Media Workers Against the War | ukwatch.net

Time for a serious debate on Islamophobia

Ellie Keen — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Every journalist owes the Daily Mail’s Peter Oborne a debt of gratitude for last week’s Dispatches documentary exposing Islamophobia in our media. From the journalists on the Express and Star who refused to publish a page of inflammatory nonsense about Muslims, to the staff on the Barking and Dagenham Recorder facing foul-mouthed abuse from the BNP, every media worker who is concerned about anti-Muslim racism in the media will be uplifted by Oborne’s work.

This was a very serious piece of journalism, broadcast at an extremely sensitive time – on the anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. Channel 4 made sure the documentary was copper-bottomed by commissioning accompanying research by the excellent Cardiff School of Journalism team under Prof Justin Lewis. Moreover, Oborne produced his own pamphlet to go with the film, “Muslims Under Siege“. Both should be required reading for journalists.

The mainstream media’s response to Oborne’s challenge, however, has so far been disappointing, and by no means matches the seriousness of the issues he raises.

The Independent gave Oborne space for two major articles, one of which in its media section, and columnist Mark Steele last week demolished the Sun’s response to Oborne. The Mail gave him a double page spread.

But apart from a few comment pieces by Muslims praising the documentary in the Guardian, the Observer and the Times, and a splendid piece by the Guardian’s Seamus Milne, the response has been either silence or hostility.

The Observer’s Andrew Anthony slagged it off, accusing Oborne of “blasting himself in the foot“. In the Sindy, Hermione Eyre accused Oborne, of all people, of “white liberal piety“. To add insult to injury, Oborne was disgracefully thrown out of parliament for distributing his pamphlet to MPs.

Readers of this blog might wish to questions aspects of Oborne’s approach, which, for example, doesn’t make explicit the link between the rise of Islamophobia and the “war on terror”. But we share his criticisms of the war in Iraq. In his Dispatches documentary in March, “Iraq’s Lost Generation”, he said: “The British Government has misled us in the run-up to war and is in denial now about what we are leaving behind. It has failed to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, brought danger to the streets of London, damaged our international reputation, alienated millions of our fellow citizens and betrayed the values we stand for in a moral and strategic disaster.”

It is time for the dangerous Islamophobia that is rampant in the British media to be recognised and debated.

We must not let the issues that Oborne has raised be brushed under the carpet.

Police force journalist to share notes

Ellie Keen — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:53:37 +0000

Freelance journalist Shiv Malik must hand over his source material on terrorism to the police, the High Court ruled last week, slamming Malik for daring to take the case to a judicial review – and forcing him to pay costs.

Malik’s crucial test case succeeded in reining in the police, who had raided his house in March in search of his notes. The court’s main ruling two weeks ago spelt out that the police have no right to conduct speculative “fishing expeditions” to force journalists to hand over their research.

But the case has starkly revealed how the terror laws mean journalists must go to the authorities if they suspect that a source has information about “terrorism”.

Given the broad-brush definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2006 – which includes “glorifying” terror and possessing terrorist materials without the intention of committing an offence – the latest ruling means many Muslims will perceive journalists as a direct extension of the police. Anyone with genuine information about the terrorist milieu will have to weigh up the risk that talking to a reporter is like talking to the cops.

The court’s first ruling, however, was welcomed by Malik, who stressed how it circumscribed police powers. He told Free Press: “It’s a victory for common sense in that, from the wider perspective, we can protect confidential sources – that’s a big victory.

“The High Court said production orders are allowed, but in my case they really do have to be precisely drafted, the police can’t just go on fishing expeditions. Protecting journalists’ sources should be paramount, and now the High Court has said even in terrorism cases journalists are allowed to maintain confidential sources.”

The NUJ also emphasised how the initial ruling sent a clear signal to police that they can’t see journalists as “simply another tool of intelligence gathering”. Speaking outside the High Court after the ruling was announced, general secretary Jeremy Dear said that Greater Manchester Police had “failed to recognise the special nature of journalistic material. Rather than take the time to consider what information they really needed, the police went fishing, hoping a general order would dredge up something of use.”

