Fear And Learning In America

Osama bin Laden once told me that Americans did not understand the Middle East. Last week, in a littleshuttle bus shouldering its way through curtains of rain across the Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the DesMoines Register and realised that he might be right. "BIG HOG LOTS CALLED GREATER THREAT THAN BINLADEN," announced the headline. Iowa's 15 million massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure that thestate waterways are polluted. "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and USdemocracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F Kennedy Junior, president of... a NewYork environment group... 'We've watched communities and American values shattered by these bullies,' Kennedysaid..." I took out my pocket calculator and did a little maths. Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000miles from Afghanistan. Another planet, more like.

I've been travelling to the United States for years, lecturing at Princeton or Harvard or Brown University,Rhode Island, or San Francisco, or Madison, Wisconsin. God knows why. I refuse all payment and take just abusiness-class round trip from Beirut because I can't take 14 hours of screaming babies in each direction.American college students are tough as nails and bored as cabbages, and in some cities – Washington is topof the list – I might as well talk in Amharic. If you don't use phrases like "peace process","back on track" or "Israel under siege", there's a kind of computerised blackout on thefaces of the audience. Total Disk Failure. Why should my latest bout of Americana have been anydifferent?

Sure, there were the usual oddballs. There was the old black guy whose first "question" on theMiddle East in a Chicago University lecture theatre was a long and proud announcement that he hadn't paidtaxes to the IRS since 1948 – a claim so wonderful that I forbore the usual threat to close down on him.There were the World Trade Centre conspiracists who insisted that the US government had planted explosives inthe twin towers. There was the silver-haired lady who wanted to know why God couldn't be made to resolve thehatred between Israelis and Palestinians. And a Native American Indian in Los Angeles who ranted on about aJewish plot to deprive his people of their land. A bespectacled man with long white hair in a ponytail shuthim up before declaring that the Israeli-Palestinian war was identical to the American-Mexican war thatdeprived his own people of... well, of Los Angeles. I began to calculate the distance between LA and Jenin. Agalaxy perhaps.

And there were the little tell-tale stories that showed just how biased and gutless the American press hasbecome in the face of America's Israeli lobby groups. "I wrote a report for a major paper about thePalestinian exodus of 1948," a Jewish woman told me as we drove through the smog of downtown LA."And of course, I mentioned the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang and otherJewish groups – the massacre that prompted 750,000 Arabs to flee their homes. Then I look for my story inthe paper and what do I find? The word 'alleged' has been inserted before the word 'massacre'. I called thepaper's ombudsman and told him the massacre at Deir Yassin was a historical fact. Can you guess his reply? Hesaid that the editor had written the word 'alleged' before 'massacre' because that way he thought he'd avoidlots of critical letters."

By chance, this was the theme of my talks and lectures: the cowardly, idle, spineless way in which Americanjournalists are lobotomising their stories from the Middle East, how the "occupied territories" havebecome "disputed territories" in their reports, how Jewish "settlements" have beentransformed into Jewish "neighbourhoods", how Arab militants are "terrorists" but Israelimilitants only "fanatics" or "extremists", how Ariel Sharon – the man held"personally responsible" by Israel's own commissioner's inquiry for the 1982 Sabra and Chatilamassacre of 1,700 Palestinians – could be described in a report in The New York Times as having theinstincts of "a warrior". How the execution of surviving Palestinian fighters was so often called"mopping up". How civilians killed by Israeli soldiers were always "caught in thecrossfire". I demanded to know of my audiences – and I expected the usual American indignation when Idid – how US citizens could accept the infantile "dead or alive", "with us or againstus", axis-of-evil policies of their President.

And for the first time in more than a decade of lecturing in the United States, I was shocked. Not by thepassivity of Americans – the all-accepting, patriotic notion that the President knows best – nor by thedangerous self-absorption of the United States since 11 September and the constant, all-consuming fear ofcriticising Israel. What shocked me was the extraordinary new American refusal to go along with the officialline, the growing, angry awareness among Americans that they were being lied to and deceived. At some of mytalks, 60 per cent of the audiences were over 40. In some cases, perhaps 80 per cent were Americans with noethnic or religious roots in the Middle East – "American Americans", as I cruelly referred to themon one occasion, "white Americans", as a Palestinian student called them more truculently. For thefirst time, it wasn't my lectures they objected to, but the lectures they received from their President andthe lectures they read in their press about Israel's "war on terror" and the need always,uncritically, to support everything that America's little Middle Eastern ally says and does.

