Honored by Hatred: Elite Propaganda
and U.S. Policy in the Middle East
by Jeremy R. Hammond
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/,
July 13th, 2007
A recent op-ed in the Washington Post
offers an instructive example of elite opinion towards the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and the kind of logic, or lack thereof, which guides
U.S. policy.
Richard Cohen, in an article entitled,
"They Honor Us With Their Hate", begins by reminding
his readers of news that on September 11, 2001, "the Palestinians
were cheering the deaths of about 3,000 innocent people in America".
He then proceeds to explain that this
was "before America's retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan
or the war in Iraq", before "Guantanamo became shorthand
for abuse of the president's constitutional authority and before
the outrage of Abu Ghraib"; "In other words, the demonstration
by Palestinians (in the Lebanese refugee camp of Shatila) preceded
most of the usual reasons given for why America today is held
in contempt by much of the world."
Cohen informs his readers that he's been
to Shatila and mentions Israel "allegedly abetting the 1982
massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps
by Lebanese Christian forces." He notes, "The Palestinians
have been mistreated by just about everybody, including, of course,
their own inept and often corrupt leadership."
"Still," he continues, "the
chief reason for the cheering on Sept. 11 was U.S. support for
Israel. Sometimes that support has been mindless and sometimes
it has been over the top, but fundamentally it is based on certain
truths." Among these "truths", is that "Israel
is a legally sanctioned state, created by the United Nations in
1948, Iran and "a host of militant organizations - Hamas,
Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and, of course, al-Qaeda - fervently
wish for Israel's destruction." Cohen then adds that "There
is no way the United States could appease these groups and not,
in the process, trample on its own moral values. Israel on occasion
is wrong - and the settlements are an abomination - but its existence
is right."
Although the Bush administration has "made
matters worse", "in a way, America has little choice
about being hated in some parts of the world. The United States
is never going to be truly popular as long as it insists on adhering
to certain principles."
In conclusion, Cohen writes, "It's
always nice to have friends. Sometimes, though, it's more honorable
to have enemies."
In short, while Israel is sometimes in
the wrong, we must support that country out of principle and should
hence feel a sense of honor for adhering resolutely to our "principles"
rather than seeking to "appease" Israel's enemies, even
when doing so causes them to hate us as well.
It's an interesting argument, the examination
which provides some useful insights. Cohen begins by invoking
an image of "the Palestinians" rejoicing about the attacks
of September 11. In fact, Palestine officially condemned the terrorist
attacks and the images of Palestinians celebrating represented
only a small group. It is certainly condemnable for people to
praise such a horrible tragedy. But how many Americans cheered
on the attack against Afghanistan, resulting, after just the first
few months of conflict, in more civilian deaths than caused by
the terrorist attacks of September 11? How many Americans cheered
on the attack against Iraq? According to the most scientific study
to date of mortality rates in Iraq as a result of the war, published
in the Lancet medical journal, there have been 655,000 excess
Iraqi deaths. How many Americans have glorified violence such
as this? Cohen himself once wrote, "In a post-Sept. 11 world,
I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic."
Perhaps it was also "therapeutic" for those Palestinians
to celebrate the use of violence.
The relevance of the incidents of Palestinians
celebrating the attacks, for Cohen's purpose, is to show that
the U.S. was hated by them even before "most of the usual
reasons given" for why America is hated today. The intended
implication as that, prior to the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, Palestinians had no reason to hate the U.S. The corollary,
reiterated again later in his article, is that the U.S. will be
hated no matter what it does, even for no good reason, so we must
stay the course with present policies.
Of course, Cohen acknowledges that the
Palestinians weren't completely without reason for disliking the
U.S. and recognizes that "U.S. support for Israel" was
a cause for hatred of U.S. policy even before "the usual
reasons" came to be. Other than U.S. support for Israel,
however, the U.S. apparently never gave cause for contempt from
people in the Middle East before the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Never mind that we created the situation
that led to the rise of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda organization
by funding, arming, and training the most radical Islamists -
whom President Reagan later regarded as "freedom fighters"
- in an effort to overthrow the Afghani government; funding which
began in part, according to then National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski, in order to "induce a Soviet military intervention"
- a policy carried out with no inconsiderable success. Brzezinski
even bragged about having had "the opportunity of giving
the USSR its Vietnam war", despite the overthrow of a progressive
government which sought to improve rights for women and its replacement
with warlords intent upon establishing their repressive versions
of Sharia, or Islamic law.4 In fact, when the Taliban rose to
power they were initially greeted as liberators for ridding the
people of the warlords, some of whom have since regained power
as allies of the U.S. in the war to overthrow the Taliban.5 The
Soviet-Afghan war left more than a million dead Afghans and five
million refugees; but this is of little concern to Brzezinksi
and other U.S. government policy-makers.6 And for Cohen and his
ilk, such policies and their devastating results are easily enough
wiped from memory.
