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American
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May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
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John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
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May 11, 2002
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The Holy Lands:
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Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
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the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
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Lisa Taraki
In Defense
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Jack McCarthy
Snitch Envy: Hitchens, Brock and
Whitaker Chambers
John Jonik
Tobacco
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Vijay Prashad
Fettered Histories:
Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid
on Islam
Bill Christison
A
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Omar Barghouti
Israel's Best Interest
May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
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Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
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James
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Hysteria
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Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
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Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
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May 13,
2002
Hate and Star
Power
Why Does Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
by Robert Fisk
The
Independent
It used to be just a trickle, a steady drip-drip
of hate mail which arrived once a week, castigating me for reporting
on the killing of innocent Lebanese under Israeli air raids or
for suggesting that Arabs--as well as Israelis--wanted peace
in the Middle East. It began to change in the late 1990s. Typical
was the letter which arrived after I wrote my eyewitness account
of the 1996 slaughter by Israeli gunners of 108 refugees sheltering
in the UN base in the Lebanese town of Qana.
"I do not like or admire anti-Semites,"
it began. "Hitler was one of the most famous in recent history".
Yet compared to the avalanche of vicious, threatening letters
and openly violent statements that we journalists receive today,
this was comparatively mild. For the internet seems to have turned
those who do not like to hear the truth about the Middle East
into a community of haters, sending venomous letters not only
to myself but to any reporter who dares to criticise Israel--or
American policy in the Middle East.
There was always, in the past, a limit
to this hatred. Letters would be signed with the writer's address.
Or if not, they would be so-ill-written as to be illegible. Not
any more. In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so
many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now
demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich
did just that, telling the Cambridge Union that he would like
to shoot me.
How, I ask myself, did it come to this?
Slowly but surely, the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement
into death threats, the walls of propriety and legality gradually
pulled down so that a reporter can be abused, his family defamed,
his beating at the hands of an angry crowd greeted with laughter
and insults in the pages of an American newspaper, his life cheapened
and made vulnerable by an actor who--without even saying why--says
he wants to kill me.
Much of this disgusting nonsense comes
from men and women who say they are defending Israel, although
I have to say that I have never in my life received a rude or
insulting letter from Israel itself. Israelis sometimes express
their criticism of my reporting--and sometimes their praise--but
they have never stooped to the filth and obscenities which I
now receive.
"Your mother was Eichmann's daughter,"
was one of the most recent of these. My mother Peggy, who died
after a long battle with Parkinson's three and a half years ago,
was in fact an RAF radio repair operator on Spitfires at the
height of the Battle of Britain in 1940.
The events of 11 September turned the
hate mail white hot. That day, in an airliner high over the Atlantic
that had just turned back from its routing to America, I wrote
an article for The Independent, pointing out that there would
be an attempt in the coming days to prevent anyone asking why
the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington had occurred.
Dictating my report from the aircraft's satellite phone, I wrote
about the history of deceit in the Middle East, the growing Arab
anger at the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children under US-supported
sanctions, and the continued occupation of Palestinian land in
the West Bank and Gaza by America's Israeli ally. I didn't blame
Israel. I suggested that Osama bin Laden was responsible.
But the e-mails that poured into The
Independent over the next few days bordered on the inflammatory.
The attacks on America were caused by "hate itself, of precisely
the obsessive and dehumanising kind that Fisk and Bin Laden have
been spreading," said a letter from a Professor Judea Pearl
of UCLA. I was, he claimed, "drooling venom" and a
professional "hate peddler". Another missive, signed
Ellen Popper, announced that I was "in cahoots with the
archterrorist" Bin Laden. Mark Guon labelled me "a
total nut-case". I was "psychotic," according
to Lillie and Barry Weiss. Brandon Heller of San Diego informed
me that "you are actually supporting evil itself".
It got worse. On an Irish radio show,
a Harvard professor--infuriated by my asking about the motives
for the atrocities of 11 September--condemned me as a "liar"
and a "dangerous man" and announced that "anti-Americanism"--whatever
that is--was the same as anti-Semitism. Not only was it wicked
to suggest that someone might have had reasons, however deranged,
to commit the mass slaughter. It was even more appalling to suggest
what these reasons might be. To criticise the United States was
to be a Jew-hater, a racist, a Nazi.
And so it went on. In early December,
I was almost killed by a crowd of Afghan refugees who were enraged
by the recent slaughter of their relatives in American B-52 air-raids.
I wrote an account of my beating, adding that I could not blame
my attackers, that if I had suffered their grief, I would have
done the same. There was no end to the abuse that came then.
In The Wall Street Journal, Mark Steyn
wrote an article under a headline saying that a "multiculturalist"--me--had
"got his due." Cards arrived bearing the names of London
"whipping" parlours. The Independent's web-site received
an e-mail suggesting that I was a paedophile. Among several vicious
Christmas cards was one bearing the legend of the 12 Days of
Christmas and the following note inside: "Robert Fiske (sic)--aka
Lord Haw Haw of the Middle East and a leading anti-semite &
proto-fascist Islamophile propagandist. Here's hoping 2002 finds
you deep in Gehenna (Hell), Osama bin Laden on your right, Mullah
Omar on your left. Yours, Ishmael Zetin."
Since Ariel Sharon's offensive in the
West Bank, provoked by the Palestinians' wicked suicide bombing,
a new theme has emerged. Reporters who criticise Israel are to
blame for inciting anti-Semites to burn synagogues. Thus it is
not Israel's brutality and occupation that provokes the sick
and cruel people who attack Jewish institutions, synagogues and
cemeteries. We journalists are to blame.
Almost anyone who criticises US or Israeli
policy in the Middle East is now in this free-fire zone. My own
colleague in Jerusalem, Phil Reeves, is one of them. So are two
of the BBCs' reporters in Israel, along with Suzanne Goldenberg
of The Guardian. And take Jennifer Loewenstein, a human rights
worker in Gaza--who is herself Jewish and who wrote a condemnation
of those who claim that Palestinians are deliberately sacrificing
their children. She swiftly received the following e-mail: "BITCH.
I can smell you from afar. You are a bitch and you have Arab
blood in you. Your mother is a fucking Arab. At least, for God's
sake, change your fucking name. Ben Aviram."
Does this kind of filth have an effect
on others? I fear it does. Only days after Malkovich announced
that he wanted to shoot me, a website claimed that the actor's
words were "a brazen attempt at queue-jumping". The
site contained an animation of my own face being violently punched
by a fist and a caption which said: "I understand why they're
beating the shit out of me."
Thus a disgusting remark by an actor
in the Cambridge Union led to a website suggesting that others
were even more eager to kill me. Malkovich was not questioned
by the police. He might, I suppose, be refused any further visas
to Britain until he explains or apologises for his vile remarks.
But the damage has been done. As journalists, our lives are now
forfeit to the internet haters. If we want a quiet life, we will
just have to toe the line, stop criticising Israel or America.
Or just stop writing altogether.
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