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Truth, terror and globalisation

December 1, 2014 at 4:21 pm

Double standards proliferate everywhere, and nowhere more so when it comes to defining the elusive concept of “terrorism”. On Friday, Ryan Mcgee, a 20-year-old British Army soldier, was sentenced for his crimes of making a nail bomb and engaging with extreme right wing politics on the Internet. But instead of facing terrorism charges, he was sentenced to a mere two years in prison as the prosecutor “accepted McGee was not a terrorist but an immature teenager“.

In Canada, in October this year, just days after the outpouring of rage and fear caused by the murder of two soldiers (in unrelated events perpetrated by two different recent converts to Islam), Justin Christien Bourque, a 24-year-old from Moncton, New Brunswick, was sentenced to 25-75 years in prison. Bourque had shot 5 members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, killing 3, in a campaign intended to bring down the government. Bourque was neither charged with terrorism offences nor was he widely referred to as a terrorist in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, protests demanding justice for unarmed black teenager Michael Brown – who was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri – have sprung up across the world. Many of them, along with a number of media reports, have challenged the mainstream take on these events. Perhaps the most remarkable of these campaigns have involved activists from Palestine who have shown solidarity – including practical advice – drawn from their own experience of standing up against oppression.

Violence and the media

The fact that the perpetrators of violent acts who are from Christian, white and, usually, conservative backgrounds are often subject to different standards – under the law and in press reporting – than actors and/or victims who are non-white, is well known.

For example, the fear driven by media reporting of the “threat” from “Islamist terrorism” is evidently completely disproportionate to the actual number of criminal acts tied to those groups. Indeed, as Wired reported last year, the actual number of terrorist attacks by Muslims in the US, for instance, was zero in 2012 and the number of convictions for terrorist offences in Europe was lower than ten for every year between 2008 and 2011.

With that in mind, I wish to identify here three different methods that can be employed in challenging such bias in mainstream reporting.

Challenging mistruth with the truth

An obvious method of exposing and confronting media bias is simply pointing it out. As Yvonne Ridley recently identified in an article for MEMO, the bias evident in most media reporting of the recent and ongoing violence in Jerusalem is stark. She noted how reports covering deaths of Palestinians killed by Israelis and deaths of Israelis killed by Palestinians differ:

“The Western media, it seems, is not interested when the dead come from the Gaza Strip, where 2,140 Palestinians paid the ultimate price this summer alone for having the misfortune to live in the world’s largest open air prison.”

Yet experience tells us that this method is not always effective. For instance, if it were the case that journalists and intellectuals who frequently write pieces challenging the mainstream, such as (Ridley or Cornell West, Amira Hass, Naomi Klein inter alia), could change public opinion simply by pointing out the truth, then those writers would quickly become the mainstream themselves, and the world would be a very different place.

But, as we know, this is not the case. Indeed, those advocating alternative perspectives tend to remain, perpetually, on the periphery of mainstream debate; though the rapid growth of online news and the weakening of establishment media sources have brought about some signs of change.

Identifying internal contradictions

A second, powerful method of challenging this kind of bias is to analyse a particular text and identify when, where and how the author contradicts him/herself. Fortunately some of the most obviously biased journalists make this kind of response quite easy.

For instance, consider the following statement from a recent article by Jonathan Schanzer. Writing on the topic of the recent uptick in violence in Jerusalem, Schanzer states:

“The first sign of trouble came right after the abduction and brutal murder this summer of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian resident of Shuafat, by three Israelis, two of whom had histories of mental illness.

Before it could even be established whether the killing was motivated by nationalism, Shuafat descended into utter chaos. Protesters threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at border police while rioters destroyed the light-rail station that passed through the heart of town.”

Overall the article presents an account of the events that is strongly sympathetic to the Israeli narrative, and posits various reasons for the reader to be fearful, albeit with little actual evidence cited.

But this statement is particularly interesting for two important reasons. The first of these is that Schanzer’s article ignores the broader scope of recent history in the city – expertly summarised in a short video from Al Jazeera plus – and the numerous other causes for frustration and rage within the Palestinian population.

The second reason is even more perplexing. This is simply that the statement itself carries such an obvious double standard. Indeed, if we read the words carefully it becomes clear that Schanzer’s account of the events does not allow for the possibility that brutal crimes committed by Israelis carry the same weight as political violence undertaken by Palestinians: “The first sign of trouble came right after the abduction and brutal murder… of… Mohammed Abu Khdeir”.

According to Schanzer then, the killing of Abu Khdeir simply does not count. It was not the “first sign of trouble” or even, presumably, a “sign of trouble” at all, given that – according to Schanzer – “trouble” only began after the fact. Further, it is worth noting that Schanzer does not even concede that the “trouble” he cites may have been in response to the killing.

