New @ Just Journalism:

London, 27 May 2010 - The UK broadsheet newspapers have ignored the major economic and security advances in the West Bank under Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, surely one of the most newsworthy topics to emerge from the contemporary Middle East. A report published today by Just Journalism contrasts this blinkered approach by British journalists with the keen interest shown by major US publications in the considerable progress made over the last two and a half years.

The report, entitled, "Salam Fayyad and the drive towards Palestinian statehood" is a comprehensive review of relevant coverage over nine months in the five UK broadsheets - The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph - as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine and Newsweek.

The study shows that dramatic improvements for Palestinians in the West Bank - a result of Salam Fayyad's unique leadership, co-operation from Israel and support from the US - have been ignored or severely underplayed in the British press, which generally presented a focus on grassroots improvements simply as a ruse by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stunt political progress.

Writing in the report's foreword, Hussein Ibish, a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, said:

"The Just Journalism report is a welcome contribution to research into media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hopefully it will alert the British press to what certainly appears to be a blind spot in its range of vision on the conflict. What is happening on the ground in the West Bank, initiated by and for Palestinians themselves and designed to both complement negotiations and bring the day of independence forward, deserves more attention than it's received anywhere in the world thus far. It certainly deserves more attention than it appears to have received in the UK."

Just Journalism's Executive Director Michael Weiss commented: "Salam Fayyad is one of the most extraordinary figures to emerge from the Arab-Israeli conflict in decades: a Western-educated technocrat who, not without controversy, has supplanted the idea of armed 'resistance' with the language of interest rates and law and order. Almost as extraordinary as his achievements as prime minister is the British press's utter dismissal of them as unworthy of discussion or debate."

Key findings of the report:

• The US media attribute real importance to Salam Fayyad and his active approach to state-building, whereas the UK media find him to be irrelevant in the grand scheme of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

• Whilst a measure of diversity exists within both the UK and the US, in general, the US media are more supportive of Fayyad and his politics than the UK media

• The UK media identify an emphasis on restarting the Palestinian economy with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom they broadly dislike, whereas the US media identify it with Fayyad's own focus on this subject

• The UK media present the focus on economic improvement in the West Bank as a ruse by Netanyahu to distract focus from reaching a full political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, indicating a strong inclination to emphasise points of conflict over potential co-operation

• UK media coverage of Fayyad is more likely to give ultimate emphasis to the problem of settlements whereas US media coverage does not conflate the subject of economic success in the West Bank with the problem of settlements

Read Just Journalism's report here. Also, see Carmel Gould's opinion piece highlighting its findings in Haaretz here.

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The Guardian's front-page story, 'Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons', by Chris McGreal, was triggered by uncovered documents revealed in 'The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa',a newly published book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a senior editor at the New York-based Foreign Affairs magazine. In his book, Polakow-Suransky claims that the extent to which Israel traded with apartheid South Africa was much greater than had previously been assumed. Drawing on declassified documents from the South African archives, he argues that in 1975, Israeli defence minister Shimon Peres 'formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal' via Peres' counterpart in Johannesburg, P.W. Botha. The supposed codename of this project was 'Chalet'.

Peres, now president of Israel, has vigorously denied these allegations, saying that they have 'no basis in reality.' Additionally, historian Avner Cohen, author of 'Israel and the Bomb', has responded to The Guardian story saying that the 'headline, sub-headline, and lede of Chris McGreal's story are erroneous and misleading' because the documents uncovered by Mr Polakow-Suransky only show that South Africa was probing Israel about the purchase of nuclear weapons, and that the probe ultimately went nowhere. Cohen writes, in a letter posted on The Guardian's website, that any such sale would have to have been authorized by Israel's then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and 'I believe that both Rabin and Shalheveth Freier, the head of the nuclear program, would have opposed the sale of nuclear weapons, technology, or even components -- not just to South Africa, but to anyone. And note that this was 1975, when nonproliferation norms had yet to take shape fully.' [Cohen gave a similar argument in this Independent article.] Polakow-Suransky has elsewhere been asked about the validity of the inferences he's drawn from the 35-year-old documents.

Following Just Journalism's analysis of The Guardian's editorial framing of the McGreal article, our executive director Michael Weiss spoke to Sasha Polakow-Suransky to address The Guardian's coverage, as well as his own view about the moral and ideological analogies between the Jewish state and apartheid South Africa.

