A sound mind in Britain

I had never heard of Melanie Phillips until I came across this speech, in which she brilliantly sets forth and attempts to explain the British media's irrational perversion of its coverage of the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire. This is absolutely one of the best pieces I've read on Israel or the war in Iraq. Although her commentary on the media is aimed at the British press (she is after all British) her words ring just as true for the left-leaning media in the States. The link provided above leads you to a page that contains a link at the bottom to the entire 17 page pdf file. Every word of this speech should be read. But if time constrains you, here are some of the highlights:

How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view — hitherto confined to the most extreme left-wing circles — that the President of the United States is more of a danger than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to view a democracy — Israel — that has been under attack since its foundation as the greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?

Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.

This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don’t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them...

The public has been grossly misled by the British media, and falsehoods have become accepted as fact, so much so that any statement of actual facts which undermine this mindset are excised from the debate altogether...

Every single development in the Iraq saga has been reported through a prism of prejudice. The whole debate has been characterised by distortion, omission and misrepresentation. The intended outcome is not just to discredit Tony Blair but to induce such cynicism and fury about the Iraq war that Britain withdraws its troops, peels off from the US and undermines the defence of the west...

On Blair's Israeli policy:

A crucial part of this frenzy has been the firm belief that Iraq was the wrong target. And that’s because the media knew what the real target should be. The real cause of terror, goes the prevailing wisdom, is Israel’s perceived refusal to grant a state to the Palestinians — a misapprehension unfortunately given weight by pronouncements by Tony Blair himself, who has said that solving the Israel/Palestinian impasse would make the greatest contribution to the war against terror. He has it precisely the wrong way round: only by ridding the world of the sources of terror will the Israel/Palestinian conflict be solved. His inability to give the British public a correct perspective on the relationship between Israel and terror has undoubtedly been a major factor behind both Britain’s extreme animosity towards Israel and, ironically, its hostility to Blair’s policy on Iraq...

As to why terrorists do what they do:

Unaware of this, people ask themselves what can possibly cause human beings to behave in such a barbaric way. And in their media-induced ignorance, they conclude the only reason must be despair and dispossession. And so they fix on Israel as the cause, because through the relentless TV pictures of Palestinians weeping in the rubble of houses demolished by the Israeli army, with a running commentary which predicates the myth of Israeli tanks against Palestinian stones, they are provided with a neat cause of righteous armchair indignation. The obscenity of using even children as human bombs focuses British ire not at the Palestinians for doing so but at Israel, their target. The actual causes of the slaughter — the indoctrination from the cradle in gross Jew hatred, paranoid delusions about the west and a cult of death sanctified and even mandated by religious edict — are studiously ignored by the media which presents it instead as a dispute over
land...

Concerning Israel:

Moreover, Israel itself is shamefully misrepresented by the British media. As in other parts of Europe, Israel is now demonised in a way that goes way beyond legitimate criticism. The one democracy in the Middle East is being delegitimised as a pariah state, while the media is silent on the despotisms that try to destroy it. Of course, it sometimes behaves badly and should be criticised. But it is held to impossibly high standards of behaviour which are expected of no other country. Its every action is reported malevolently, ascribing to it the worst possible motives and denying its own victimisation. Instead of the truth, which is that every military action is taken solely to protect itself from attack, it is portrayed falsely as instigating the violent oppression of Palestinians.

Such an approach is rooted in the media’s astonishing ignorance of history and wilful distortions. The Middle East tragedy is patently not about a Palestinian state, which could have been established any time between 1947 and 1967, and which was actually offered both in 1947 and in 2000, when the only response was an unprecedented campaign of mass murder. Journalists talk about the ‘occupied territories’ without ever saying this is not an aggressive occupation - as is, for example, the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which is simply ignored - but in Israel’s case it is perfectly legal to hold land where the belligerent entity that has attacked it in the first place still regards itself as in a state of war against it.

The media constantly present Israel’s behaviour as brutal and disproportionate. And yes, sometimes it is - and it should be condemned when this is so. Yet there is no acknowledgement of the substantial attrition rate suffered by its forces by choosing to conduct house to house searches in order to minimise innocent casualties rather than bomb from the air, as the Americans would undoubtedly do to minimise their own casualty rate. Indeed, in the battle of Jenin in 2002 when Israel went in to root out terrorists, the media described it as a massacre with hugely inflated figures of hundreds of dead Palestinians. The massacre story ran for days, even in newspapers whose editorial line is sympathetic to Israel. Yet the facts were that only 52 Palestinians died, of whom the
vast majority were armed men, and no fewer than 23 Israeli soldiers — an extraordinarily high attrition rate. But the false impression created by the media libel remains to this day...

The following is true for many media outlets in the US:

But probably the greatest single reason for the obsessive and unbalanced focus on Israel,along with the irrationality over Iraq, is the hostility and prejudice of the BBC’s reporting. Unlike newspapers, the BBC is trusted as a paradigm of fairness and objectivity. In fact, it views the world from a political position which is similar to that of the Guardian or Independent. In other words, its default position is the left. And since it regards this as the political centre of gravity, it cannot acknowledge its own bias. The BBC is thus a perfectly closed thought system...

The conclusion of Phillips's argument:

So why has all this happened? Why has the media succumbed to this epidemic of bigotry, blindness and bias?

One obvious reason is simple fear. In Ramallah, when Arafat was alive, reporters who assembled for a press conference happened to witness a man being frog-marched outside and shot. They were threatened with death if they reported it. In tyrannies or police states where information is hard to get, journalists report what they are told and have neither the language skills nor the freedom to inquire whether it is actually true. At home, journalists are terrified of being tarred and feathered as an Islamophobe or right-wing or worst of all, a Sharon-lover. There is no equivalent fear, it seems, of being thought a Jewhater, which is merely laughed off as another example of Jewish paranoia and Holocaust hysteria.

The second reason is the cult of postmodernism to which the media, like the rest of the intellectual world, has fallen victim. Some time ago, journalism decided that objectivity was bunk and truth was relative. Facts stopped being sacred and news reporting became an expression of opinion. And because truth itself was merely a subjective view, the way was open for propaganda based on lies to be promoted as the truth as long as it fitted the prevailing prejudice.

That prejudice is overwhelmingly the mindset of the left. Since the left demonises America and western capitalism, and lionises the third world and all liberation movements, America or Israel can never be victims, only aggressors, while the Muslim and Arab third world can only be victims because they are the powerless pawns of western imperialism. This has propelled the left into an unholy alliance with the Arab and Muslim world. As a result, both western leftists and eastern zealots share the perception of America and Israel as the Great and Little Satan, and march shoulder to shoulder behind placards saying ‘No Blood for Oil’ and ‘Death to the Jews’...

The appalling result of all this is that, if a terrorist outrage in London were to claim the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, the reaction of many Britons might not be a revival of the spirit of the Blitz and an iron determination to defeat fascism and tyranny. It might be instead to turn on Tony Blair and blame him directly for bringing about the slaughter. And that, of course, is precisely what makes such a terrible outcome more likely. There can be little doubt that al Qaeda, such a shrewd judge of western decadence and the differences in moral fibre between the countries of the west, will have noted the fact that in Britain, the worse the terrorist outrage that is committed, the more the public will turn on Tony Blair. Every single defeatist, distorted or dishonest article about Iraq, Israel and the war on terror makes another barbaric atrocity more likely.

It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west’s response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. In the war that has been declared upon the free world, the western media’s abuse of power is perhaps the most lethal weapon of all.

Forgive the length of this post; it's worth the bandwidth and time.