There was, for example, the crinkly-faced, ex-naval officer who approached me after a talk at a UnitedMethodist church in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. "Sir, I was an officer on the aircraft carrierJohn F Kennedy during the 1973 Middle East war," he began. (I checked him out later and he was, as myhost remarked, "for real".) "We were stationed off Gibraltar and our job was to refuel thefighter jets we were sending to Israel after their air force was shot to bits by the Arabs. Our planes wouldland with their USAF and Marine markings partly stripped off and the Star of David already painted on theside. Does anyone know why we gave all those planes to the Israelis just like that? When I see on televisionour planes and our tanks used to attack Palestinians, I can understand why people hate Americans."

In the United States, I'm used to lecturing in half-empty lecture halls. Three years ago, I managed to filla Washington auditorium seating 600 with just 32 Americans. But in Chicago and Iowa and Los Angeles thismonth, they came in their hundreds – almost 900 at one venue at the University of Southern California –and they sat in the aisles and corridors and outside the doors. It wasn't because Lord Fisk was in town. Maybethe title of my talk – "September 11: ask who did it, but for heaven's sake don't ask why" – wasprovocative. But for the most part they came, as the question-and-answer sessions quickly revealed, becausethey were tired of being suckered by the television news networks and the right-wing punditocracy.

Never before have I been asked by Americans: "How can we make our press report the Middle Eastfairly?" or – much more disturbingly – "How can we make our government reflect our views?"The questions are a trap, of course. Brits have been shoving advice at the United States ever since we lostthe War of Independence, and I wasn't going to join their number. But the fact that these questions could beasked – usually by middle-aged Americans with no family origins in the Middle East – suggested a profoundchange in a hitherto docile population.

Towards the end of each talk, I apologised for the remarks I was about to make. I told audiences that theworld did not change on 11 September, that the Lebanese and Palestinians had lost 17,500 dead during Israel's1982 invasion – more than five times the death toll of the international crimes against humanity of 11September – but the world did not change 20 yearsago. There were no candles lit then, no memorial services.And each time I said this, there was a nodding of heads – grey-haired and balding as well as young –across the room. The smallest irreverent joke about President Bush was often met with hoots of laughter. Iasked one of my hosts why this happened, why the audience accepted this from a Briton. "Because we don'tthink Bush won the election," she replied.

Of course, it's easy to be fooled. The first local radio shows illustrated all too well how the Middle Eastdiscourse is handled in America. When Gayane Torosyan opened WSUI/KSUI for questions in Iowa City, a callernamed "Michael" – a leader of the local Jewish community, I later learnt, though he did not saythis on air – insisted that after the Camp David talks in 2000, Yasser Arafat had turned to"terrorism" despite being offered a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem and 96 per cent ofthe West Bank and Gaza. Slowly and deliberately, I had to deconstruct this nonsense. Jerusalem was to haveremained the "eternal and unified capital of Israel", according to Camp David. Arafat would onlyhave got what Madeleine Albright called "a sort of sovereignty" over the Haram al-Sharif mosque areaand some Arab streets, while the Palestinian parliament would have been below the city's eastern walls at AbuDis. With the vastly extended and illegal Jerusalem municipality boundaries deep into the West Bank, Jewishsettlements like Maale Adumim were not up for negotiation; nor were several other settlements. Nor was the10-mile Israeli military buffer zone around the West Bank, nor the settlers' roads, which would razor throughthe Palestinian "state". Arafat was offered about 46 per cent of the 22 per cent of Palestine thatwas left. I could imagine the audience of WSUI/KSUI falling slowly from their seats in boredom.

Yet back at my folksy, wooden-walled hotel, the proprietor and his wife – P Force volunteers in theKennedy era – had listened to every word. "We know what is going on," he said. "I was a navalofficer in the Gulf back in the Sixties and we only had few ships there then. In those days, the Shah of Iranwas our policeman. Now we've got all those ships in there and our soldiers in the Arab countries and we seemto dominate the place." Osama bin Laden, I said to myself, couldn't put it better.

How odd, I reflected, that American newspapers can scarcely say even this. The Daily Iowan – there are nofewer than four dailies in Iowa City, press freedom being represented by the number of newspapers rather thantheir depth of coverage – had none of my hotel landlord's forthrightness. "The situation in the MiddleEast is one that many Americans do not adequately understand," it miserably lamented, "nor can theybe reasonably articulate about it." This rubbish – that Americans were too dumb to comprehend theMiddle East bloodbath and should therefore keep their mouths shut – was a pervasive theme in editorials.Even more instructive were the reports of my own lectures.

