Aust. public broadcaster SBS directed to no longer use the term “Palestinian land”

Do You Ever Feel Like The Walls Are Closing In? By Jake Lynch

In a further restriction on political debate, journalists at SBS have been directed not to use the term “Palestinian land” when describing the occupied territories, writes Jake Lynch

So narrow has political debate become here in Australia over the Israel/Palestine conflict that attempts to remind Australians of basic facts, well accepted in the global community, are falling foul of censorship — silenced by the swish of a bureaucrat’s pen.

Journalists at public broadcaster SBS have been told, in a missive from their head of news, that the station’s Ombudsman has ruled out the use of the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe the occupied territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The status of these territories “remains the subject of negotiation”, the memo says, and should be described solely with reference to their geographical location, for instance: “Israeli settlements on the West Bank”.

This shows the chilling effect of the selective deafness practised by frontbench politicians in Canberra, which has, as I have pointed out before, put Australia further into Israel’s camp than any other country, including the United States. Labor’s Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard found some rare common ground with former Liberal treasurer Peter Costello when both were part of a senior bipartisan delegation to Israel. When a delegation of that kind fails to mention, even once, the attack on Gaza at the turn of the year or questions over its legality, it has the effect of placing huge pieces of reality outside the bounds of the legitimately controversial. They fall into the “don’t-mention-the-war” category, or what media scholar Daniel Hallin called the “zone of deviancy”.

In fact, it is the Australian Parliament that is somewhat deviant on this issue, compared to parliaments elsewhere. And things are not improving. Julia Irwin, who earlier this year was almost alone among Australian MPs to join with the rest of the world in criticising Israel’s attack on Gaza, last night announced her intention not to run in the next federal election. The disappearance from the Parliament of a voice prepared to say what many people know on this issue is bad news for the state of this debate in Australia.

At the University of Sydney, where I work, the Students for Palestine group have been told by their Student Union that they are not entitled to form a club, and benefit from the facilities, for reasons no one is allowed to disclose. All those present at the meeting that imposed this ban have been sworn to secrecy. So the Students for Palestine called a protest rally later this month, which is also being advertised by students from other universities: universities like Macquarie, also in Sydney, whose head of security reportedly frog-marched several of them off the campus for leafleting outside the library, occasioning complaints of “offensive behaviour”.

Talking of which, the steady trickle of emails I receive from supporters of Israel has grown lately, their writers now apparently feeling emboldened to make more abusive and, in some cases, openly racist comments. Then there’s the latest stoush between the pro-Israel lobby and the Sydney Peace Foundation, over the decision to award this year’s Sydney Peace Prize to the journalist and filmmaker, John Pilger.

Pilger is famous for many things, including his reports raising the alarm over Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia during the 1970s, and his courage in smuggling himself into East Timor under Suharto, and Burma, where he brought out unforgettable pictures of slave labour being used to build roads by the Burmese military junta.

His film, Palestine Is Still The Issue, is valuable precisely because it opens by situating the conflict in the context of international law and the well established view of the international community. The reason why the Occupied Palestinian Territories are so called is because there is an important difference between their claims over them and those of Israel: the Palestinians are their lawful owners. As Pilger points out, the reason why there have been countless UN resolutions condemning Israel’s occupation is because the inadmissibility of territory acquired by force is a cornerstone of international law.

As the SBS absurdity shows, these basic facts are now regarded as “controversial” in the context of Australian public discourse. It represents a triumph for Israel and its apologists here, who are thinking aloud about how best to take on the peace prize and its new laureate. “Strategist” Ernie Schwartz told the Australian Jewish News that, if professionally consulted — as some suspect he has been — he would advise critics of the award to face down allegations that they, in attacking a journalist for his journalism, are enemies of open debate. “Be realistic about the fact that we’ll always come across as myopic,” he said. “That’s just the way we’re going to be cast.”

Pilger-bashing over his reporting from the Middle East has already spread to academia. First into the breach, after the announcement of the honour, was a blog, The Sensible Jew, which declared him “odious” and “a joke among the serious-minded”. It featured a post from Philip Mendes, a social work lecturer at Melbourne’s Monash University, drawing attention to his scholarly article on Pilger in the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies. It’s unusual for an academic journal — especially one enjoying the highest “A*” rating, as this one does — to publish a contribution by a researcher outside his or her own field.

In it, Mendes criticises Pilger for declaring that it is his “duty to rectify” an imbalance in Western news coverage. But unfortunately for Mendes that is actually what Pilger is supposed to be doing: Pilger makes documentaries for Independent Television in the UK, which is obliged to follow the requirement that TV licensees “ensure that justice is done to a full range of significant views and perspectives”, as stipulated by the UK’s industry regulator, the Office of Communication. In short, they need Pilger to make up for shortcomings elsewhere.

