The Para-Scandal and the Bush Visit in Colombia: An interview with Jorge Robledo

Jorge Robledo has been a Colombian senator with the Polo Democratico Alternativo (PDA), a democratic left party, since 2002. In recent years he has given a national voice to the opposition to the ‘free trade agreement’ between the US and Colombia, which has delivered the country’s public sector industries, resources and territories to multinationals. In recent months, the Polo Democratico has also opened a national debate to expose the connections between the political system and the paramilitaries, death squads linked to the government who are implicated in massive human rights violations, assassinations, massacres, the liquidation of social opposition, and narcotrafficking. Another senator with the PDA, Gustavo Petro, has been instrumental in investigating these connections, and was interviewed during a recent trip to the US on Democracy Now! (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/09/1443229) and WBAI (http://archive.wbai.org/files/mp3/070309_070001wuc.MP3).

With Bush’s visit to the region, US Senators McGovern and Leahy, as well as others in the Democratic party, have challenged Bush’s sponsorship of President Alvaro Uribe Velez. Popular protests against Bush’s visit have taken place all over Latin America. Senator Robledo will be raising questions about the beneficiaries of paramilitarism in Colombia, and its backers, in the US. We interviewed him over the phone on March 9.

Justin Podur: Can you introduce, and explain briefly to readers who don’t know, what the ‘para-scandal’ is, how it came to be exposed, and what its effects have been on politics in Colombia?

Jorge Robledo: Colombia has long had the phenomenon of ‘paramilitarism’. Paramilitaries are armed groups linked with the state. One sector of the paramilitaries was organized by wealthy rural landowners for the purpose of attacking the guerrilla movement, but many paramilitary crimes have been directed against the civilian population. They are closely linked with narcotrafficking and organized crime. This has been the case for at least 20 years. Over this time, the paramilitaries have become a significant political power, in regional governments, municipalities, governorships, the congress, and the senate.

The ‘para-scandal’ is this: in recent months it has come to light that the paramilitaries are connected throughout the political system of the country, and especially the congress and senate. The supreme court has sent some congresspeople and other politicians to jail. According to the national newspaper, El Tiempo, there are 19 more congress members who could end up in jail. No less than the chief of the secret police, DAS (departamento administrativo de seguridad) is in jail. There are publicly available documents signed by congresspeople and paramilitaries, explicit agreements.

But the other part of this scandal that’s less-often discussed, is that all of the paramilitary-connected politicians, almost all of them, are friends of the Uribe government (Colombia’s President is Alvaro Uribe Velez). So even though the scandal is referred to as a scandal of ‘para-politica’, it makes more sense to call it ‘para-Uribismo’.

JP: But the connections between paramilitarism and the state, connections between paramilitaries and politicians, between paramilitaries and the army – these were all well-documented and well-known, and have been for years. What is it that has raised common knowledge to the level of a ‘scandal’?

JR: That’s a million-dollar question, and you’re completely right. Years ago, one of the paramilitary chiefs said that they had 30% of congress in their pockets. This was known. The new part today is that the supreme court has proceeded with an investigation and sent 8 congresspeople to jail.

JP: How far do you think the ‘scandal’ will go? What will its effect be on politics in Colombia?

JR: What we hope is that many more congresspeople who we know are connected to paramilitarism, as well as governors, mayors, and others, end up in jail. This is just the beginning. We know the connections are very deep but we do not know how far the process will be allowed to go. There are very powerful forces who do not want the truth to be known. When the final accounting is done, we know that it will involve business, the armed forces, the judiciary. So we are all wanting to see it pursued and concerned about whether it will go far enough, how far it will implicate the President, for example. Uribe continues to have the polls even though 90% of the paramilitary-connected politicians who have been exposed and punished so far are his friends, people he supported, people who supported him in his campaign.

Manuel Rozental: You mentioned the chief of the secret police, DAS, Jorge Noguera. We know that Noguera is very close to the President, and that the charges against him are very damning of the President and of the US. Can you talk about this?

JR: This is, in the midst of a massive scandal, one of the most scandalous pieces of information. The director of the nation’s secret service, DAS, Jorge Noguera, is in prison for his participation in paramilitary crimes. This is a real scandal because the charges include electoral fraud, assassinations of unionists, academics, activists, the use of president’s own car used for paramilitarism. Noguera was chief of Uribe’s electoral campaign in Magdalena. Uribe has stayed at Noguera’s house various times. These two people are very close. When the charges were coming to light Uribe tried to get Noguera a post with the Colombian Embassy in Italy. When the press challenged him, Uribe became very intemperate, as he often does.

MR: Can you explain also the link between the para-scandal and the ‘peace process’ between the government and the paramilitaries?