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For all its cloistered solipsism, the political culture of Washington, D.C. does produce the occasional insight relevant to American culture at large. 'Failing upwards' is perhaps the shrewdest observation about the rewards of incompetence to find application beyond the Potomac, encompassing everything from Michael Brown's appointment to the directorship of FEMA to Nick Clegg's sleepwalk into England's deputy premiership to Michael Scott's tenure as the district regional manager of the Dunder Miflin Paper Company on The Office. There are people who get away with getting on despite themselves; it's only until the masquerade is uncovered that their peculiar endurance can be assessed after the fact. Failing upwards typically happens to individuals but it can also happen to institutions and political movements.

The recent nomination of Rand Paul to the Kentucky GOP Senate race is the best indication so far that the Republican Party has taken political opposition as an opportunity to burnish the medals of its own defeat, succumbing to an insurgent populism that mistakes Michigan militia-style entryism for a genuine political comeback. Is this failing upwards or succeeding downwards? As David Frum has written, the Crackpot Son Also Rises element to the GOP's electoral strategy could have been easily avoided thanks to the stunningly anticlimactic first year of the Obama administration:

Thus far, Democratic efforts to create a vote-enhancing villain had failed. Now Rand Paul has contrived to volunteer himself. It's as if his mission had been to walk across an empty room without tripping. Instead, he stepped out of the room, rummaged through a hall closet, found a vacuum cleaner, plugged it in, extended the wire, took a dozen steps backward, and then raced forward to catch his ankle, plunge face forward and break his nose. As unforced errors go, this may be one of the most impressively self-destroying in recent U.S. electoral history.

Rand Paul has confessed to agreeing with his father on pretty much everything. That means implicitly endorsing Ron Paul's newsletters and various web "forums" that have for years promoted all manner of conspiracy theories, from the anti-Semitic to the 9/11 denialist. In an interview nearly a year ago with Alex Jones, himself a prominent 9/11 denailist, Paul fils not only acknowledged how closely his politics mirrors his parent's but did so in the course of also affirming the need to hide his true beliefs for the sake of electoral expediency: "I'd say we'd be very very similar. We might present the message sometimes differently.. I think in some ways the message has to be broadened and made more appealing to the entire Republican electorate because you have to win a primary."

Conservatives who suspect Barack Obama of being a Frankenstein creation of Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky would be hard pressed to find a more bald-faced admission of concealed radical motive than in the above statement. If the door for such sinister infiltration had not been left open widely enough, then Paul is happy to pry open a window or two.

The party of Reagan has thus certified a crank who opposes American military supremacy, the wars against Islamic fascism, the detention of jihadists on U.S. soil, the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve, forty years of monetary policy not based on the gold standard, the government's attempt to extirpate institutional racism, the historical outcome of the Civil War and a moral, internationalist foreign policy that includes shows of solidarity with dissidents of totalitarianism.

Rand Paul has conceded that the increased popularity of his politics reflects a 'sort of left-right paradigm,' a uniting isolationism for the post-partisan age. In its bid to 'take back our government,' the Republican Party has in effect auctioned it off to the hive mind of Gore Vidal and Lew Rockwell.

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Not least among Vasily Grossman's great achievements as a Soviet writer was his ability to fashion a true art form out of the procrustean genre of socialist realism. His technique was as simple as it was subversive. Rather than employ his characters as monotone metaphors acting in the service of revolutionary fantasy, he made them into variegated people besieged by revolutionary reality. As the protagonist of Everything Flows, Grossman's third novel, puts it: "The literature that called itself 'realist' was as convention-ridden as the bucolic romances of the eighteenth century. The collective farmers, workers, and peasant women of Soviet literature seemed close kin to those elegant, slim villagers and curly-headed shepherdesses in woodland glades, playing on reed pipes and dancing, surrounded by little white lambs with pretty blue ribbons." Grossman let war, persecution and genocide serve as his backdrop but he was most preoccupied with the fate of ordinary human beings caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Down to the last battlefield commissar, guilt-ridden informant, or NKVD agent, his characters were imbued with a psychological and moral complexity rare for any age, much less a totalitarian one that forced an artistic parade ground upon what Max Eastman once witheringly termed "writers in uniform."