Mendes treats the question of bias in reporting of the Palestine/Israel conflict as if scholarly opinion on the subject is equally divided, when in fact the vast majority of research finds that frames, definitions and versions of events favoured by Israel predominate in the news. Among the evidence he adduces to back up this claim, representative of the overall weakness of his argument, is the unpublished study by BBC News management of their own output, which he uses without setting it in the appropriate context, which was a dispute with the BBC’s governors at the time of the study.

Attempts like these to restrict debate or to delegitimise certain voices are of deep concern not just in relation to the Palestine/Israel issue, but to all of the issues that we rely on the media to cover. When Pilger receives the award in November, from New South Wales Governor, Professor Marie Bashir, and gives the City of Sydney Peace Prize lecture in the Opera House the following evening, it will be an overdue signal that we are entitled to know what we know, and to say what we need to say about it

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War Costs in Perspective

With $872.6 billion, the cost of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan so far, the United States could fund…

…a year’s worth of health care for 117 million Americans ($7,439/person)

…one year of public elementary school for 116 million children ($7,500/child)…four years of public university

tuition for 35 million students ($6,185/student) …145 billion mosquito nets to help stop malaria in the developing world ($6/net)

…4.6 billion laptops to promote literacy in the developing world ($188/laptop)

If you had an expense account that let you spend $1 million dollars per day… …it would take 2,391 years to spend $872.6 billion, the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan so far.

The cost of Iraq and Afghanistan laid out end-to-end in $100 bills… …would extend 846,157.6 miles – or just short of 34 times around the Earth’s circumference.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost each American family of four $11,458.

Source Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation - Total Iraq and Afghanistan Supplemental War Funding To Date Actual U.S State Dept. figures used as source. Current combined direct American spending on Iraq + Afghanistan is $11.33 billion per month. And they give Pakistan $1.5 billion annually to fight it’s war on the cheap !

In Search of the Burqa

Nicolas Sarkozy and Muslims would agree on one thing when it comes to his comments to Parliament about the burqa, and that is he didn't make the remarks that he did in order to start a debate or discussion, he did it with the clearest of intentions, to insult, hinder and ultimately frighten those who are so obviously regaining, without compromise, their Islamic identity.

It is a sign of subjection and is a symbol of "women's enslavement". If one had heard that in isolation one may be forgiven for thinking of the endless enslavement of women whose bodies are used and abused in order to sell the health and beauty products. You may even think of the women who suffer from abduction from their home countries only to be brought over into countries such as France to be prostitutes; women who suffer violence, 400 a year die at the very hands of their spouse, women such as Sarkozy wife, who is an acclaimed former nude model. But he was speaking of a piece of cloth.

The banning of pieces of cloth is not something that Mr. Sarkozy is strange to. Indeed he was the very man as Interior minister who spearheaded the ban of the hijab in 2004 in schools. Has that meant their liberation, have women forsaken their scarf's and thanked Mr. Sarkozy for his championing of Muslim women's rights.

My recent trip to Paris tells a very different story. France does see the subjection of Muslim women and their enslavement, but not for the reasons that the French President has us believe. They are subjected as a consequence of the very laws that seek to "liberate them". I heard of women denied medical help for refusing to take off her hijab at her doctor's surgery, a women refused vaccination for her child for her refusal to remove her "symbol of enslavement"; scores of women bullied and demoted at work for daring to adhere to the Islamic dress and one woman was actually denied entry to a police station to complain of an assault. In essence the French secular state should not preach what it most certainly does not practise.

Mr. Sarkozy would do well to learn from Muslim women about rights. Women had the right to vote, to trade, to education, to be employers and employees well before the so called enlightenment. Was it not Roseau who said that women will always remain intellectually inferior to men?

The reality is Mr Sarkozy - that 20% of your French born citizens are reverting to Islam. Muslims living in France are proud of their pieces of cloth and are increasing by significant numbers every day. My return to Paris having lived there for some years prior was truly eye opening. Despite the attack on the Islamic dress, women donning it were apparent everywhere.

Whilst Mr. Sarkozy is trying to spread fear, perhaps it is he who is fearful of the resurgence of Islam in the hearts and minds of Muslims. His attempt to create a "French Islam" has failed miserably, and his attempt to step up the attack is weak and transparent. What does it say about the strength of your secular values if you feel threatened by a mere piece of cloth?

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