JR: The government has accused those of us who are bringing the evidence of ‘para-politica’ or ‘para-uribismo’ to light of trying to ruin this ‘peace process’. So the ‘peace process’ was started by the national government in 2002-2003. It was a process to pardon the paramilitaries from their crimes and resolve the legal problem, to legalize them, giving some of them light sentences, not amnesty but a very generous pardon. This process was supported by some of the politicians who are in jail now. Part of the ‘peace process’ was that the paramilitaries confess their crimes, their connections, and their relations. And in these confessions, the paramilitaries are saying things but they have not yet exposed the main connections. They have confessed some of their links to the military, Salvatore Mancuso, the paramilitary chief, talked about connections to various brigades of the army, but very little of the connections with politicians has been brought to light through the ‘peace process’.

JP: Some people close to Uribe have proposed, as a solution to the para-scandal and the loss of credibility by politicians linked to paramilitarism, the closure of Congress. What do you think of that ‘solution’?

JR: That is correct. One of the Uribistas, Marta Lucia Ramirez, who was the Defense Minister, about two weeks ago proposed that congress be closed. We in the PDA frankly opposed this because in Colombia’s conditions, there are no laws to permit the closure of congress. Congress cannot be revoked. To do so would be a break from judicial order, and this would benefit the president who would become a dictator. To change the norms to close the congress, they would basically have to have a coup. We have called this an ‘auto-golpe’, or a ‘self-coup’, which is what President Fujimori did in Peru. It’s important to remember that nearly the totality of those implicated in paramilitarism are Uribistas. Not all of congress is involved, and those who are, are all Uribistas. So it’s unacceptable that the solution be to close the congress. The effect would be to throw out those who are denouncing paramilitary control and connections to congress and hand all power to the Presidency, whose role in paramilitarism has not yet been investigated or determined.

There is another important point of legality to consider. If Ramirez considers that congress is illegitimate and should be closed, presumably because of the evidence that has arisen of widespread electoral fraud organized in part by the paramilitaries, then she has to also consider that these same votes helped to elect the President. If congress’s mandate is revoked, she’d have to revoke the mandate of the President also. She is not talking about doing that, and so this is all manipulation in order to try to hide the political responsibility of the President (not the legal responsibility) for the ‘para-politica’.

JP: Your political work has been devoted to opposing the ‘free trade agreement’. Can you explain this work and, are there any connections between ‘free trade’ and the ‘para-scandal’?

JR: From before I got to congress, in the 1990s, I was organizing against neoliberalism, which is now called ‘free trade’. For nearly five years since I have been in congress we opposed the free trade agreement. The free trade agreement is not to integrate the economies of Colombia and the US, but to annex Colombia’s economy to US monopolies and multinationals. This is easy to demonstrate. It is the same model that the US imposes on all countries. In the text of the free trade agreement, the White House declares its interests, and they are imposed on countries like Colombia. This imperialist imposition makes us a colony. It has practically ruined our agriculture and industry. It is responsible for much of the barbarity, corruption and horror we have experienced. It is responsible for the deterioration of labor rights, the environment, poverty, and unemployment, for the past 17 years since the economing ‘opening’ in 1990.

This whole ‘para-politica’, is a project of the Right. The Right is the agent of neoliberalism, close to White House, close to Washington. The Right in Colombia’s congress has supported all the neoliberal reforms, since they ruined the economy with the ‘opening’ of 1990, privatizating state enterprises, giving privileges to foreign investors. As the economy has been devastated, the paramilitaries and the ‘para-politicos’ have seen their fortunes grow. Their wealth doesn’t come from the national economy, but from kidnapping, crime, the seizure of land.

MR: They would have us believe that Colombia is unique for the level of violence it faces and the paramilitary strategy. But if you look at Latin America’s history you see the same strategy was used with the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala or the Contras in Nicaragua. The strategy goes beyond paramilitarism and the US is always behind it.

JR: Everything happening in Colombia has to do one way or another with Washington. We’re in the orbit of the emprie, by way of Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia of 2000 did more than just impose a way of managing ‘narcotrafficking’. There were also 20 pages of small type in the Plan that detailed the reorganization of Colombia’s economy.

So if Plan Colombia imposed an economic, political, and military model on us from the US, then we wonder how it is possible that the US Embassy and State Department don’t know about paramilitarism in this country. How can paramilitary crimes be so pervasive without the US knowing about it, or being involved? We’d like to know how the US is involved, and we’ll know more when large numbers of Americans demand that their government assume responsibility for paramilitarism.

MR: Can you speak a bit more about Plan Colombia, now entering its second phase?

JR: Plan Colombia was designed between the US and Colombia with the proposal of reducing production, processing, traffic of drugs by 50%. That was its basic objective. Not to end narcotrafficking, but to reduce it by 50%. To this end, over $1 billion from the US and over $4 billion from Colombia were spent. The money was spent on ‘security’, fumigation, helicopters, mercenaries, and so on. This is well known.

But it also has another aspect that we have tried to raise, the small print connecting Plan Colombia to economic changes, and this is how imperialism covers its ‘free’ support. They came to ‘save’ us but the fine print says for example that Colombia has to join the free trade agreement. The fine print outlines the importance of Colombia getting foreign investment – ie., to give the country to US investors. The state enterprises, energy, banks, were all given notice in the fine print. And everything there has come to pass.