And never mind that the bombing of Iraq
didn't begin in March 2003. Bombings had continued intermittently
since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, escalating sharply in 1998 and
continuing regularly since then until 2003, when the bombing once
again escalated in the "shock and awe" campaign and
subsequent invasion. The U.S. also bears primary responsibility
for the U.N. sanctions that resulted in the deaths of over a million
Iraqis, most of whom were children. According to the U.N., by
1999 the sanctions had resulted in the deaths of over half a million
children.7
Denis Halliday, then Assistant Secretary-General
of the United Nations and coordinator of humanitarian relief to
Iraq, resigned in 1998 in protest of the sanctions. "We are
in the process of destroying an entire society," he said
at the time. "It is as simple and terrifying as that. It
is illegal and immoral."8 As he later put it, "I had
been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition
of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well
over a million individuals, children and adults."9
Halliday's successor, Hans von Sponeck,
also resigned in protest in 2000. As a result of sanctions, he
said, putting it mildly, "We can expect people entering adult
life much less well prepared than their parents were in facing
civic responsibility, in having an ethical and moral grounding
when they were taught mainly how to survive under sanctions. The
chances are pretty good that we will see a generation that will
not be so favorably inclined towards countries in Europe and North
America."10
But never mind all that. Before Bush went
and screwed things up, we'd never given anyone in the Middle East
cause to hate us.
There are no shortage of other examples
of U.S. policies and actions in the Middle East that would incur
the wrath of anyone who happened to be unfortunate enough to be
on the receiving end, and yet Cohen would have his readers believe
that the U.S. had little nothing to provoke hatred prior to 2001.
It's doubtful that this is due to ignorance and far more likely
the result of dishonesty.
Cohen next attempts to demonstrate his
objectivity by mentioning the slaughter of civilians in Sabra
and Shatila in 1982. But he caveats his statement by saying that
Israel only "allegedly" abetted this war crime. In truth,
complicity was admitted. The Israeli Defense Force, under then
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, instructed the Christian Phalange
militia to enter the camp.11 Israel's commission of inquiry into
the massacre, the Kahan Commission, found Sharon personally responsible
and concluded that "it is impossible to justify the Minister
of Defense's disregard of the danger of a massacre", adding
that "this danger was certainly to have been anticipated".12
After the onset of the slaughter, U.S.
special envoy Morris Draper demanded of Israel that "You
must stop the massacres. They are obscene. You ought to be ashamed.
The situation is rotten and terrible. They are killing children.
You are in absolute control of the area and therefore responsible
for that area."13 Israeli writer Amos Elon likened it to
"A man who puts a snake into a child's bed and says: 'I'm
sorry. I told the snake not to bite. I didn't know snakes were
so dangerous.' It's impossible to understand. This man's a war
criminal."14 Ze'ev Schiff, another well known Israeli writer,
similarly commented that "whoever allowed the Phalangists
to enter the refugee camps on their own can be compared to one
who allows a fox into the chicken coop and then wonders why the
chickens were all eaten."15
But Cohen's use of the word "allegedly"
serves its purpose: Palestinians are evildoers who celebrate terrorist
atrocities, while Israel is a good state worthy of our support
despite occasional mistakes, real or "alleged". Presumably,
U.S. support for the 1982 invasion of Lebanon of which the Sabra
and Shatila massacres were a part were one of those occasions
when U.S. support was "over the top" - but in the end,
in Cohen's formula, necessary in order to adhere to our moral
principles.
Besides our moral principles, we must
also support Israel because "Israel is a legally sanctioned
state, created by the United Nations in 1948." This, simply
stated, is a fabrication-though an often enough repeated one that
blame for its propagation cannot be placed with Cohen. The United
Nations did not create the state of Israel in 1948. The U.N. neither
has the authority to take land from one people and give it to
another nor has it ever presumed to usurp such authority. On November
29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a non-binding resolution
(only U.N. Security Council resolutions are legally binding) recommending
the partition of Palestine, subsequent to the end of the British
"mandate", into Arab and Jewish states.16 Though Jews
were a minority of the population of Palestine (608,000 Jews to
1,269,000 Arabs at the end of 1946), the plan apportioned a majority
of Palestine, including most of the best land, to the Jews (approximately
56 percent to 43 percent). The Arabs, naturally, rejected the
proposal. When the British withdrew from Palestine on May 15,
1948, the Zionist leaders under David Ben-Gurion unilaterally
proclaimed the existence of the State of Israel.17
According to Cohen's logic, we must support
Israel against the Palestinians simply because Israel is a "legally
sanctioned state" while the Palestinians are stateless. The
fact that this is a historical myth aside, it's instructive that
according to Cohen's argument, it is adherence to "principals"
to support the oppression of one people over another based simply
on the status of their statehood. According to this formula, the
U.S. should have supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq against the Kurds
because Iraq was legally a state while the Kurds were stateless.
How this position is reconcilable with serious moral principles
seems a mystery, but this doesn't stop Cohen from laying claim
to the higher moral ground.
In his effort to lay such claim, Cohen
adds that Iran and various militant groups "fervently wish
for Israel's destruction." Israel is thus the victim while
its opponents are monsters which threaten its very existence.