The headline, "Fisk: Who really are the terrorists?" in the Daily Iowan last week at least caughtthe gist of my message, and included my own examples of American press bias in the Middle East, although itfailed on the facts, wrongly reporting that it was the United Nations (rather than the far more persuasiveIsraeli Kahan Commission) which concluded that Sharon was "personally responsible" for the Sabra andChatila massacre. The Des Moines Register's account of one of my talks was intriguing. It concentrated on myinterviews with Osama bin Laden – which I had indeed mentioned in my lecture – and then referred to myaccount of how an Afghan crowd beat me up last December. I had told the American audience that the Afghanswere outraged by US bombing raids that had just killed their relatives around Kandahar and how important ithad been to include this fact in my own report of the fray – to give context and reason to the Afghan attackon me. The Register used my words to describe the attack but then itself made no mention of the reasons. Longlive, I thought, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, whose own headline – "Middle East reporter slamsmedia" – got the point.

It's not that Iowans have any excuse to be unaware of the Middle East. In the small town of Davenport,Israelis have been trained in the systems of the Apache AH-64 attack helicopters used to assassinatePalestinians on Israel's wanted list. According to one local journalist, several Iowa companies, including theregional office of Rockwell, have been involved in military contracts worth millions of dollars with Israel.CemenTech of Indianola supplies equipment to the Israeli air force. The day I arrived in Iowa City, JohnAshcroft, the US Attorney General, was telling Iowans that a hundred foreign nationals "from countriesknown as home to terrorists" had been interrogated in the state. Another hundred were likely to be"interviewed" soon. There was no editorial comment on this.

So Iowa University classes were absorbing. One young woman began by announcing that she knew the Americanmedia were biased. When I asked why, she said that "it has to do with America's support forIsrael..." and then, red-faced, she dried up. Not so the student in Rex Honey's global studies class.After I had outlined the military trap into which the Americans had been lured in Afghanistan – the supposed"victory" followed by further engagements with al-Qa'ida and then, inevitably, daily battles withAfghan warlords and sniping attacks on Western troops – he put his hand up. "So how do we beatthem?" he asked. There was a gentle ripple of laughter through the room. "Why do you want to 'beat'the Afghans," I asked? "Why not help them build a new land?" The student came up to meafterwards, hand outstretched. "I want to thank you, sir, for all you told us," he said. I had asuspicion he was a military man. Are you planning to join the army, I asked? "No, sir," he replied."I'm going to join the Marines."

I advised him to stay clear of Afghanistan. In its own way, the American national press was doing the same.Two days later, the Los Angeles Times, in a remarkable dispatch from its correspondent David Zucchino,reported on the bitterness and anger among Afghans whose families had been killed in United States B-52 bomberraids. The recent American battle in Gardez, the report said, had left "bitterness in itswake".

If only the same bluntness was applied to the Palestinian-Israeli war. Alas, no. On the freeway past LongBeach on Friday, I opened the LA Times to be told that Israel "mops up [sic] in the West Bank",while the syndicated columnist Mona Charen was telling readers in other papers that "98 per cent ofPalestinians have not been living under occupation since Israel pulled out under the Oslo accords" andthat the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Ehud Barak, had offered Arafat "97 per cent of the West Bankand Gaza". This was 1 per cent higher even than the statistic from "Michael" on WSUI/KSUIradio. Arafat – "this murderer with the deaths of thousands of Jews and Arabs on his hands" –was to blame. The issue between Israel and her neighbours, Charen contended, "is not occupation, it isnot settlements and it certainly is not Israeli brutality and aggression. It is the Arabs' inability to livepeacefully with others".

Maybe California is organically different from the rest of the United States, but its journalists as wellas its students seemed a tad smarter than the Midwest of America. The Orange County Register, a traditionallyconservative newspaper in an area that is now 50 per cent Latino, has been trying to tell the truth about theMiddle East and was carrying a tough feature by Holger Jensen, which warned that if President Bush didn't reinin Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister "will succeed where Osama bin Laden failed: forcing us into a warof civilisations against 1.2 billion Muslims". When I lunched with senior editorial staff, they invitedthree members of the Orange County Muslim community to join them.

Cocktails with friends of the Methodist church revealed a sane grasp of the Middle East – one of them wasdeeply disturbed by a recent remark by Israel's Internal Security Minister, Uzi Landau, who had said that"we're not facing human beings, but rather beasts". A black guest commended the UN secretary generalKofi Annan's criticism of Israel. Yet when I flipped on Fox News, there was Benjamin Netanyahu out-SharoningSharon, declaring that Palestinian suicide bombers would soon be prowling America's streets, meetingCongressmen to enlist their help in Israel's "war on terror", even while the US Secretary of State,Colin Powell, was in Israel.