Another thing to say about Plan Colombia is that it’s a failure. The objective was to reduce trafficking by 50%. But all analysts agree that prices haven’t risen: prices are the simplest and most effective way of knowing that supply hasn’t been reduced. So it is a failure to reduce the drug traffic.

I see it as an imperialist pretext for the US to get involved in our country and loot our economy.

JP: Uribe’s habit, like Bush’s, is to accuse those who oppose him of being ‘terrorists’. He has done so with the Polo Democratico. What is the intention behind these smear campaigns and how can they be defeated?

Remember that Bush and Uribe are right-wing spokespeople for the global right wing. This right wing is currently defending torture as a technique of criminal investigation, this right wing invaded Iraq with the support of Uribe, who supports that invasion to this day. These are characters of the extreme right, which has been using ‘terrorism’ to justify everything. Everything they do justify by ‘terrorism’. Every opposition is stigmatized as terrorism.

Uribe gave a speech recently saying the passage of the free trade agreement was a victory against terrorism. That implies that those of us who opposed free trade are friends of terrorism. The PDA, folks like Gustavo Petro, have exposed the ‘para-politica’, or ‘para-Uribismo’, and so Uribe’s tactic is to distract people. He has had some success in his aggression against us. He called us ‘terrorists in civilian clothing’ – he’s trying to imply we are guerrillas or friends of the guerrilla. He wants to polarize.

We are trying to say there are more than two positions. We have a third position, we don’t have any faith in violence, neither in violence of the paramilitaries nor of the guerrilla. Our manipulative president makes insinuations to paint democrats as guerrillas. This is a political attack on us partly because, and we have to admit this, partly because the guerrillas are at an all-time low of prestige, because Colombians are sick of violence.

JP: Colombia’s democratic left parties have suffered terror and assassinations like Colombia’s social movements generally. How does PDA organize in such a context? What are the risks you face? What are the possibilities for the future?

JR: There is, unfortunately, a long history of political violence in Colombia. In the 1940s and 1950s, we had ‘La Violencia’ of Liberals and Conservatives, the two parties of Colombia’s oligarchy killed each other for 15 years, with 400,000 killed. After that there were various stages of guerrilla movements, which were favored by Colombia’s complicated geography and size, many different guerrilla organizations, all facing the establishment with a left position.

In the 1980s, as part of a peace process, a party called Union Patriotica was created. That party was destroyed by the establishment, who first insinuated they were friends of the guerrilla, and then killed them. This was a real, dramatic massacre of thousands, for which the Colombian government could be called to account in international courts.

So this is a permanent part of our history. The number of people who have been killed for their involvement in political parties, unions, social movements, guerrillas, is immense.

In this context, Uribe’s practice of linking the polo with the guerrilla is shown to be an extremely irresponsible thing to do. In the case of the PDA it’s made even worse, because we are a democratic left, a coalition of many forces, and one of our points of unity is that we do not use violence in politics. We don’t make our demands by way of arms. We don’t agree with kidnapping or assassination, irrelevant of the goals.

MR: There are multiple levels of ‘para-politica’. At the local, regional, municipal levels, we have seen the infiltration of the state by the paramilitaries. At the national level, the investigation is getting closer to Uribe. And internationally, it is impossible to believe the US is not behind much of this. Democratic senators like McGovern and Leahy of the US are starting to say publicly that Uribe is not just an observer in what is happening with paramilitarism. Bush in his visit is saying that he supports Uribe because Uribe is getting to the bottom of paramilitarism. So we have Bush protecting Uribe, who is actually acting on behalf of the US.

JR: That’s why I use the term ‘para-Uribismo’. All the congresspeople who have gone to prison already are Uribistas. Of the 19 in line for judgement, 17 are Uribistas. One of the famous documents, the document of Santa Fe Ralito, signed by paramilitaries and congresspeople, the congresspeople who signed were Uribistas. The director of DAS is an Uribista. The organization ARCOIRIS, with 83 congresspeople from paramilitary-controlled zones, 90% are Uribistas. This is not to say that all Uribistas are paras, but it does say the phenomenon is that these are friends of the president. This is understood in the exterior, and democratic senators in the US like McGovern and Leahy have noticed as much. Leahy said in El Tiempo that the US government must correct its support for Uribe. Leahy said ‘someone explain to me who we are working with in Colombia.’

We in the PDA insist that these are political, not just penal, responsibilities for Uribe. He has to explain why so many of his friends are involved. And we also want to know how far is the US involved? The US embassy is full of CIA, DEA, FBI, and they don’t have any idea what is happening with paramilitarism? It is not credible.

JP: Do US officials have the moral high ground to ask questions like: ‘Who exactly are we involved with in Colombia?’ Should they not just ask, more simply, ‘Who exactly are we?’