That Grossman survived the twentieth century is no less remarkable than the fact that he became a great Russian novelist in it. He was born in 1905 in the heavily Jewish town of Berdichev. Originally trained as a chemist, he became a famous World War II correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, whose articles were read aloud for inspiration in the ranks of the Red Army, with whom he returned in 1943 to witness Ukraine's "liberation" from Nazi occupation as well as the gruesome discoveries of Babi Yar and Treblinka--and Berdichev. His beloved mother was one of the thirty thousand of Berdichev's Jewish population slaughtered in Hitler's abattoir in the Caucasus. It was a devastating personal loss that furnished one of Grossman's great leitmotifs of maternal nostalgia. He also had the distinction, if the term isn't obscene in this context, of being the first writer in any language to document the death camps. His article, "The Hell of Treblinka," written in 1944, was used by the prosecution as testimonial at Nuremberg.

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Paul Berman's Flight of the Intellectuals may only recapitulate much of what's been said and screamed over the Western intelligentsia's embrace of the charismatic Islamist Tariq Ramadan and and its wincing alienation of the atheist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but if that's all it does, it'll be enough. Friendships and intellectual alliances are still being broken over which side a certain novelist or poet or essayist took during the Cold War. Ours is nothing if not a century of acceleration that, not a decade in, we're already tallying up the scorecard for les clercs when it comes to the new ideological struggle. Anthony Julius has favorably reviewed Flight of the Intellectuals in this weekend's New York Times Book Review and Berman has given a characteristically shrewd interview to Michael Totten on that ever fruitful subject of the great abandonment of liberal principles.

Paul Berman: [Ramadan is] against bigotry, he's against anti-Semitism, he's against terrorism, he's for the rights of women, he's in favor of democratic liberties, he's for a tolerant and multi-religious society ruled ultimately by secular values. He's for science, learning, and enlightenment. He's in favor of every possible good thing. There isn't a single objectionable point in the first fifteen minutes of his presentation.

MJT: Yes.

Paul Berman: Unfortunately, the sixteenth minute arrives, and, if you are still paying attention, you learn that he wants us to revere the most vicious and reactionary of Islamist sheikhs -- the people who promote violence, bigotry, totalitarianism, and terror. The sixteenth minute is not good. The liberal quality of his thinking falls apart entirely.

However, his liberal admirers in the Western press stop paying attention in the fifteenth minute, and they rush to acclaim him. They do it by mistake. That's one reason.

But they are motivated also by something else. I think a lot of people without Muslim backgrounds have a hard time imagining how vast and complex and huge and finally ordinary the Muslim world is. There are a billion and a half Muslims, and they do have more than one opinion. But I think a lot of journalists and intellectuals whose experiences are mostly European or Western somehow end up imagining that the whole of Islam constitutes a single thing. They imagine that some single terrible error has occurred within Islam. And they imagine that the single terrible error is going to be undone and corrected by a single messianic figure. So they go about surveying the horizon looking for the grand good guy, the single person who is going to rescue us from the single terrible error.

On this basis, we have ended up with a lot of liberal-minded journalists who proclaim themselves to be the enemies of racism and bigotry, and who engage, even so, in the worst sort of stereotyping of a vast portion of mankind, in their enthusiastic quest for the great Muslim hope. These people hear the first fifteen minutes of Tariq Ramadan's presentation, they leap from their seats and they say, "There he is. We found him." And they rush into print to proclaim the good news.

These points are well taken but there's another motivating force in the sleazy cozying up to Ramadan by people who ought to know better. If Berman's book has a complementary volume this publishing season, it is Pascal Bruckner's brilliant The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, which poses the question of Western deference to enemies of the West as both an expiation of past sins as well as a coping mechanism for present decline. Though this may seem unbearably French of him, Bruckner argues that postcolonial self-abnegation is just colonial triumphalism turned on its head:

Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West, that passion for cursing and lacerating ourselves. By issuing their anathemas, the high priests of defamation only signal their membership in the universe they reject. The suspicion that hovers over our most brilliant successes always threatens to degenerate into facile defeatism. The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind it only ruins. A new dogma of demolition is born out of the rejection of dogmas.

Thus we Euro-Americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off self-denunciation while taking a strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification. Evil can come from us; other people are motivated by sympathy, good will, candor. This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history. Since Freud we know that masochism is only a reversed sadism, a passion for domination turned against oneself. Europe is still messianic in a minor key, campaigning for its own weakness, exporting humility and wisdom. Its obvious scorn for itself does not conceal a very great infatuation. Barbarity is Europe's great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of denying them all responsibility).

