Manufacturing Consent

Juan Cole on Pakistan

Manufacturing Consent, US foreign policy
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Juan Cole agrees with me on the American view of Pakistan:

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan’s nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

Like I said Saturday, mistrust of democracy has always been a staple of US foreign policy. It’s not surprising that US government sources consistantly overstate the dangers of the Taliban in Pakistan or the importance of the campaign against it; for the US government, the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan is the most important security issue there as it impacts on American operations in Afghanistan.

What is surprising is how far the western news media have internalised this attitude. Not only do they agree with this and present news from Pakistan in the context of the war against the Taliban, but the idea that this war might just be less important to Pakistan itself, that the Taliban is to the Pakistani state as the ETA is to Spain, an important security problem but not a fundamental challenge is almost never mentioned. Pakistan is constantly judged on whether it achieves American goals and nobody thinks this strange. As if we’ve lost the ability to understand any other viewpoint but the American one.

Silencing academic criticism of Zionism

Manufacturing Consent
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Joel Kovel is a well known American politician and academic, who made the mistake in 2007 to write a book (mildly) critical of zionism. For this he has had to suffer through accusations of anti-semitism and now his employer, Bard College, has fired him:

This document argues that this termination of service is prejudicial and motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism. There is of course much more to my years at Bard than this, including another controversial subject, my work on ecosocialism (/The Enemy of Nature/). However, the evidence shows a pattern of conflict over Zionism only too reminiscent of innumerable instances in this country in which critics of Israel have been made to pay, often with their careers, for speaking out. In this instance the process culminated in a deeply flawed
evaluation process which was used to justify my termination from the faculty.

Meanwhile John Yoo is still at Berkeley…

Louis Proyect has more information.

The strictly impartial BBC, operating on behalf of the Israeli government

Auntie Beeb, Manufacturing Consent, War on Gaza
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To update an old Young Ones joke. As seen on Prog Gold, the current BBC’s director general is quite cozy with the Israeli government, which of course did not influence the decision to remain impartial by not broadcasting an appeal for the IDF’s victims. Now Ellis Sharp reminds us that he has been impartial towards Israel from the start of his tenure when in 2004 the then Middle East correspondent was transferred to Africa:

Orla Guerin’s offence was to run stories not just about the grief of Israeli families who had lost family members to suicide bombers but also stories about the grief and suffering of ordinary Palestinian families. As one blogger put it at the time:

Guerin’s real sin, of course, is to show some sympathy for the victims of the Israeli bombing (that’s enough to brand her a “terrorist”).

Within days of Thompson meeting Sharon, Guerin was sacked as BBC TV Middle East correspondent and transferred to Africa.

As you’ll remember, Thompson became director general because his predecessor had to resign after the BBC got caught on a technicality and was keelhauled for it in the aftermath of the Hutton Inquiry. Thompson was brought in as very much a pair of safe hands who wouldn’t rock the boat, follow the establishment line ever more so than his predecessors and not embarass the government. Despite this, there have been several scandals during his tenure, from running unwinnable contests to sexing up a documentary about the royal family to of course the Ross/Brands clusterfuck. This seemed to have made the BBC gunshy, prone to overreact and moreover, seemed to have lost the corporation its political nous.

So while the BBC has always been careful to not upset Israel or its zionist cheerleaders in the UK, always had an internal bias towards Israel, it used to be much more subtle about this. Even five years ago, I don’t think it would’ve been so blatant as to refuse air time to a genuinely humanitarian appeal for the inhabitants of Gaza. But because the corporation has been so battered by the same politicians and tabloids that are such great friends of Israel as well, because it has been caught with its pants down so often lately, it has overreacted. And now even those people who are normally the first to accuse it of a pro-Palestinian bias are disgusted.

Poor Auntie Beeb. It just cannot win.

Plucky little Georgia not so innocent after all

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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If there ever was a texbook example of Chomsky’s and Herman’s propaganda model in action, it was the way in which the conventional narrative about the War for South Ossetia was created this August. It was …interesting… to see how quickly western media, (with a little prompting from Washington and London) settled on a cod-Cold War story of plucky little Georgia standing up to the mad and dangerous Russian bear, while still reporting the war as it happened. On the one hand you had journalists correctly reporting how escalating tensions finally led to a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia followed by a Russian response, on the other hand you had the op-ed pages and other commentary roundly condemning this latest example of Russian aggression. As the news cycle moved on the facts of the war disappeared, eclipsed by new news events while the story remained, now firmly established as background assumptions to further reports about the war and its aftermath.

Which is why it’s good to see the BBC reporting that the Georgians were not so innocent after all, even if it comes months too late:

Marina Kochieva, a doctor in the regional capital Tskhinvali’s main hospital, told our reporters that she and three relatives were targeted by a Georgian tank as they were trying to escape by car from the town on the night of 9 August.

She said the tank fired on her car and two other vehicles, leading them to crash into a ditch. The firing continued as she and her companions lay on the ground, she added.

Georgy Tadtayev, a 21-year-old dental student, was one of the Ossetian civilians killed during the fighting.

His mother, Taya Sitnik, 45, told the BBC he bled to death in her arms on the morning of 9 August after a fragment from a Georgian tank shell hit him in the throat as they were both sheltering from artillery fire in the basement of her block of flats.

It confirms what I thought from the start: Saakashvili tried to ethnically cleanse the Ossetians and it backfired, not so much on him as on the Georgian inhabitants of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, who in turn were cleansed from those regions. Saakashvili gambled that Russia was too weak to intervene or that his western backers would help him and he lost.

Ragemongering

Manufacturing Consent, Nu Labour
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Justice secretary Jack Straw says prisons exist to punish criminals and attacks the “criminal justice lobby [sic] for putting the needs of offenders before those of victims”. Immigration minister Phil Woolas says a tough new points-based system to limit non-EU immigration is needed to make sure the UK won’t reach a population of seventy million. Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell, a while back said the unemployed should be made to work for their benefits.

Three examples of ragemongering, pandering to the worst instincts of the tabloids. Unlike America where fear and hatred of the stranger seems the paramount emotion driving the rightwing press, in the UK it seems to be anger and rage at everybody getting one over on ordinary, decent hardworking folk. Scroungers getting money for nothing from my hard earned wages, criminals mollycoddled by those leftie lawyers, bloody foreigners coming over here and getting everything handed on a silver platter, those are all tabloid stock villains. Amongst a certain part of the electorate there’s a deep rooted conviction that other people are getting away with murder and a strong desire to see them punished for it. It’s a well conditioned reflex that New Labour has been nurturing ever since they first got in power, by a torrent of ill considered and needless legislation designed to trigger these sentiments. Because if there’s one thing New Labour has internalised is that they need the tabloids behind them to remain in power.

For Gordon Brown it must be slightly worrying that such a big hitter like Jack Straw is engaging in this tactic now, just when Gordon himself is widely praised for his handling of the credit crisis, after such a long period of tabloid dissatisfaction with the Designated Successor. It may just be a sign that Gordon’s political position is not as secure as it seems to be, that Straw is positioning himself for a possible leadership battle in the near future. Ragemongering after all can also be used to raise your own profile, rather than that of the party…