JR: Good question. And we do not know with precision how involved the US has been, but we do know that Plan Colombia was voted in by both Democrats and Republicans. On the other hand, the attitude of any such Democratic politician is very helpful. And we don’t want to say they’re all with Bush, and we have to work with everyone who can help. For there to be people in the US looking for truth is important. The big battle of PDA and Colombia is the search for truth and Uribe is doing everything to prevent this, that’s why he tries to silence us. If he can prevent the truth from getting out, then every one of our problems will be made worse. So for people outside the country, in Europe, in the US, to be raising questions, is very important! It’s a big help

Uribe has two things working in his favor. Less than a year ago he was re-elected, with significant support, and that makes the political fight against him for two reasons. First, he is seen, internally and externally, the leader of the struggle against the guerrillas. He is able to take advantage of the war-weariness of Colombians. People are so sick of violence that the result is a society that is permissive and tolerant of the kinds of measures Uribe has passed. Second, Uribe is a cynical, professional manipulator.

These two things combined have given Uribe enough support to move. The US says ‘he’s our guy over there’. He’s contained the indigenous rebellion, the opposition struggles, the campaigns against free trade, all things the US doesn’t like. In the US, Bush was able to get the free trade agreement passed without the Democrats. But this fight isn’t over. I don’t have illusions about the Democrats, Colombia doesn’t matter much to them, it’s a transaction between politicians to them. But when Bush talked to El Tiempo last week he was pessimistic about various matters.

MR: What is the future of the PDA in this context?

JR: The present is very positive. We’ve managed to unite 99% of the democratic left in Colombia. There is no precedent for that. We have 18 members of congress. We had 2.6 million votes for Carlos Gaviria in the presidency.

In this battle with the government of Uribe, free trade, and the para-politica, I don’t mean to be immodest, but we have struggled well. Supporters of democracy in Colombia see us sympathetically. I’m optimistic, we’re in conditions to advance rapidly. Uribe has para-uribismo, he has no solutions for the country, for problems of poverty and development and violence. We have an option, we have a chance in 2010 and we’ll see. We should be able to actually create an effective alternative.

MR: How is Bush to be welcomed in Colombia?

JR: There have been huge demonstrations in Bogota and elsewhere. There are mobilizations in all universities against Bush, and on Monday we will have a concentration near the Plaza in Bogota and it will be good. There are many things in the media. Colombia is starting to wake up like so many Latin American countries, to struggle for sovereignty, national independence, opposition to imperialism and neoliberalism. This is happening in Colombia.

Justin Podur is a writer and editor of ZNet (www.zmag.org) and a member of the Pueblos en Camino collective (www.en-camino.org).

Manuel Rozental is part of the communications team for the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN – www.nasaacin.net) and a member of the Pueblos en Camino collective (www.en-camino.org).

Patrick Elie in Toronto

Patrick Elie (who has taught me much of what I know about Haiti)was in Toronto last night giving the Toronto Haiti Action Coalition an update on what is happening in Haiti.

Patrick came in So Ann’s stead (I interviewed her in prison in 2005). So Ann needed to rest, according to her doctors, after a tremendous burst of activity following her two years in prison (trips to New York, Florida, Montreal).

Some highlights from his talk.

Continue reading “Patrick Elie in Toronto”

Jamal Zahalka quoted Hannah Arendt in Toronto

It’s true. In his talk, “Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy”, Jamal Zahalka quoted Hannah Arendt. I think. He might or might not have quoted Hegel, I can’t remember. He definitely quoted Hannah Arendt. He also quoted Spiro Agnew, which was weird. He definitely didn’t quote Hitler though, which is apparently what they’ve started saying about him back in Israel. The group that brought him, “Students Against Israeli Apartheid”, are in the process of getting the video of his talk ready and available on the internet so everyone can see for themselves that the vicious and all-too unsurprising rumors that are being spread about him are not true. The real message, I suppose, is that Palestinians shouldn’t be given platforms to speak. They should be denied any opportunity to tell their story, from any platform. Having been pretty thoroughly shut out of the media (you might see one interview with this member of the Israeli parliament published besides the one on ZNet, and that other one will be in a small alternative news magazine in Toronto), Palestinians like Zahalka can’t even talk invited by small campus groups to audiences of a few hundred without being subjected to vicious campaigns of defamation. It isn’t enough to dispossess them, starve them, imprison thousands of them, kill hundreds of them. We also have to prevent them from talking about it.

So in the spirit of letting Zahalka’s words speak for themselves, here is the interview I did with him the day after his talk in Toronto, in which we recap many of the issues he raised in his talk.

A State of all its Citizens: an interview with Jamal Zahalka

http://www.zcommunications.org/a-state-of-all-its-citizens-by-jamal-zahalka

Jamal Zahalka is a member of the Israeli Knesset as part of the Balad Party list that includes Wasil Taha and Azmi Bishara. He was in Toronto delivering the keynote address at Israeli Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto on February 16, 2007. His talk, “Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy”, discussed discrimination against Palestinians living inside Israel. I interviewed him the following day in Toronto.

