> > Better to talk about film.
> >
> > Kathy Agar
>
>Here here.
>
>I'll join in the discussion on the representation of the
>Middle East in US film etc. when it starts to cool down in
>here. Can others do the same?
>
>Damian
yeah, why not DAmian. Now that Bush & Co are preparing a response that will
result in far more human tragedies than we have seen in the last week what
an innapropriate time to have a discussion that moves out of the realms of
theory.
ssshhh...don't mention the war
posted below is a group e-mail i received the other day from Paul Laverty,
Loach's collaborator. If you're heads buried in the sand you won;t be a ble
to read it.
all the best
davie
Just a quick note to say hello. I am presently in Tuscon, USA. Iciar is
teaching in the University of Arizona for the next three months and I'll be
here for the next week or so. For the last two days I've seen wall to wall
TV, - I only have access to some 40 stations - there are dozens more, but it
has made very depressing viewing. There are lots of handsome squared jawed
anchor men with deep velvet voices connected up to hundreds of journalists
around the country. There have been some stunning and heart breaking
interviews and images. In the middle of all this I kept trying to phone New
York where at least two of my first cousins work in Manhattan, but of course
it was impossible to get a connection. (My Mum told me she thought one of my
cousins Michelle who is an accountant at one time worked in and out of the
World Trade Centre.) Via a call from New York to Ireland then to Scotland
and back again to me I found out they were all safe and sound.
One image is ingrained in my head. A stunned professional, covered in dust,
fumed at the camera, "It's not my war. Keep it over there". I think this is
the key to it; the fatal gap. Here we had a well trained sophisticated
professional who no doubt understands the markets, trade and international
finance better than most displaying a terrifying naivete. Most people here
have absolutely no idea what the US Government has done, or is doing, with
money raised from their tax dollars in other parts of the world. They see no
connection between funds raised from them, and used by their Government.
They see no connection between themselves and "over there".
This struck me particularly for the following reason; most of the TV
stations had a merry go round of the usual experts, mostly ex cia, ex
national security and politicians. Faces I remember from the US war with
Nicaragua were particularly hawkish eg Lawrence Eagleburgher "We'll have to
do some tough things that will get the liberals all excited..." Brezinski,
McCain too, and many others. Norman Schwartzkopf "We target military. These
bastards target civilians. That's the difference between us and them."
Anchor, "Well put General."
Listening to these men I was reminded of the day the World Court at the
Hague found the US Government guilty of nine different violations of
International law against Nicaragua in the eighties. On the very same day,
in a total and premeditated snub to international law, BOTH arms of
Government, House of Representatives and Senate, voted another 100 million
tax payers dollars to the Contra whose modus operandi according to Amnesty
International and Americas Watch was the systematic targeting of cvilians.
"It's not my war. Keep it over there."
Somoza can be replaced by Marcos, by Pinochet, by Rios Mont, by Mobutu, by
the Shah of Iran, by hundreds of others all around the world, supported by
US tax dollars, who buthchered
and murdered civilians in their thousands....."It's not my war, keep it over
there."
I am writing to you from the University of Arizona which has a student body
of 35 thousand students. In the middle of this enormous campus they have put
up a "wall of expression" for the student body to record their views. I
walked round it yesterday. Most of the contributions are of a religious
nature. Many, understandably, display solidarity with families of deceased
or injured. Apart from one mindless scrawl "Smash the system" I could only
find one contribution, mild in nature in faintly reflective mode. It went
something like this. "WE have to ask not only how this happened, but why.
Perhaps it has something to do with the US role in the world and the power
of its military?" Scrawled over it, in a thick red marker someone penned
"Fucking traitor."
The uniformity of every station has been remarkable. Tough questions have
not been asked and certainly recent history eg who trained Bin Laden or
Husein, have not been raised. Even on a University campus, (several Arab
students have been threatened) ignorance is alive and kicking. Several
congressmen attached to a group called "Empower America" have called for a
declaration of war and even less extreme so called mainstream politicians
have called for a "festival of patriotism." We can take it as read this
will not mean more citizens being encouraged to find out what has been and
will be done in their name.
The most depressing news this morning, if the report is accurate, is a poll
by CBS stating that 66% of Americans support retaliation even if it means
killing innocent civilians. To anyone with a sense of history I'm tempted to
ask, "What's new?"
The big thick red marker of censorship is just starting I fear. TV has been
abysmal but I did find one excellent internet site some of you might be
interested in. (cf undermentioned article by Robert Fisk.) It is
www.zmag.org/weluser.htm
Excuse rushed note. Hope you are all well. In the midst of all this trumped
up hypocrisy, chauvinism (Colin Powell...We're Americans...we don't walk
around scared...) and crude ignorance it has been good to spend some time
with Lucas who is one year old tomorrow. He has not been impressed by the
coverage and has been making excellent pig noises at the anchormen.