Malik is an established freelance who has written extensively on terrorism for national newspapers and magazines. He is working on a book with the former Islamist Hassan Butt, who is linked to a forthcoming terrorism trail in Manchester in the autumn. Greater Manchester Police, who raided Malik’s home in March in pursuit of his notes, have also served draft production orders on the BBC, the Sunday Times, Prospect magazine and CBS demanding that they hand over materials they believe to be connected with the case.

Malik’s High Court appeal is the first major test of the application to journalism of the Terrorism Act 2000, sections 19 and 38B (the latter was added in 2001) of which make it a criminal offence to withhold information. Formerly police had to satisfy a judge that the information they sought from a journalist was closely related to a “serious offence” – the 2000 Act contains no such restriction.

Malik said: “This makes it almost impossible for journalists working in the field of terrorism. It’s been a scythe hanging over our necks since it was enacted in 2000. Journalists in the field have been breaking the law and hoping they won’t get prosecuted.”

He believes the issue came to a head because the police decided he would be in no position to defend himself, so they imposed a wide-ranging production order. But the NUJ and the Sunday Times agreed to pay his costs.

There is a maliciousness in the police attack on Malik. As the court ruling states, the police interest in Malik is in what he can tell them about Hassan Butt, and not in whether he has committed offences under sections 19 or 38B. However, according to the Court, on May 9 Butt was arrested and extensively interviewed by police; he told them his earlier public statements about involvement in Al-Qaeda were untrue. He has now been released without charge.

The case shows that journalists face enormous difficulties researching the roots of Islamist extremism in Britain. As a result, policies aimed at preventing terrorism will come to rely even further on the shadowy secret services and the ill-informed prejudices of the Murdoch press.

Moreover, the line between legitimate support for resistance to western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporting “terrorism” will be further blurred, increasing the stigma attached to the Muslim community, where hostility to government foreign policy is strongest.

A range of high profile figures and organisations have supported Malik’s case. On March 19 leading figures from journalism and civil liberties organisations, including Jonathan Dimbleby and Shami Chakrabarti, signed a letter to the Times warning of its implications.

Behind the BBC's Good News from Basra

Ellie Keen — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:43:35 +0000

The Today programme’s reporting of the assault on Basra and Baghdad’s Sadr City by the Iraqi government, backed by US and British troops, tanks and warplanes, has descended to the base assertion that our side is good, their side is bad.

Evan Davis, Today’s new presenter, introduced a section on Basra on May 2 which opened with an resident of Basra describing Moqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army as “very ill-educated, basically criminals” and welcoming the renewed invasion by western forces. Davis then turned to Major General Barney White-Spunner, the UK’s senior officer in Iraq: “So it sounds like fairly good news from Basra?”

“That’s certainly our view,” White-Spunner replied. Davis pressed for more good news: “Are the gains sustainable, I suppose is the question isn’t it? Or do you think if you don’t get to mend the sewers very well people are going to become discontented again and we’ll start getting back to more street disorder?”

White-Spunner took his cue and talked unchallenged about the “excellent work” UK troops were doing, about “development”, “aid distribution”, “humanitarian work”, “sensitivity” to local needs and so on. The interview was almost as cosy as editorial meetings of The Field magazine or Baily’s Hunting Directory, where White-Spunner works when not occupying foreign lands.

Meanwhile, Iraqi government troops were parading the bodies of dead Mahdi fighters like trophies and beating up prisoners. On the same day as White-Spunner’s Radio 4 interview a huge crowd of Shia Muslims protested against Iraq’s US-backed prime minister al-Maliki in Baghdad’s Sadr City, urging him to end the bloody confrontation with the Mahdi Army.

The British media routinely portrays supporters of Moqtada Sadr as “militia”, “extremists”, “men in black”, “rogue gunmen” and “death squads”. Yet, up until last September, Moqtada Sadr’s group was part of the Iraqi government. The US offensive has relied heavily on the Iran-backed Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, many members of the armed wing of which, the Badr Organisation, have been battling the Sadr-led resistance.