And by way of projection, anything said or done by a Muslim who rejects the West is intrinsically better than anything said or done by a Muslim who accepts the West, a condition that Bruckner has previously diagnosed the "racism of the anti-racists." So when Ramadan was caught live on French television saying in plain French that he only believed in a "moratorium" on stoning women to death, he knew that he'd be excused for certifying barbarity because his pedigree as the heir to one of the founders of Islamic liberation theology would be all the excuse that he needed. Indeed, one of Julius's more prosaic moments in his review is to express surprise that Ramadan needn't deploy the shabby patois of postmodernism when ventilating his most noxious views; for instance, he's quite open about his anti-Semitism. Well, of course he is. He can be.

What Berman and Bruckner elegantly expose is what I would call the "ought/is" distinction in evaluating Islamist politics. Everyone ought to be for the emancipation of women, the promotion of liberal democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of and from religion, equality and so on; but everyone is not really for these things beyond the realm of rhetoric--and sometimes not even then. As Orwell intuited long before Al Qaeda came along, the easiest way for the Western intellectual to indulge a cryptic or unselfconscious pleasure in totalitarianism is to make apologies for the actions of totalitarians. If Ayaan Hirsi Ali wanted to really ingratiate herself with Ian Buruma and Tim Garton Ash, she'd have said that Theo van Gogh had it coming and then personally begged forgiveness for causing any emotional distress to his killer.

In my experience, there is only one way to scandalize a left-wing apologist of Islamism, although the returns diminish as soon as the exchange is concluded and the apologist regains his moorings, safely rationalized out of an alien moral quandary. The way to do this is to ask him which side Hamas take in the genocide in Darfur. If ever there were a prime time atrocity that unites in outrage all sane people, progressive and apolitical alike, no doubt reaffirmed by the knowledge that nothing substantive will be done to stop it, it's the systematic murder, rape and dispossession of black African Muslims by Arab Muslims. Hamas take the side of the murders, rapists and dispossessors: the janjaweed and their masters in Khartoum. But just as quickly as this obvious yet jarring discovery is transmitted so is the memory of British colonialism in Sudan recalled in one's interlocutor as a convenient laxative for moral condemnation and before you realize what's happened, Hamas aren't all that bad again.

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The stunningly anticlimactic showing of the British Liberal Democrats in last week's election precipitated a front-page story on website of the liberal Israeli daily Ha'aretz: 'Israel diplomats breathe sigh of relief at Clegg's poor poll showing.' Characteristic though it may be for Jerusalem to monitor the political vicissitudes of its western allies, a 'sigh of relief' seemed a mite strong. The Lib Dems may be to the left of Labour, and to the distant left of the Conservatives, but in the wake of leader Nick Clegg's nimble debate performances they had emerged as a serious third party alternative with impressive pre-election poll numbers. They had become, in other words, part of the British mainstream.

The problem is with what that mainstream now comprises: the continued de-legitimization of Israel, regular apologetics for jihadism, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigns and, most troubling of all, extreme rhetoric appearing the mouths of so-called progressives. Two Labour Party MPs were recently reported to have made inflammatory and prejudiced claims regarding Jews and Israel, this time at a March meeting of British NGO 'Friends of Al Aqsa', which describes itself as concerned with 'defending the human rights of Palestinians and protecting the sacred al-Aqsa Sanctuary in Jerusalem.' Addressing the meeting, which was convened at the British Parliament, MP Martin Linton claimed that 'Israelis and pro-Israelis' were 'trying to buy a Conservative victory'. Further prejudiced characterization came in his assertion: 'There are long tentacles of Israel in this country who are funding election campaigns and putting money into the British political system for their own ends.'

Historical amnesia or a kind of cultural autism may have accounted for Linton's poor choice of metaphor, but on a bad day, the political attitudes and postures of the British left can indeed be indistinguishable from those of the nationalist far right. Where these attitudes and postures first gain a foothold is in the ideologically promiscuous fringe media.

Three weeks ago Liberal Democrat Baroness Jenny Tonge withdrew her patronage of The Palestine Telegraph, a Gaza-based online newspaper aimed at an English-speaking audience. Her reason? The Palestine Telegraph had prominently featured on its homepage a video of American white supremacist and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke suggesting that Israel was responsible for terrorism in the United States.

Well, it's certainly good to know where Baroness Tonge draws the line. Yet when it came to previous effusions of anti-Semitism in the pages of The Palestine Telegraph, Tonge had formerly been defiant. Last February, she was asked by Britain's Jewish Chronicle what she thought about an article that appeared on the website accusing Israeli doctors of stealing organs from Haitian earthquake victims. She responded that there ought to be in independent inquiry into the allegations. The article, written by Stephen Lendman, was certainly not based on any hard evidence and certainly would not have been noteworthy in itself save for the fact that Tonge was not a low-level politician but the acting Liberal Democrat health advisor. She was subsequently sacked from this shadow cabinet position although not expelled from her party by Nick Clegg.