Best,
Paul
The awesome cruelty
of a doomed people
By Robert Fisk
So it has come to this. The entire modern history of the Middle East -
the collapse of the Ottoman
empire, the Balfour declaration, Lawrence of Arabia's lies, the Arab
revolt, the foundation of the
state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and the 34 years of Israel's
brutal occupation of Arab land - all
erased within hours as those who claim to represent a crushed,
humiliated population struck back
with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people. Is it fair -
is it moral - to write this so
soon, without proof, without a shred of evidence, when the last act of
barbarism in Oklahoma turned
out to be the work of home-grown Americans? I fear it is. America is at
war and, unless I am
grotesquely mistaken, many thousands more are now scheduled to die in
the Middle East, perhaps
in America too. Some of us warned of "the explosion to come''. But we
never dreamed this
nightmare.
And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind, his money, his theology, his
frightening dedication to
destroy American power. I have sat in front of bin Laden as he described
how his men helped to
destroy the Russian army in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their
boundless confidence
allowed them to declare war on America. But this is not the war of
democracy vs terror that the world
will be asked to believe in the coming hours and days. It is also about
American missiles smashing
into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a
Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and
American shells crashing into a village called Qana a few days later and
about a Lebanese militia -
paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and
murdering their way through
refugee camps.
No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has
happened in the United States.
That Palestinians could celebrate the massacre of 20,000, perhaps 35,000
innocent people is not
only a symbol of their despair but of their political immaturity, of
their failure to grasp what they had
always been accusing their Israeli enemies of doing: acting
disproportionately. But we were
warned. All the years of rhetoric, all the promises to strike at the
heart of America, to cut off the head
of "the American snake'' we took for empty threats. How could a
backward, conservative,
undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and small, violent
organizations fulfil such preposterous
promises? Now we know.
And in the hours that followed yesterday's annihilation, I began to
remember those other
extraordinary, unbelievable assaults upon the US and its allies,
miniature now by comparison with
yesterdays' casualties. Did not the suicide bombers who killed 241
American servicemen and
almost 100 french paratroops in Beirut on 23 October 1983, time their
attacks with unthinkable
precision?
It was just 7 seconds between the Marine bombing and the destruction of
the French three miles
away. Then there were the attacks on US bases in Saudi Arabia, and last
year's attempt - almost
successful it now turns out - to sink the USS Cole in Aiden. And then
how easy was our failure to
recognize the new weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans or
any other Westerners
could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.
All America's power, wealth - and arrogance, the Arabs will be saying -
could not defend the
greatest power the world has ever known from this destruction.
For journalists, even those who have literally walked through the blood
of the Middle East, words dry
up here. Awesome, terrible, unspeakable, unforgivable; in the coming
days, these words will
become water in the desert. And there will be, naturally and inevitably,
and quite immorally, an
attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the blood and the
injustices that lie behind yesterday's
firestorms. We will be told about "mindless terrorism'', the "mindless"
bit being essential if we are
not to realise how hated America has become in the land of the birth of
three great religions.
Ask an Arab how he responds to 20 or 30 thousand innocent deaths and he
or she will respond as
good and decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But they
will ask why we did not
use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of
perhaps half a million children
in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon,
why we allowed one nation in the Middle East to ignore UN Security
Council resolutions but bombed
and sanctioned all others who did. And those basic reasons why the
Middle East caught fire last
September - the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of
Palestinians, the
bombardments and state sponsored executions, the Israeli tortures ...
all these must be obscured
lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for yesterday's mass
savagery.
No, Israel was not to blame - that we can be sure that Saddam Hussein
and the other grotesque
dictators will claim so - but the malign influence of history and our
share in its burden must surely
stand in the dark with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps
even our destruction of
the Ottoman Empire, led inevitably to this tragedy. America has
bankrolled Israel's wars for so many
years that it believed this would be cost-free. No longer so. It would
be an act of extraordinary
courage and wisdom if the United States was to pause for a moment and
reflect upon its role in the
world, the indifference of its government to the suffering of Arabs, the
indolence of its current
president.
But of course, the United States will want to strike back against "world
terror'', who can blame them?
Indeed, who could ever point the finger at Americans now for using that
pejorative and sometimes
racist word "terrorism''? There will be those swift to condemn any
suggestion that we should look for
real historical reasons for an act of violence on this world-war scale.
But unless we do so, then we
are facing a conflict the like of which we have not seen since Hitler's
death and the surrender of
Japan. Korea, Vietnam, is beginning to fade away in comparison.
Eight years ago, I helped to make a television series that tried to
explain why so many Muslims had
come to hate the West. Last night, I remembered some of those Muslims in
that film, their families
burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. They talked about how no one
would help them but
God. Theology vs technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear
power. Now we have learnt
what this means.
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