The US demonises the Mahdi Army because Sadr is resolutely opposed to the occupation. Moreover, many Shia view the Mahdi in part as a charitable organisation and are often grateful for the security it provides. Sadr’s organisation gives money to families of Shia dead and injured, resettles displaced families and offers funds for any victim of American weapons in Sadr City. Evoking comparisons with Hezbollah, Sadr’s movement “has established itself as the main service provider in the country,” says a recent report by Refugees International. Every month the Mahdi army distributes rations of rice, cooking oil, sugar, tea and other staples, much of it provided by the Iraqi Red Crescent, to thousands of Baghdad’s poorest families.

As the Financial Times put it last month, the clashes between the government and the Mahdi army reveal a class division at the heart of the Shia community. Sadr represents the angry, dispossessed Shia masses of Iraq who suffered under Saddam. “What we’ve seen over the past few weeks is a real class struggle open up with no political means for bridging the gap,” the International Crisis Group told the FT. “Sadr’s followers don’t care if he’s an ayatollah or not. They just want him to win for them the wealth and prosperity they feel should be theirs,” a US official told the paper.

The British media’s last line of attack is that British troops are defending women’s rights. But abuse of women was widespread in Basra before the British were driven out of the city last autumn. The US-backed government has brought right-wing Islamists to power, unleashing attacks against women.

The resistance in battling the occupation. But for the BBC’s flagship news programme our boys are just doing good, building sewers and helping reconstruction. This is far from the case – the British and US armies are building a sewer of bloodshed and sectarian hatred in Iraq.

Indie’s new editor means bad news

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:16:57 +0000

Roger Alton’s move from the Observer to edit the Independent is as shocking as Tony Blair’s appointment as Middle East envoy, and marks a set-back for the anti-war movement. To understand why, we must look at the Indie’s stance on Iraq, why Blair hated the paper, Alton’s politics and what he did at the Observer.

Alton was a crusader for the invasion of Iraq. As Johann Hari, who himself backed the invasion at the time, put it on the eve of the war: “There is now a considerable school of British centre-left thinkers and commentators who are lobbying hard for war, so that the Iraqi people can be freed: Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill, Roger Alton and David Aaronovitch.”

In other words, Alton was up there with the worst of British journalists in terms of craven support of Bush and Blair and contempt for the anti-war case.

Hari’s observation is backed up by Nick Davies, who discovered that Alton had an intimate lunch with Blair in autumn 2002 “from which, according to colleagues, Alton returned full of determined support for the campaign against Saddam”. With the Observer’s home affairs correspondent David Rose being fed “sheer disinformation” by MI6, and its political editor Kamal Ahmed deep in Alastair Campbell’s pocket, readers of Alton’s newspaper were, as Davies catalogues in some detail, “slowly soaked in disinformation” about Iraq.

Yet Alton carried on with his support for the invasion. When columnist Richard Ingrams quit the paper in 2005, he insisted that the Observer’s stance on Iraq was damaging the paper: “It’s particularly noticeable on the whole Iraq issue. In the Indie, you had a very strong attack on the whole thing from the beginning. But The Observer’s got it wrong about Iraq, which goes on and on, and you’re clobbered by that unless you get up and say: ‘We got it wrong’.”

Ingrams was right that the gap between the Observer and the Independent was huge.

On the day after the Hutton report came out in January 2004, the Independent produced a totally white front page with a one-word headline: “WHITEWASH”. In Blair’s last major public speech as prime minister, he attacked the Independent, after which the paper splashed with: “Would you be saying this, Mr Blair, if we supported your war in Iraq?” Beneath that headline, the paper’s editor Simon Kelner hit back brilliantly at Blair:

“After 10 years of the Blair administration, a decade of spin and counter-spin, of dodgy dossiers, of 45-minute warnings, of burying bad news, of manipulation and misinformation, we feel that the need to interpret and comment upon the official version of events is more important than ever.”

Kelner saw it as a “badge of honour” to be singled out by Blair.

Will Alton take a similarly brave and principled stand against Gordon Brown and George Bush? It is enough just to ask the question to see what an absurd proposition that is. But if you need more proof, here it is from the horse’s mouth.

Alton on Blair: “Blair is fucking good.“

And again: “I think he’s a very good prime minister and an exceptional politician who will be much missed when he’s gone. Some of the hostility to him is quite baffling. I just can’t understand it. It doesn’t logically relate to things.”