Tonge's departure from the board of patrons may have been the result of a genuine crisis of conscience or electoral gamesmanship in a year where her party suddenly found itself polling better than expected. But it created an opportunity for another MP, George Galloway, to take her place. Galloway was expelled from the Labour party in 2003 after encouraging British soldiers in Iraq to disobey orders. He represented, up until last Thursday, the constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow as part of the Respect Party, which in its 2010 manifesto stated that if elected if would 'strengthen legislation to tackle racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry.' However, Galloway has little concern for Hamas' anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism and sexism since his Viva Palestina 'charity' group has already convened three convoys to Gaza where he has personally handed over money and automobiles to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, not forgetting to boast of how these donations violated UK and EU laws, which deem Hamas a terrorist entity.

Having recruited as patrons two members of Britain's political class, The Palestine Telegraph has also snagged its own mainstream media figure-- journalist and broadcaster Lauren Booth, perhaps best known for being Tony Blair's sister-in-law. Booth writes regularly for the right-of-centre tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail and is also presenter of a regular programme on the Iranian state-owned English-language channel Press TV. Privately, she has raised money for Interpal, a legally registered charity which the UK Charity Commission determined in 2009 had failed to vet the partnerships it kept, namely with organizations that promote "terrorist ideology." One of these was The Union of Good, a Hamas front headed by radical cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who in 2005 was banned from entering Britain for his frequent incitements to 'martyrdom.' Qaradawi is also infamous for saying unpleasant things about Jews and homosexuals and for applauding wife beating and the punishment of raped women. Not waning to leave her own political views to the vagaries of interpretation, Booth has also cited approvingly the more noxious statements of a British-Israeli contributor to Palestine Telegraph, Gilad Atzmon, who regularly promotes conspiracy theories about Jews (he believes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to have been 'prophetic') and whose own website hosts anti-Semitic cartoons. The Palestine Telegraph features a competitive collection of these as well.

Booth, Tonge and Galloway, which sounds like the name of a Dickensian solicitors' firm, have got miles to go before approaching the outspokenness of The Palestine Telegraph's owner and editor, the British resident Sameh Habeeb. Last week, Habeeb granted an interview to the Leeds University student newspaper in which, when queried about the coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict in outlets such as the BBC and Sky News, he said the following: 'They are certainly pro-Israeli. I think you have to ask yourself who controls the media.'

I think we have to ask ourselves where such bouts of lunacy end and where the conventional wisdom in 21st-century Britain begins. It used to be unthinkable for an elected official of a so-called liberal party to support a far-right propaganda mill masquerading as a pro-Palestinian news source.

Michael Weiss is the executive director of Just Journalism, a London-based think tank focused on how Israel and Middle East issues are reported in the UK media.

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However unpleasant a hung parliament will be for Britain, I find that all was not wasted in Thursday's dash toward indecisiveness. Among the losers in this election were Islamist buffoons, neo-fascist thugs and a quixotically left-wing party whose sudden rise to prominence was anchored to a photogenic leader whose surname nevertheless sounds like a Scottish folk dance.

Let us tally the night's lesser haul: George Galloway was tossed out of Commons, which I'll take as a distant second to being tossed into jail for repeated violations of international law. His protege Salma Yaqoob lost her bid for Birmingham Hall Green, likely because her natural constituency of Islamists accused her of apostasy for even standing for office at all. Additionally, the British National Party failed to win a single constituency and the presentable party of protectionism and isolationism, Ukip, literally got tied up in its own politics and went down with a harmless thud.

The notion of a Tory/Lib Dem coalition seems as counterintuitive as a Bush-Nader alliance but not nearly as unlikely--not in Britain in 2010. The mood here is profoundly depressed and agitated at the same time with ideological promiscuity the order of the day. Hardcore Labourites loathe Gordon Brown almost as much as the Lib Dems do. Conservatives see Cameron as an indefinable bolus stuffed full of bad advice. And Clegg, whatever his long-term ambitions, will likely not want to cap off a season of anticlimax and lowered expectations by certifying the status quo party, particularly one that has not had a popular mandate since Tony Blair started preparing for his first Iraq war inquiry.

EasyJet should be paying me to fly to Greece but they're not, the pound is now weaker than ever, and Alex Massie of The Spectator says that we'll have to endure another election again in no time. And I just got here.

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