And later, I heard on Media Roots that our friends' media is treated
differently. If you look online, BBC is said to be publicly funded by Great
Britain. PBS is said to be publicly funded. ButAl Jazeera and RT are described
as foreign entities , owned and controlled by their respective governments.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2018 9:42 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Will a Hard-Hitting Investigation Into Israel's
Influence in US Government Ever See the Light of Day?
As my Grandma Ludwig used to say, "There's more than one way to skin a cat".
And there is more than one way to censor the Empire's opposition.
From the far Right Shock Jocks to the Fox in the hen house News, to the cuts in
Federal Funding of Public Broadcasting. And the attack is not just on the
broadcasting media. The Christian Science Monitor, which was about the most
objective reporter ever offered by the newspaper industry, has fled to an
on-line edition, along with so many others. Investigative reporting is being
undercut, and those who remain are becoming very bland in their reporting. And
of course the Internet is also coming under attack.
Frankly, I can't see any way out, so long as we continue holding hands with
Capitalism.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/29/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And, in fact, I heard today that Al Jazeera has been designated as a
foreign entity, along with RT and Sputnik Radio. I wonder when they'll
find a way to outlaw The Real News Network?
Miriam
Will a Hard-Hitting Investigation Into Israel's Influence in US
Government Ever See the Light of Day?
By Robert Fisk, The Independent
29 March 18
According to Swisher, if his documentary on the American lobby doesn't
air soon, 'it might prove to be ammunition sought by a group of
zealous US politicians who wish to declare Al Jazeera a foreign
entity, and label us journalists as 'spies''
So when am I going to be able to watch Al Jazeera's hard-hitting
investigation into Israel's powerful lobby in the United States?
Remember Al Jazeera? The tough, no-holds-barred Middle East satellite
channel that transformed Qatar into a media empire whose reports
frightened dictators and infuriated potentates and presidents alike?
Why, George W Bush once wanted to bomb its headquarters in Doha - so
it must have been doing something right. It even has an office in
Jerusalem.
But something seems to be amiss. Not Al Jazeera's disastrous American
venture, which was supposed to break free of the dross on CNN and Fox
News and ended up looking just like CNN or Fox. Nor the tragicomedy of
its journalists' imprisonment in Sissi's Egypt, banged up by Cairo's
farcical laws and the stupidity of Al Jazeera's own management in Qatar.
No, I'm talking about a documentary called The Lobby, directed by one
of Al Jazeera's top journalists, Clayton Swisher, the man whose
exclusive (and
book) on the "Palestine Papers" blew open the secret and scandalous
American-led negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinian
authority between 2000 and 2010. But after months of postponement, The
Lobby, which secretly filmed pro-Israeli US activists and Israeli
government officials and was completed last autumn, is still no nearer
to being shown - and Swisher himself has taken a paid leave of
absence. He even chose to explain his frustration in an article for
the progressive American Jewish magazine Forward, which has always
maintained a liberal and often very critical view of Israel.
"Don't mistake me - I love Al Jazeera," Swisher told me this week. "I
love working for Al Jazeera. They've done fantastic things. And they
look after their staff very well. But our new documentary doesn't seem
to be getting on air."
In his published explanation, Swisher described how his award-winning
investigative unit - which he says operates "without [Qatari]
government interference" - sent an undercover reporter to look into
"how Israel wields influence in America through the pro-Israeli
American community. But when some right-wing American supporters of
Israel found out about the documentary, there was a massive backlash.
It was even labelled as antisemitic in a spate of articles."
Nothing surprising there, you might think. Any reporters who have
dared to criticise Israel grow used to the vile smear of antisemitism
thrown over them - but there was an even more disturbing background to
Swisher's attempts to get his documentary on the air.
The programme's completion, he writes, "came at a time when, due to an
arbitrary blockade on Qatar imposed by the United Arab Emirates and
Saudi Arabia, Qatar had been pursuing an end to its siege by appealing to the
US.
According to reports, Qatar sought to offer its own side of the
narrative in this conflict by hosting thought leaders, including from
the American Jewish community. From reports in the Israeli press, I
learned that [Harvard Professor Alan] Dershowitz had been brought to
meet with the Qatari emir [Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani], and that the
American Jews had brought up what they saw as Al Jazeera's
antisemitism in those meetings. Of course, our documentary is not
antisemitic. It is an exploration of how Israel, a foreign government,
influences US foreign policy."