Continue reading “A State of all its Citizens: an interview with Jamal Zahalka”

Peter Hallward!

The best analysis of the 2004 coup in Haiti, in my opinion, was by Peter Hallward’s “Option Zero in Haiti” in New Left Review. That article anchored my own analysis of what happened in Haiti and I found it immensely helpful in all the work I did. I thought there was a need for a longer analysis and I set about writing one in 2005. Other things intervened and I didn’t end up completing it, and I was very excited to learn that Peter Hallward’s book, “Damming the Flood”, will be coming out soon. That is a book I am really looking forward to getting, the more so because the concluding chapter has come out already and I got a great deal out of that. And still more so because of his interview with Aristide, in which every question I would have wanted to ask Aristide is asked, and answered extremely well. I wrote him to tell him so over email, but I realized that doing so wouldn’t encourage others to read it quite as well as posting it here, so I’m doing that too.

Africa and Gates-keeping

I have been, over the past year or so, making a slow conversion to free software. It started when I interviewed Richard Stallman and tried to get ZNet moving in the direction of free software, along with some help from my friend Tarek. It’s been a long process and I don’t want to minimize the difficulties, but I have decided to aim for full conversion once Windows Vista replaces Windows XP to the point that XP is no longer supported (I’m typing this from an XP machine). I had decided this a while ago, and then I saw an excellent article by Raj Patel called “Tunnel Vista”. The article is available at an excellent site – looks like a blog and is, I note, done in drupal, a free software content management system that this blog will soon be converting to – called “Stuffed and Starved” about our food system.

Raj connects the behavior of the Gates’ in their philanthropy with Africa and their corporate behavior as Microsoft. I’ve been thinking about Africa recently. I’ve been reading about Sudan and Darfur, and that got me thinking about the Congo, and that got me thinking about AIDS. The common thread that runs through Africa’s problems, to my mind, is that the whole continent has been stripped of its sovereignty. Its independent development, its economies, and its governments, have all been destroyed and undermined. The serious problems its people face, they aren’t able to solve, because all the levers of control are outside of their control. The idea that a continent of so many peoples is to depend on philanthropy for vaccinations at all is really angering. Anyway, please read Raj’s piece, and check out Stuffed and Starved.

Enjoying my chorus of one…

One trick of writing on the internet: if you want feedback, leave your email at the bottom of the article, and if you don’t, don’t. Sometimes you forget, as I did with my open letter to Mitch Potter. His reply to me, you’ll recall, was basically to remind me that he has a larger audience than I do (“Enjoy your chorus of one”) thanks to his employer, Torstar, being somewhat larger than ZNet or killingtrain.com, and also to remind me of a further constraint on fair coverage (“those of us on print deadlines”). When you’re on deadlines, it’s easier to go to the sources in the rolodex, and if you’re in Israel/Palestine, those are think-tanks close to the state and military officials.

In any case I forgot to put my email at the bottom which means that people who wanted to write to me had to look it up. Not hard, in my case, at all, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the feedback over the past few days:

I just read your Open Letter. Solid, hard-hitting piece of work.
Impressive. Damn.

*

Brilliant. Thank you.

*

I just wanted to say that I’ve been keeping up on reading your work, and I’m glad that you’ve been keeping up with writing it. Your open letter to Mitch Potter was particularly strong, and it’s nice to see people on our side sticking to their position like you did.

*

I just finished reading an email I received containing a letter you wrote to Mitch Potter. All I can say is well done and more power to you!!

One hopes that the rest of the citizens of the world will play a more active role in an effort to expose the truth… because we (the Palestinians) are not valued as equals when it comes to the dispersal of humanity from the western world, any reports that humanise our cause are all but buried, but those that glorify any act of resistance, thus leading to any harm whatsoever to the Israelis, is plastered across the news bulletins of the world. Keep up the great work!

This is more feedback than I usually get. I think people have been frustrated by subtler and cruder patterns of racism that they take in over long periods of time watching “liberal” media, so the chance to see it named and exposed is vindicating.

A good book I read a year or so ago is called “The Genocide Machine in Canada”. One of the strategic principles the authors advocate is confronting individuals with the consequences of what they do and support. Feelings will get hurt in this process, and the individuals may not change their minds. But it is still an important part of trying to honestly face these problems and our participation in them.

My reply to Mitch Potter

My reply to Mitch Potter’s letter (see two blog posts ago) is published at ZNet.

I sent it to him, and he replied quickly, saying:

> You take months to compose what those of us on print deadlines do
> daily and you manage only to add “lazy” to my glossary of sins?
>
> Pathetic.
>
> Enjoy your chorus of one.
>
> Mitch Potter

I replied simply:

Good to read that you got it, even if you didn’t read it.

Cheers Mitch.

-J.

He replied:

Read it. Wounded by it. Have no intention of engaging further as you seem only interested in selectively distorting the spirit of my work to inflict further pain.

You are off-base in branding me racist. If you knew me you would soon come to understand how wrong you are.