This is a dramatic departure from reality. First, even if were
as Cohen says, the fact that some "wish for Israel's destruction"
doesn't mean they are capable of destroying Israel. Israel's existence
has never been threatened, as history has demonstrated repeatedly,
the most outstanding example of which was the June 1967 war. Again,
at that time, there was speak of a genocidal threat to Israel,
a threat to the very existence of the state. Yet the outcome of
the war was never in doubt, only how long it would take Israel
to win a decisive victory. U.S. intelligence estimates were very
near the mark and it took only six days for Israel to achieve
its aim.
Second, the truth of this characterization
is questionable. In one prominent contemporary example, Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been widely quoted as having
said that Israel "must be wiped off the map".18 This
translation uses the English idiom meaning "to obliterate
totally",19 and the quote has often been cited as proof that
Iran harbors the intent to commit violence and wishes "for
Israel's destruction", a veritable call for genocide.
The only catch is that Ahmadinejad never
said any such thing.20 He quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as saying,
"This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated
from the pages of history." The context of his speech was
concerning oppressive and illegitimate regimes, of which Saddam
Hussein's Iraq and the Shah's Iran were also included.21
Even the New York Times, while incredibly
defending their use of "wiped off the map" and suggesting
Ahmadinejad may have been calling for war, acknowledges that Ahmadinejad
never said "Israel", but "occupying regime of Jerusalem",
and that he actually used a metaphorical expression with an approximate
meaning of "pages of time or history" and not literally
"map".22
His conclusion, based on the assertion
that Israel's enemies "fervently wish for Israel's destruction",
is that the U.S. must not "trample on its own moral values",
but must rather, even though "the settlements are an abomination",
continue to support Israel because "its existence is right."
The pen of the propagandist thus makes
it a moral obligation for the U.S. to continue to support Israel's
ongoing wiping of any viable future Palestinian state from the
map because its enemies harbor similar intentions towards Israel.
Why the U.S. shouldn't support Palestinian aspirations for a state
against Israel's ongoing policy of wiping any potential Palestine
from the map because its existence would be right and consistent
with our moral obligations is left unexplained.
By the time he's done, Cohen manages to
explain away hatred towards the U.S. as being the result of the
U.S. "adhering to certain principles" (this is certainly
true, but Cohen clearly means moral principles), rather than the
result of the U.S. having strayed from moral principles. Our support
of Israel, our bombing of Iraq, our deliberate policy of starving
Iraqi children, our overthrow of democratic leaders, our support
for oppressive regimes-all of these historic U.S. policies and
deeds are the result of policy-makers "adhering to certain
principles", and thus good and true and right.
The U.S. not only has done nothing to
deserve the hatred of others, but they only hate us because we
are so good, and so we should therefore take pride in the fact
that we are so unloved by so many people in so much of the world.
It is hardly uncommon for such utterly
nonsensical arguments in favor of existing U.S. policies to be
propagated among the educated elite, among politicians and the
intelligentsia. That this state of affairs even exists offers
extraordinary insight into the political culture of the U.S. and
is a sad commentary upon the health of true moral principles amongst
educated Americans.
0. Richard Cohen, "They Honor Us
With Their Hate", Washington Post, July 10, 2007. _
0.
0. David Brown, "Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll
Has Reached 655,000_, Washington Post, October 11, 2006 _
0.
0. Richard Cohen, "The Lingo of Vietnam", Washington
Post, November 21, 2006; A27. _
0.
0. Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur,
January 1998 (translated from the French by William Blum). _
0.
0. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords, (Pan
Macmillan, London 2001), p.5. _
0.
0. "Afghanistan War", The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth
Edition, 2007. _
0.
0. "Iraq surveys show 'humanitarian emergency'", UNICEF,
August 12, 1999. _
0.
0. Andrew Buncombe, "Infant mortality in Iraq soars as young
pay the price for war", The Independent, May 8, 2007. _
0.
0. John Pilger, "Squeezed to Death", Guardian, March
4, 2000. _
0.
0. "The Unfinished War: The Legacy of Desert Storm",
CNN, January 5, 2001. _
0.
0. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, (South End Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 1999), p. 360. _
0.
0. Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the events at the
refugee camps in Beirut, February 8, 1983. _
0.
0. Chomsky, p. 368. _
0.
0. Chomsky, p. 392. _
0.
0. Ibid. _
0.
0. U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, 1947 _
0.
0. Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar, "Palestine, Israel and the
Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Primer", Middle East Research &
Information Project. _
0.
0. Nazila Fathi, "Iran's President Says Israel Must Be 'Wiped
Off the Map'", New York Times, October 26, 2007. _
0.
0. Oxford English Dictionary. _
0.
0. See Juan Cole's Blog "Informed Comment", May 3, 2006.
Jonathan Steele, "Lost in Translation", Comment is Free
(Guardian), June 14, 2006. _
0.
0. This is the translation provided by The Middle East Media Research
Institute. _
0.
0. Ehtan Bronner, "Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words
Against Israel?", New York Times, June 11, 2006. _
0.
Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent researcher and writer who
examines the facts and myths of US foreign policy, particularly
with regard to the US "war on terrorism." He currently
lives with his wife in Taipei, Taiwan and can be reached at: jeremy@yirmeyahureview.com.
Read other articles by Jeremy, or visit Jeremy's website.
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