Alton on editorial priorities: “Absolutely have your environmental horrors in Sudan, but you might put it on page four. On page three you might well have, as we did, inside Sven’s five-star England football World Cup love nest — just because it’s more

visual.”

On the prosecution of BNP leader Nick Griffin: “ludicrous… should never have been brought”.

On Kamal Ahmed: “Kamal is one of the best journalists I have ever worked with and of the highest integrity, so if anybody impinges his integrity I’ll go and punch his fucking face in.”

What Alton’s editorship of the Independent means is this.

Every pro-war editor will feel safer in his or her job, and more confident in their editorial line. Piers Morgan and Greg Dyke, sacked over Iraq, are still in the news media wilderness. But Alton has taken over the Indie. The message couldn’t be clearer.

Every other editor will feel under even more pressure to give in to the dominant pro-war assumptions: our leaders’ intentions in the “war on terror” are noble; Iraq is yesterday’s story and our audience doesn’t want to hear about it; the anti-war movement is beyond the pale, an unrepresentative rump that is stuck in a rut.

Every journalist will feel it that more difficult to stand out against the notion that the Iraq WMD fiasco is behind us, we can carry on as if nothing had happened.

Alton’s appointment at the Indie is a disgrace. The anti-war movement should watch closely what happens to the paper and be ready to mobilise against Alton in support of the Indie journalists who have made their paper the conscience of the British media.

Editors Kneel Before Harry and MoD

Ellie Keen — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:58:51 +0000

The establishment is fond of blaming the media for the public’s cynicism about politics, and particularly its opposition to war. Blair waged a concerted campaign to bully the media in the name of “balance” and “impartiality”.

The collusion of senior media editors in the blackout on Prince Harry in Helmand reveals how specious this argument is. Rather than challenging the government’s war in Afghanistan, the media’s proprietors and controllers conspired to give the MoD the biggest possible propaganda coup, a huge boost to the notion that Britain is fighting a glamorous, just and valiant war.

As a result, more young men will join the army to fight: “They have just used Harry as propaganda to promote and glorify a war which, in the end, is going to be found to be a terrible mistake,” said Anthony Philippson, whose soldier son James died in Afghanistan.

As a result, thousands more Afghanis will die, blown to pieces by bombs from the same “air” drawn down by the Prince on his “Kill TV”.

Eighteen months ago the MoD faced a potential revolt in the army. General Sir Richard Dannatt told the Mail that Britain faced losing the war in Afghanistan if it didn’t pull out of Iraq. The MoD lashed out Blair’s favourite scapegoat for the problems – the media – and launched a campaign to regain the media initiative.

First the MoD banned ITN from embedding reporters with troops. Then it allowed the 15 military personnel captured by Iran to sell their stories to the press. And it banned soldiers from blogging and speaking in public. By the end of last year the MoD had succeeded in re-imposing strict censorship on the media in Afghanistan.

Now senior editors have handed the military establishment a real gem. As the incomparable Peter Wilby has put it, the Prince Harry story “was a PR stunt, from beginning to end”. By lapping it up, editors “dealt another blow to genuinely independent journalism and to the long-term credibility of the media”.

It is a supreme irony that, as the Harry story flooded through the media last week, the government gagged the former SAS soldier Ben Griffin, preventing him from speaking out about UK involvement in illegal renditions, and preventing the media from reporting his words. Game, set and match – the editors lap up the Harry propaganda while a valuable source of truth is silenced.

For some well-known journalists, this stuck in the craw. Jon Snow of Channel 4 news was incensed at the media’s collusion on Harry. As a result, however, Snow became the target of a concerted campaign of “flak” in the Mail, Telegraph, Telegraph again, Evening Standard, and the Times.

If you haven’t done so already, please write to Channel 4 News – email news@channel4.com – to back Jon Snow’s independent and professional journalism.

Author under fire over Iraq exposé

JamieSW — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:05:57 +0000

A campaign is afoot to suppress the brilliant new book Flat Earth News by Nick Davies analysing the media’s collective failure on Iraq.

The Sunday Times is preparing to sue Davies for libel, as reportedly is the Observer’s former political editor. One executive editor has threatened to punch him in the face, while another has promised to bankrupt him. Another has tried to smear him with a made-up story about his private life.