Ironically, one of the Saudi-UAE demands for a return to normal
relations with Qatar was to shut down Al Jazeera.
Most of Swisher's staff within Al Jazeera are American or British, and
he recruited a young Oxford postgraduate, James Anthony Kleinfeld, to
meet and mix with members of pro-Israeli groups in Washington. When
this was discovered - partly because Swisher, for legal reasons,
contacted those appearing in the programme to say that his team had
used secret filming during their investigations - there was uproar.
Kleinfeld, who apparently used the name "Tony Kleinfeld", was accused
of being "pro-Palestinian" but of "embedding himself with the
Washington pro-Israel crowd" while spending "months of his life under
a new and meticulously fabricated persona to infiltrate pro-Israeli groups".
The concern of Israeli lobbyists was not without reason. Recipients of
legal letters from the documentary group - referring to the secretly
recorded Israeli activists - included AIPAC, the Israeli-American
Council, the Sheldon Adelson-created Maccabee Task Force, the Israel
Project, the Zionist Organisation of America and other groups.
Although Swisher's reporters had exposed genocide in Myanmar,
presidential corruption in the Maldives and paedophilia in British
youth football, another documentary under Swisher's direction
concentrated on Israel's influence over Britain and included a
secretly filmed sequence in which Israeli official Shai Masot
discussed how to "take down" British MPs regarded as pro-Palestinian,
including Sir Alan Duncan. Masot was forced to resign and the Israeli
ambassador to London, Mark Regev, issued a formal apology.
According to Swisher, if his documentary on the American lobby doesn't
air soon, "it might prove to be ammunition sought by a group of
zealous US politicians who wish to declare Al Jazeera a foreign
entity, and label us journalists as 'spies'". In response to
antisemitism claims after the London documentary, the broadcasting
regulator Ofcom ruled that the programme was "a serious investigative
documentary". It was the same question, Swisher says, that he and his
team sought to answer in the American edition of The
Lobby: "whether the Israeli government was funding or involved in
lobbying efforts in the US under the guise of a domestic lobbying group".
Swisher says that several "leaders of Jewish American organisations"
met with Qatar's registered agent and lobbyist, Nick Muzin - a former
aide to US Senator Ted Cruz, who supported American recognition of
Jerusalem as Israel's capital - "to see if he could use his ties with
the Qataris to stop the airing". Since October, Swisher says, "we've
faced a series of unexplained delays on broadcasting our project, the
likes of which I've never experienced. I was repeatedly told by
everyone to 'wait', and was assured our documentary would eventually
see the light of day. Then, as now, I took my senior management at its
word. To my own specially trained ears, 'wait' did not constitute
'stop'. In fact, it must not constitute 'stop'."
Almost every journalist I've met in the Middle East has encountered
similar problems. When I worked for the The Times, I alerted the then
editor, Charles Douglas-Home, to evidence that Israeli officers had
secretly buried at least seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners -
done to death in an interrogation centre - at night in a Sidon
graveyard in 1983. He wanted me to spend as many weeks as necessary to find
out if the story was true.
Then,
months later, when witnesses emerged with evidence of the burial,
including the gravedigger - the bodies still had their hands tied
behind their back with nylon rope when they were brought to him - I
called my editor. My witnesses were being "visited" by armed members
of the Israeli Shin Beth intelligence agency, I told him, and I was
being trailed around Sidon by Israeli-registered vehicles. It was time to run
the story.
To my shock, Douglas-Home - an editor who otherwise loyally stood by
me in every Middle East dispute over my work - replied that he wasn't
sure "how we're justified in running a story like this so long after
the event". In other words, we had to be sure of our facts on such an
important story - but by taking the time to do just that, the story
was now out of date.
After much argument - during which I suggested to the Israelis that
they might like to institute a military inquiry into the deaths if
they wanted to avoid a scandal (they said, mysteriously, that it was
already under way, although I doubted this) - the story ran. A deputy
editor, I was told, had tried to cut the report by two-thirds. He was
overruled. Then the story ran.
In full.
So, old story, new story. I've appeared many times on Al Jazeera. And
never been told to mince my words. Nor would I. But a lot of us are
waiting to see Swisher's new documentary. If we don't, we'll know what
to think of Al Jazeera.
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