Mitch Potter

I replied to that, too, saying that I had set out to wound, out of frustration at not being able to do anything to change the imbalance of the situation and its misrepresentation. I also acknowledged that I didn’t think he was a racist in the sense of hating a group of people and being a bigot against them, but that he, like I, participated in a system that leads to their suppression and ongoing destruction, and that we’re going along with it, not doing enough to fight it. I also worried that I may have personalized it too much, such that the wider points about the bias in the coverage and the patterns and frames for the discussion of Israel/Palestine have may have gotten lost.

I suppose that is the end of my interaction with Mitch Potter.

My article is below.

Dear Mitch Potter,

It has been some time since you wrote me on September 10, 2006, in response to my blog post at killingtrain.com of July 28, 2006. You wrote me with serious concerns that I had maligned your reputation – attaching, in your words, a slur to your name, and doing so “cavalierly”. I should have replied sooner, and for that I apologize.

I cannot, however, apologize for what I called you, “a truly disgusting racist”. In fact, going over your work over the past six months, I have to add that you are lazy, a liar, and a cliché-ridden writer.

I looked at your work on the Israel/Palestine conflict, including the Lebanon war but excluding solely domestic issues in Israel, from June 29 2006 to December 18 2006. That is 44 stories.

If the stories are an indication, you were in the region from June 29 – July 25, then again from September 2-September 16, again from October 30 – December 18. During that six month period you filed 4 stories from Gaza and 4 from Ramallah. You filed one from Pesagot Settlement in the West Bank and another from Haifa. You filed the other 34 stories from Jerusalem. If, as you suggest, it was premature to call you a truly disgusting racist after reading one story in which you liken Palestinians to rodents, perhaps we can agree that 44 stories (over 80,000 words) is enough to start to discern patterns.

The strong language (“truly disgusting racist”) came to mind for two reasons after reading your article (“After Hamas, another Somalia?”, July 9, 2006). First, because I knew instantly upon reading it that you would never liken Israelis to rodents, nor indeed to any other kind of animal, and you did not ever do so in any of the 44 stories I read, though you did use many disparaging terms to describe Palestinians and Lebanese (I’ll return to that below). Second, and more importantly, because your flippant use of language throughout your reporting obscures Israel’s genocidal policies towards the Palestinians.

Disgusting racism: Obscuring the disparity, causes, and consequences

“Genocidal” is another strong word. It means, according to the UN Genocide Convention, attempts to destroy a group of people. Most people only accept the definition if it also includes attempts to physically destroy a group, not just to culturally destroy them and displace them. With the whole world, starting with Canada, assisting in Israel’s starvation of the Palestinians, while Israel casually (should I say “cavalierly”?) kills dozens of Palestinians every week, and given the direction of Israel’s political and military changes, I think the label genocidal applies. So does Ilan Pappe, a historian at Haifa University, and one of the diverse Israeli expert sources that are readily available that you don’t speak to, favouring a homogeneous group of military and strategic studies experts from think-tanks close to the state.

You were in Gaza in July 2006. To get there you would have had to go through various checkpoints and fortified walls, something most Palestinians are not allowed to do. You were in a place where, by now, probably the majority of children are chronically malnourished and will suffer long-term developmental problems because of it. The two references to Gaza’s children that I found in your stories, though, were as follows. First, you noted how, because Israel had destroyed all the electricity supply in Gaza, that “entrepreneurial street kids who normally can be found hawking gum yesterday switched to candles at Gaza City intersections” (“The war of nerves in Gaza”, June 30, 2006). Second, that after Israeli planes flew over Gaza to create sonic booms (a story I will return to) you could hear children crying, which was “hardly surprising, given that half of the territory’s 1.4 million Palestinians are 15 or younger.” (“Sonic onslaught in Gaza”, July 1, 2006)

At any time, you could have looked around and seen what some (no one you would talk to, perhaps) call the Apartheid Wall but which you referred to, when you wrote about it (before July 2006), as the “separation barrier” or the “security barrier”. Does being Middle East Bureau Chief mean you have some say over the selection of graphics? Could you have published maps of the wall and the checkpoints, the cantonization of the West Bank, the locations of the artillery strikes in Gaza, or the cluster bombs in Lebanon? Could you have published them alongside the locations where all the Qassams or Katyushas landed in Israel? Could you have published the lists and numbers of casualties on both sides?

All this might have given your readers a better chance to understand what Israel is doing. And what Israel is doing is controlling every detail of Palestinian life, including such details as whether a person will live or die, watch their child or parent live or die, be taken off to prison to be tortured, watch their child or parent be taken, be allowed to leave their home, be allowed to leave their town through a massive gate in the massive wall, be allowed to see a loved one, be allowed to see a doctor, have food or fuel or medicine. These details are missing from your stories. So is the agenda behind them missing, which is to take the land of the Palestinians, remove them from it, and destroy those who resist. Both the details and the agenda are things you are in a position to know. The consequences are so serious for so many (starving, murdered, terrorized) people that presenting the conflict as if there is parity, the way you do in some stories, or from the point of view of Israel, the way you do in others, is not innocent deception, but complicity in a major, ongoing crime. That is what is truly disgusting about what you have done.