More importantly, the media’s big guns have been wheeled out to rubbish the book in the crudest terms. As Davies himself wrote to the Times last week: “I am discovering what it is like to be on the receiving end of the press.”

Editors, former editors, managing editors, media professors – a string of top media people have come out to attack the book’s central observation that that the modern media are churning out PR to make money, leaving them wide open to manipulation by the rich, the powerful and the warmongers.

Moreover, the more subtle commentators on the right are trying to claim the book as their own. So John Lloyd of the Financial Times says that Flat Earth News merely shows how cynical journalism has become, repeating his Blairite mantra that “comment” is “papering over the cracks down which facts and investigation have disappeared”. There is a whiff off this attempt to co-opt Davies for the right in the Spectator’s review of his book.

You can follow the story in detail on the Press Gazette’s excellent blog, where you will also find a few insightful and sympathetic reviews.

Davies has replied to some of the attacks here and here. He writes: “What’s wonderful, of course, is the irony of seeing senior journalists attacking the book by reproducing precisely the kind of falsehood and distortion which it attempts to expose.”

This campaign by the media elite is so obviously self-serving – no editor of a national newspaper or broadcaster is going to admit that his or her product is a sham. It is striking how none of the critiques of Flat Earth News take up Davies’ points about media ownership and the crucial role of Murdoch in crushing the media trade unions at Wapping in 1986.

But Davies has taken on a powerful and ruthless establishment. Anti-war media workers must give him every support. As Davies explains on page 1 of his book, his research “started with a single, notorious story – the long and twisted saga of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. … It’s about everything I found when I started trying to explain how we managed to do so badly in covering what is probably the biggest single story of our era.”

Disgust with the “war on terror” runs right through this book. The anti-war movement must get behind its author.

Email him here: www.flatearthnews.net/contact

Please copy your emails to Media Workers Against the War: info@mwaw.net.

Sharia Law in Britain

Ellie Keen — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:20:30 +0000

The remarks by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, have seen the media and politicians unleash a vicious wave of Islamophobia, from the ravings of the tabloid press, to the disgraceful Independent on Sunday splash about domestic violence and the shocking claims about “inbreeding” by Phil Woolas MP, who has responded to the current hysteria by leaping head-first into the racist gutter.

What are the basic facts behind the Muslim-baiting?

1. Most British Muslims do not demand Sharia law.

Muslim Council of Britain: “We do not wish to see a parallel system or a separate system of judiciary for Muslims.”

Shaista Gohir, government adviser: “The majority of Muslims do not want it. Many Muslim commentators and the media are wrongly assuming that all Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”

2. What British Muslims want is for the UK, US and Israel to end their bloody occupations of Muslim countries.

3. They want an end to the racism against British Muslims, who are overwhelmingly dark-skinned.

4. A 2004 ICM poll found 61% of British Muslims might support Sharia courts being introduced in Britain, but only to resolve civil cases within the Muslim community, and only so long as the penalties did not contravene British law.

5. Archbishop Rowan Williams argued for “a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a community”, not for an extensive parallel legal system. The aspects of Sharia being considered by Williams are restricted to matters of family and finance law, i.e. civil matters. No one is suggesting introducing an Islamic penal code.

6. Religious courts already operate in this country for Orthodox Jews. Why shouldn’t Muslims enjoy the same right?

7. Sharia courts also operate in the UK, although without official recognition and concentrating only on mundane issues such as inheritance and divorce. Many British Muslims are already married under Sharia law, eat meat slaughtered by it, and bank according to it.

8. The UK is already amending its finance laws to allow Sharia-compliant products such as halal mortgages and Islamic bonds, in part to attract billions of petro-dollars from the cash-rich Gulf.

9. Ontario, Canada, for 15 years had a system of “faith based arbitration” whereby family issues such as inheritance and property division could be adjudicated by religious authorities. In 2005 Ontario’s attorney general reviewed how the system worked for Muslims and “did not find any evidence to suggest that women are being systematically discriminated against as a result of arbitration of family law issues”.