Identifying faulty premises (and calling out racism)

Another solid example of this kind of demagogy at play, this time in a more general context, came in the form of a recent article in the American magazine The National Interest. This article, entitled “The 5 Deadliest Terrorist Groups on the Planet“, is perhaps the epitome of this kind of sloppy journalism seeking to prop up the establishment narrative.

Not only does the article – which mimics the kind of headline that one might find in a National Geographic piece about dangerous spiders – focus exclusively on Islamist organisations (presumably the IRA, FARC, the PKK and the Ku Klux Klan get a pass), but it also demonstrates an even deeper level of racism in its basic assumptions.

This racism is evident in two clear respects. The first example is that the author, Daniel R. DePetris, describes the US military in gushingly respectful terms, despite its myriad failings in the “War on Terror”, while he mocks the military response of the Nigerian government. Just compare and contrast this statement about ISIS and the US military:

“It takes a special kind of terrorist organisation to force the world’s most powerful and professional military into action halfway around the globe.”

With this one about Boko Haram and the Nigerian military:

“What’s perhaps more discouraging than the actual violence is the inept and incompetent way that the Nigerian government has chosen to fight Boko Haram.”

DePetris neglects to mention anything to do with the fact that a decade of US-led policy is arguably the most significant factor in creating the conditions for an organisation like ISIS to emerge in the first place. Further, he goes on to say:

“[The] Nigerian army [has used] the kinds of tactics that would otherwise be prohibited by international humanitarian law.”

But he does not mention that the US military was implicated in using exactly the kinds of “tactics… prohibited by international humanitarian law” in Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq and in Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, and has farmed out various duties to private military contractors who have also been found to use illegal methods against prisoners.

The second example of DePetris’s double standards is his assertion that The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) – which is effectively the external operations unit of the Iranian military – is “the third most deadly terrorist group in the world”.

This is certainly a bizarre assertion, even by DePetris’s own standards. He states that the “external operations wing of the elite Revolutionary Guard is not designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the United States government” but justifies his selection on the basis that, “in October 2007, the US Treasury Department designated the IRGC-QF as a ‘specially designated global terrorist entity’ for its support to a variety of terrorist organisations, including, but not limited to, a yearly donation to Hezbollah of $100-200 million.”

This is a particularly unusual interpretation of what it is that constitutes a “terrorist” organisation, especially when one compares the IRGC-QF to its equivalents in the US military establishment. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc) and the CIA are, between them, responsible for America’s military assassination campaign. These two organisations run the US’s drone strikes, which were estimated to have killed more than 2,400 people in the first five years of the Obama administration.

Moreover, while JSoc operates with a secret budget to assassinate individuals across 70 different countries – based solely on the orders of the US President and without legislative oversight – the CIA has trained, funded and supported numerous foreign insurgency forces “from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba“, albeit with limited success (except in the case for Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet war in the 1980s where they backed insurgents who turned out to be precursors to al Qaeda).

Why then is the IRGC-QF considered a “deadly terrorist organisation” and JSoc and the CIA not? DePetris doesn’t say, but the tone of his argument leads us only to conclude that the difference is that JSoc and the CIA are arms of the US government, and the IRGC-QF is the arm of one of the US’s current strategic rivals.

In other words, for DePetris, killing (including civilians) – when undertaken by a particular group of people it is not only justifiable, but positively heroic, but when the same act it is done by another group of people – Iranians, a group that DePetris dislikes – then it is abhorrent and “terrorism”.

“The first casualty of war…

… is truth”, or so said Aeschylus, an ancient Greek playwright. But that was a very long time ago. Ours is a different world, and just as the nature of warfare has changed into the kind of globalised campaign that we know today, so has the way it has been recounted. We should always unilaterally and equivocally condemns criminality and violence, whether perpetrated by, or against, actors of any background or creed. We should never misconstrue or exaggerate reports of violence as if one identity group is particularly responsible, or one group is particularly innocent.

In our globalised world, the media – and with growing emphasis on social media – is becoming less of a platform to learn the facts and details of events (if it ever were), and instead is rapidly becoming part of the battlefield itself. Yet it is also on that battlefield that racism, mistruths and damaging double standards can and must be challenged.

The recent protests and social media campaigns that tie rejection of injustice in Ferguson, Missouri, and Israel’s occupation together are symbols of hope. They demonstrate the empowering sense of community that can develop across and in spite of all sorts of blockades and barriers. By challenging the unfairness and bias in media reporting it is possible for all of us to support such rejection of injustice like never before. We just have to seize the opportunity.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.