Human rights organizations document the disparity. According to B’Tselem, from the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000 to the end of January 2007, Palestinians had killed 1020 Israelis, 704 of whom were civilians, 119 of whom were children. According to the PCHR, up until September 2006, when you sent me your email, Israel had killed 3859 Palestinians, 3069 of whom were unarmed, 724 of whom were children. It had completely demolished 2831 Palestinian homes and partially destroyed 2427. It had leveled 37 square kilometers (an area 10% the size of Gaza) and destroyed 677 industrial facilities.

You also must know that the disparity has grown in recent years. For the period during which I looked at your work (July 2006 – December 2006), Israeli forces killed 479 Palestinians, wounded 1650, and arrested 1570. By contrast, Palestinians killed 4 Israeli security personnel and 2 Israeli civilians.

In your two stories on Louise Arbour’s visit to the region on November 22 and 23, you framed the issue in a way that assumed parity even as you reported massive disparity, with paragraphs like: “As Qassams keep falling (eight more yesterday, landing without causing injury) and Israel Defense Forces operations against Palestinian rocket-launchers in Gaza intensify (five dead yesterday, two of them civilians) Arbour diagnoses the violent stalemate as an acute ‘protection-of-civilians deficit,’” and “One day after decrying ‘massive’ Israeli violations of human rights against Palestinian civilians, Canadian Louise Arbour got a close-up view of Israeli suffering yesterday”. Here you made sure to put the word “massive” in quotes, perhaps to ensure that you not be seen calling Israeli human rights violations “massive” (what would be “massive” in your opinion, I wonder?). You separated Arbour’s words from your own when she was calling Israeli human rights violations “massive”, but you were willing to paraphrase her giving advice to the victims: “To paraphrase Arbour’s approach, a different message to the Palestinians might be, ‘Behave like a state. Be legal. Respect and enforce the law, including international law against rocket attacks on civilians.’” How you or Arbour thinks that imprisoned Palestinians suffering periodic massacres who starve at the whim of an occupying power that periodically massacres them can “behave like a state” is unclear – but a lack of clarity about the situation is precisely what your stories induce. But the worst line in your stories on Arbour is your approving introduction to Arbour’s most repulsive statements: “in that spirit, she is not about to be drawn into debate about the uneven death toll of the continuing violence.” Mitch, the uneven death toll matters. It matters on its own merits, and it matters as a clue to the causes, effects, and possibilities for a solution to the conflict. Your presentation, your endorsement, of Arbour’s cowardly refusal to “be drawn into debate” about this basic and fundamental point, helps obscure clear thinking and understanding about what is being done to the Palestinians.

Presenting massive disparity in victimization and crimes as if there is parity helps the victimizers. Helping victimizers who are conducting a campaign of massacre and ethnic cleansing is disgusting racism.

Disgusting racism: The partisan use of language

Another element of your racism comes from your use of language.

You likened Palestinians to rodents, something I cannot let you off the hook for even when you accompany it with quotations from sociologists. Not when you never used any animal analogies about Israelis, and never would.

You describe the Palestinian capture of an Israeli tank gunner by saying they “seized” him (September 12 and November 9). But the 1019 people Israel seized to take off to prisons, many of whom were children, many of whom were tortured, were “arrested” or “detained”, never “seized”.

Further on your use of the word “seized”, you use it elsewhere to make reactions to Israel’s aggression and destruction sound opportunistic. Hizbollah “seized” the leadership (July 16, quoting Buttu) and “seized” the moment (July 14). Indeed, when Israeli shelling killed 7 members of the same family, Palestinians “seized on” this, too, to end a ceasefire (how awful of them to treat the massacre of a family as a sign of the end of a ceasefire).

When you describe Palestinians’ Qassam rockets, which you know and have stated are militarily ineffective and basically a gesture of defiance, you describe them as a “scourge” (November 26) and a “blight” (November 28). You never used such words for Israeli shelling, bombing, and gunfire, which regularly kill dozens of people. These you usually describe as “errant” (November 10 and November 23), although once, and only once, you used the world “horrific” (November 13) to describe the massacre of 19 people by shellfire you elsewhere called “errant”.

By far your most disgraceful use of language comes from the story (July 1) in which you make light of Israeli sonic booms to terrorize Gaza’s population, already starving in the dark. This is so repugnant that readers might not believe it unless quoted at length:

“Then, two teeth-rattling whumps course through your body at thousandth-of-a-second intervals, packing so colossal a wallop they simply defy description. Whump-whump. You, my friend, have just been carpet-boomed. Something in the neighbourhood of 139 decibels of wakey-wakey courtesy of your friendly, neighbourhood Israeli F-16 warplane… How to explain the oomph of a sonic boom in Toronto terms? Say that someone chops down the CN Tower and it lands beside your head. Say they chop down a second CN Tower and it lands on the other side a nanosecond later. And say that, at the very moment of impact, a cardiac surgical team shouts, “Charging to 120 – Clear!” and proceeds to defibrillate your torso…You laugh at the alarm clock on the bedside table, and your earlier worries you might sleep through its ring. Not to worry. Another F-16 should be by in an hour or so. And another after that.”