10. Criticism of Islam segues effortlessly with prejudice against black immigrants. “Niggers out” no longer wins many votes, but Muslim-bashing presses the same political buttons. For our rulers, Islam is a doubly-convenient scapegoat for resistance to the West’s “war on terror”. Any discussion of Islam today is therefore a discussion about war and about racism. By ignoring this basic fact the media join hands with the racists and the warmongers.

For the latest, see the excellent resource islamophobia-watch.com

At a Glance: Sharia Law in Britain

Ellie Keen — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:23:51 +0000

What are the basic facts behind the Muslim-baiting?

1. Most British Muslims do not demand Sharia law.

Muslim Council of Britain: “We do not wish to see a parallel system or a separate system of judiciary for Muslims.”

Shaista Gohir, government adviser: “The majority of Muslims do not want it. Many Muslim commentators and the media are wrongly assuming that all Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”

2. What British Muslims want is for the UK, US and Israel to end their bloody occupations of Muslim countries.

3. They want an end to the racism against British Muslims, who are overwhelmingly dark-skinned.

6. Religious courts already operate in this country for Orthodox Jews. Why shouldn’t Muslims enjoy the same right?

8. The UK is already amending its finance laws to allow Sharia-compliant products such as halal mortgages and Islamic bonds, in part to attract billions of petro-dollars from the cash-rich Gulf.

For the latest, see the excellent resource islamophobia-watch.com

Musa Qala: Is this Afghanistan’s Fallujah?

Tim Holmes — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:26:05 +0000

Just as the immediate threat of war on Iran appears to be receding, the full horror of the “war on terror” is being unleashed on the town of Musa Qala in Afghanistan – and is in danger of being grossly mis-reported by the British media.

This is, according to British officers quoted in the Sunday Times, one of the biggest British military operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, involving as many as 3,000 British troops – almost half the British forces in the country.

It has been five weeks in preparation, and yet the first we learned of it were BBC reports on Friday evening (Dec 7). The Saturday papers ignored the story. BBC news on Sunday night led on Gordon Brown in Iraq, reducing the assault on Musa Qala to a brief mention of the death of a British soldier.

This stunning delay in reporting such a major operation means that all the reports of what is happening appear to be strictly controlled by NATO.

The Sunday and Monday papers make it clear, nevertheless, that this is the biggest British-led operation staged so far in the Afghanistan war. British, Afghan and American forces were advancing all last week towards Musa Qala amid heavy fighting. Backed by several hundred vehicles and dozens of Apache attack helicopters and A-10 Thunderbolt jets, there were violent gun battles as the troops neared the town. British officers said the whole operation was so big that some aircraft were redeployed from combat in Iraq.

The movement began on Tuesday (Dec 4) at first light when Royal Marine commandos stormed across the Helmand river in amphibious vehicles near the town of Sangin. On Thursday, a big Afghan army column began an advance, backed by British and American special forces. The Taliban (the label universally used for the Afghan resistance) have spent months laying anti-personnel and minefields, preparing bunkers and digging trenches in preparation for the attack.

Estimates of the number of troops involved are vague, but the Observer said 4,500 NATO soldiers and Afghan National Army troops were involved, while the Guardian puts it at 6,000. In November 2004, Pentagon officials said 12,000 troops were involved in re-taking Fallujah – a city of 350,000 – from the Iraqi resistance. Given that Musa Qala has a population of about 20,000, you have some idea of the sheer scale of the NATO assault. House-to-house fighting is anticipated.

Like Fallujah, Musa Qala town has become a symbol of the Taliban’s ability to resist NATO and Afghan forces. After very fierce fighting British troops were forced to withdraw in the summer of 2006, after which Afghan forces moved in early this year. Now NATO wants revenge.

Like Fallujah, thousands of civilians are trapped in the town, as reported by embeds who also witnessed US troops open fire on and kill refugees trying to flee the town. Several children have been reported killed in fighting on Saturday. People are staying behind in Musa Qala because they fear their homes will be looted when the town falls. This, by the way, is what “precision” bombing looks like in Afghanistan. This year has been the deadliest in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion in 2001 with more than 6,200 people estimated to have been killed in insurgency-related violence.

