level – is now positioned as our man in the public gallery, as he painstakingly documents in vivid detail what could be defined as the trial of the century as far as the practice of journalism is concerned: the kangaroo court judging Julian Assange in Old Bailey, London.

Let’s focus on three of Murray’s reports this week – with an emphasis on two intertwined themes: what the US is really prosecuting, and how Western corporate media is ignoring the court proceedings.

Here, Murray reports the exact moment when the mask of Empire fell, not with a bang, but a whimper:

“The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information.” (italics mine).

“All journalists” means every legitimate journalist, from every nationality, operating in any jurisdiction.

Interpreting the argument, Murray added, “the US government is now saying, completely explicitly, in court, those reporters could and should have gone to jail and that is how we will act in future. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the “great liberal media” of the US are not in court to hear it and do not report it (italics mine), because of their active complicity in the “othering” of Julian Assange as something sub-human whose fate can be ignored. Are they really so stupid as not to understand that they are next?

Err, yes.”

The point is not that self-described paladins of “great liberal media” are stupid. They are not covering the charade in Old Bailey because they are cowards. They must keep their fabled “access” to the bowels of Empire – the kind of “access” that allowed Judith Miller to “sell” the illegal war on Iraq in countless front pages, and allows CIA asset and uber-opportunist Bob Woodward to write his “insider” books.

Nothing to see here

Previously, Murray had already detailed how “the mainstream media are turning a blind eye. There were three reporters in the press gallery, one of them an intern and one representing the NUJ. Public access continues to be restricted and major NGOs, including Amnesty, PEN and Reporters Without Borders, continue to be excluded both physically and from watching online.”

Murray also detailed how “the six of us allowed in the public gallery, incidentally, have to climb 132 steps to get there, several times a day. As you know, I have a very dodgy ticker; I am with Julian’s dad John who is 78; and another of us has a pacemaker.”

So why is he “the man in the public gallery”? “I do not in the least discount the gallant efforts of others when I explain that I feel obliged to write this up, and in this detail, because otherwise the vital basic facts of the most important trial this century, and how it is being conducted, would pass almost completely unknown to the public. If it were a genuine process, they would want people to see it, not completely minimize attendance both physically and online.”

Unless people around the world are reading Murray’s reports – and very few others with much less detail – they will ignore immensely important aspects plus the overall appalling context of what’s really happening in the heart of London. The main fact, as far as journalism is concerned, is that Western corporate media is completely ignoring it.

Let’s check the UK coverage on Day 9, for instance.

There was no article in The Guardian – which cannot possibly cover the trial because the paper, for years, was deep into no holds barred smearing and total demonization of Julian Assange.

There was nothing on The Telegraph – very close to MI6 – and only a brief AP story on the Daily Mail.

There was a brief article in The Independent only because one of the witnesses, Eric Lewis, is one of the directors of the Independent Digital News and Media Ltd which publishes the paper.

For years, the process of degrading Julian Assange to sub-human level was based on repeating a bunch of lies so often they become truth. Now, the conspiracy of silence about the trial does wonders to expose the true face of Western liberal “values” and liberal “democracy”.

Daniel Ellsberg speaks

Murray provided absolutely essential context for what Daniel “Pentagon Papers” Ellsberg made it very clear in the witness stand.

The Afghan War logs published by WikiLeaks were quite similar to low-level reports Ellsberg himself had written about Vietnam. The geopolitical framework is the same: invasion and occupation, against the interests of the absolute majority of the invaded and occupied.

Murray, illustrating Ellsberg, writes that “the war logs had exposed a pattern of war crimes: torture, assassination and death squads. The one thing that had changed since Vietnam was that these things were now so normalized they were classified below Top Secret.”

This is a very important point. All the Pentagon Papers were in fact Top Secret. But crucially, the WikiLeaks papers were not Top Secret: in fact they were below Top Secret, not subject to restricted distribution. So they were not really sensitive – as the United States government now alleges.

On the by now legendary Collateral Murder video, Murray details Ellsberg’s argument: “Ellsberg stated that it definitely showed murder, including the deliberate machine gunning of a wounded and unarmed civilian. That it was murder was undoubted. The dubious word was “collateral”, which implies accidental. What was truly shocking about it was the Pentagon reaction that these war crimes were within the Rules of Engagement. Which permitted murder.”

The prosecution cannot explain why Julian Assange withheld no less than 15,000 files; how he took a lot of time to redact the ones that were published; and why both the Pentagon and the State Dept. refused to collaborate with WikiLeaks. Murray: “Ten years later, the US Government has still not been able to name one single individual who was actually harmed by the WikiLeaks releases.”

Prometheus Bound 2.0

President Trump has made two notorious references to WikiLeaks on the record: “I love WikiLeaks” and “I know nothing about WikiLeaks”. That may reveal nothing on how a hypothetical Trump 2.0 administration would act if Julian Assange was extradited to the US. What we do now is that the most powerful Deep State factions want him “neutralized”. Forever.

I felt compelled to portray Julian Assange’s plight as Prometheus Bound 2.0. In this poignant post-modern tragedy, the key subplot centers on a deadly blow to true journalism, in the sense of speaking truth to power.

Julian Assange continues to be treated as an extremely dangerous criminal, as his partner Stella Moris describes it in a tweet.

Craig Murray will arguably enter History as the central character in a very small chorus warning us all about the tragedy’s ramifications.

It’s also quite fitting that the tragedy is also a commentary on a previous era that featured, unlike Blake’s poem, a Marriage of Hell and Hell: GWOT and OCO (Global War on Terror, under George W. Bush, and Overseas Contingency Operations under Barack Obama).

Julian Assange is being condemned for revealing imperial war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet in the end all that post-9/11 sound and fury signified nothing.

It actually metastasized into the worst imperial nightmare: the emergence of a prime, compounded peer competitor, the Russia-China strategic partnership.

“Not here the darkness, in this twittering world” (T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton). An army of future Assanges awaits.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!