British media reports so far have all been framed in terms of Afghan atrocities – right on cue, Afghan president Hamid Karzai accused the Taliban of suspending a 15-year-old boy from a ceiling and lighting a gas stove underneath him, burning him alive. The media are also faithfully reporting British troops’ claim to be fighting for “hearts and minds” (i.e. we’re the nice guys), and to cut heroin production, with no mention that it is the occupation that has abjectly failed to prevent an explosion in poppy cultivation as the only means of subsistence.

The retaking of Fallujah didn’t stop the Iraqi resistance – in fact it fuelled it. Have the British media learned any lessons from Iraq? Their coverage of Musa Qala in the next few days will be a test.

Blair's Greatest Hits

Tim Holmes — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 15:28:02 +0000

For 10 years Tony Blair has faithfully backed the United States in its military adventures abroad, using lies and spin to whip up public feeling in favour of war, and ignoring public opinion when this failed.

What are the war lies that you will remember Blair for? Here are a few of them:

1. 1998: US bombs Sudan

On Aug 20, 1998, the US bombed the al-Shifa chemicals plant in Sudan, claiming it was a “terrorist base”. The plant turned out to provide 50 percent of Sudan’s medicines; its destruction left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria.

Tony Blair and the then defence minister, George Robertson, rallied to the cause, claiming that America was justified and defending the apparently unassailable evidence. They were, however, alone in supporting the action and rejecting accusations that Clinton had ordered the attacks as a distraction from the unfolding Monica Lewinsky saga.

Noam Chomsky was one of many who pointed out: “One can scarcely try to estimate the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims.”

2. 1998: US/UK bomb Iraq

In December 1998 the US and Britain bombed Iraq for four days as part of a new strategy of “regime change”. The attacks took place during Clinton’s impeachment hearings. Britain was the only ally to join the US, setting it at odds with almost all its European partners – even Kuwait refused to support the attacks.

Blair said war was necessary because Hussein never intended to abide by his pledge to give unconditional access to UN inspectors trying to determine if Iraq had dismantled its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

But UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said the inspectors were sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that “had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify a bombing.” They were then withdrawn on instructions from Washington.

3. 1999: NATO bombs Serbia

NATO, led by the US and Britain, launched military action knowing that it would provoke a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign by Milosevic. This indeed occurred in stark fashion, with immense consequences, which then enabled NATO leaders to claim they were acting to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe that they had provoked.

With bombing under way, NATO military figures publicly refuted political leaders’ whole justification for the war by saying that the military strategy could not prevent the humanitarian disaster.

Human Rights Watch said: “We are concerned that NATO bombed the civilian infrastructure not because it was making a significant contribution to the Yugoslav military effort but because its destruction would squeeze Serb civilians to put pressure on Milosevic to withdraw from Serbia”

The war was undertaken without UN authorisation and complete with the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the use of cluster bombs. “We will carry on pounding day after day after day, until our objectives are secured”, Tony Blair said two weeks into the bombing in April 1999, revealing the brutal reality of NATO’s supposedly “humanitarian war” over Kosovo.

4. 2001: US/UK invade Afghanistan

Tony Blair, Oct 2, 2001: “To the Afghan people we make this commitment. The conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the outside world has so many times before.”

Cherie Blair, Nov 19 2001: “The women in Afghanistan are as entitled as the women in any country are to have the same hopes and aspirations for ourselves and for our daughters. … We need to help them free that spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see.”

The reality today: “Without a huge injection of foreign aid – and there is no evidence that anyone wants to provide it – it may not be long before British commanders start saying: ‘Let’s get out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.’” Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian, June 21 2007

The reality today: “In a filthy corner of a clinic in Lashkar Gah, a heavily pregnant 12-year-old lies wailing at a curt, dismissive doctor. Down the road some of the thousands of widows in the area beg in the mud. In the local hospital, women lie recovering from the horrific burns of failed suicide attempts. The brave new world promised by Tony Blair, President George Bush and Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, appears not to have reached the women of Helmand.

“When asked whether life was better now than under the Taliban, Fowzea Olomi, 40, the director of the women’s centre [in Helmand], laughs: ‘The Taliban have gone?’ Life now, she says, is worse.” Terri Judd in the Independent, June 13 2007

5. 2003: US/UK invade Iraq

Anti-War Activism, Journalists and Journalism

Alex Doherty — Wed, 09 May 2007 17:10:33 +0000

A media row has broken out over the National Union of Journalists’ vote at its national conference in April to call for a trade union-led boycott of Israeli goods. Much criticism of the vote has been framed in terms of maintaining journalists’ impartiality and balance. Regardless of how you feel about the boycott issue, for anti-war journalists the dispute raises a key question – can we take a stand on contentious political issues without sacrificing professional standards of accuracy and balance in our work?

The Guardian’s recent leader on the NUJ’s boycott vote is typical of the No position on this issue, accusing the NUJ of sacrificing journalists’ “general integrity” and “casting doubts on whether they can truly approach their work in a spirit of fairness and distinterested inquiry”. If we put to one side the condescending tone of this editorial, what are the serious issues at stake?

If we are concerned about our credibility being undermined, let’s first remember why it’s not particularly high in the first place. Journalists usually rank just above MPs and estate agents in BBC polls on respect for the professions. Going along with the Iraqi WMD farce didn’t do journalism’s credibility any favours — which suggests that the NUJ’s yearly conference votes against the war and for immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq have been a credit to the profession, rather than undermining it.
Moreover, the Guardian’s notion that British journalists “approach their work in a spirit of fairness and distinterested inquiry” might soothe a few senior editorial egos, but it is hardly convincing. Since when was the British media fair to anybody (let alone the Palestinians)? Much political activism in the British media masquerades as balanced reporting. It would be more honest for journalists to be open about their views than to hide behind the myth of professional impartiality – a central theme of Phillip Knightley’s classic book on war reporting, The First Casualty.

The British media are well known for their robust editorial positions on all sorts of political issues, yet there is no suggestion that journalists might be compromised by working for these media. So why should we be compromised by taking political positions ourselves? Peter Wilby put this point very well in his column in the MediaGuardian, commenting on the NUJ’s boycott vote (which he opposed):

“Many newspapers take strong positions in their leader columns. These positions are determined by the bosses. Mere hacks – most of whom don’t have columns – should be allowed their say too. If individual correspondents can distance themselves from their paper’s opinions, they can easily do so from their union’s.”

Moreover, journalists’ politics inform all sorts of judgments we make about news and coverage, how we select and investigate our subject matter. Vigorous politics – of both right and left – therefore often stimulate the best reporting. Paul Foot was named journalist of the decade at the What the Papers Say awards in 2000 – no one could accuse him of being politically “neutral”.

So it is a myth that journalists leave our political views at the door when we come into work. Any professional understands how to excise their opinions from the work they produce, we apply standards and methods to make what we write stand above mere opinion. But it is simplistic to suggest that journalists should jettison their personal views. Worse, it is a recipe for stifling dissent in the newsroom.

If it becomes taboo for journalists to hold political views, the right-wing consensus among senior editors and managers will simply go unquestioned and unchallenged. A demand that journalists and their organisations cease to be political hands control of our copy to our employers. We cannot allow governments, the Richard Desmonds and Rupert Murdochs to become the arbiters of editorial standards.

In short, being political is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of being a good journalist. On the question of the “war on terror”, being actively anti-war clearly means standing up for better journalism. Just look at what has happened to the British media since the invasion of Iraq. Had the peace movement been successful in preventing the war, there would have been:

No shadow cast over much of the British media for swallowing the government’s lies;

No Hutton report and no Alastair Campbell gloating over bullying the BBC into submission;

No Mark Thompson introducing swingeing job cuts across the BBC;

The Mirror would still be a serious newspaper, rather than a pale imitation of the Sun.

Media Workers Against the War is about trying to strengthen the tradition of political activism among journalists. Journalists need to be inspired, supported and encouraged to fearlessly report the big issues of our time, rather than go along with the preferences of governments and proprietors. We have much work to do to achieve this aim.

MWAW committee

Regarding the NUJ’s boycott vote, much bluster in the media might have been avoided had commentators acquainted themselves more fully with the motion itself, the speech moving the motion, and the NUJ’s statement on the matter. Media Workers Against the War is not directly engaged in this issue, however. Our primary concern is to develop the broad anti-war movement among media workers to bring into it all those who are appalled by the “war on terror” and the way it is reported.