“Wakey-wakey”, “Oomph”, “Whump-whump”, “boom-boom”, and “carpet-boomed”, are how you write about the threatening actions of an air force that destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, dropped 500-pound bombs into crowded apartment complexes, and has killed hundreds of people in the very zone from where you wrote your clever quips.

Compare this story to your piece on people in Haifa on July 15, who were going through “fretful days” because Hizbollah’s rockets, which you had described as “terrifying” (July 14) had fallen on them. You celebrated the “resilience of the thriving port city” and the “resilience” of its mayor. I saw no references to Palestinian “resilience” in the 44 stories of yours that I read. Nor did I see any reference to Israel’s sonic booms, to say nothing of its artillery and bombing attacks, being “terrifying”.

As for the mayor of Haifa, who in your eyes exemplifies Haifa’s resilience, you quote him saying about the Palestinians and Lebanese that “now we have the right to take them hostage. We have the right to destroy them.” You let this pass without comment, but you referred to Nasrallah’s speeches (July 16) as “invective rich” and “counterfactual bluster”.

On July 22, you explained an alliance between Hamas and Hizbollah by using a “timeworn Arabic adage, ‘Me and my brother against my cousin.’ What the Hamas-Hezbollah dynamic augurs now is the possibility of a religious realignment that could introduce the other half of that parable: ‘Me and my cousin against the world.’ Or, if not the world, Israel.“ Would it ever occur to you to explain Israeli politics or alliances by reference to timeworn Hebrew adages, or would that seem to you to be anti-semitic? It would, to me.

In the same story of July 22 you demonstrated your mind-reading capacities: “Hezbollah, with its daily shower of random rocket fire into northern Israeli towns and cities, is clearly intent upon killing civilians.” I saw no statement from you about what Israel’s intent was in all the massacres of civilians that have occurred while you have written about the conflict. As you may know (but haven’t yet reported that I saw), estimates of deaths in the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006 are that Israel killed over 1100 Lebanese, most of whom were civilians, and that Hizbollah killed 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians. And yet, even now, I bet you are willing to stand behind your statement that Hizbollah was “intent on killing civilians” but that Israel was not. You are willing to impute motives and intent to some, but not others.

These are all signs of racism, and they are disgusting.

Laziness, lies, and clichés

It would be too much to expect you to cover the carnage proportionately by reporting on Palestinian suffering 80 times as much as Israeli suffering (of course 80 times underestimates the disparity, since Israelis control every detail of Palestinian life and use that control to abuse, humiliate, and degrade at whim). But rather than fail to capture this incredible disparity, you inverted the relationship and gave a disproportionate voice to the victimizers. In your 44 stories, you used about 170 sources. 100 of these were Israeli, 39 were Palestinian, and 31 were other (Lebanese, US, or European). To say you used 39 Palestinian sources overstates the case: You used two sources (Diana Buttu and Saeb Erekat) 3 times each, and another (Ghassan Khatib) twice: all three of these are on the same negotiating team and members of the same political faction. You have about a half-dozen other sources (businessmen Sam Bahour and Ali Abu Shahla, academics Naji Shurab and Nader Izzat Said, mental health spokesman Marwan Diab), and another half-dozen “man-on-the-street” interviews. The rest of the Palestinian voices in your articles come second-hand, from television or other media.

Your list of Israeli contacts seems much more impressive, by contrast, particularly in think tanks and universities. The majority of your stories, even on Palestinian questions, are anchored by analysts at Israeli think tanks (Shalem Center, Jaffee Center, Reut Center), by Israeli analysts writing in newspapers (Alex Fishman in Yediot Aharonot), or Israeli academics (at Tel Aviv University or the Hebrew University in Jerusalem). Most of your stories follow a predictable pattern: Some news reported from wire services or media, followed by some analysis by an Israeli columnist in Ma’ariv or Yediot Aharonot, concluding with some analysis by an Israeli expert at a think-tank or university. Recent stories following this pattern are December 18, December 15, December 1, and November 28. Your recourse to Israeli experts and Palestinians close to President Abbas, and the absence of government officials from Hamas, leads to an especially unbalanced view of the fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah. Do you consider yourself to be part of the boycott against the government the Palestinians elected? You frequently mention how Hamas is supported by various Muslim countries, but I didn’t see (I may have missed) references to the supply of cash and weapons to Fatah in Gaza by the US. In the context of starvation, that supply and support makes the conflict in Gaza more of a proxy war than a civil war. But that perspective, widely understood by many Palestinians and Israelis, people both inside and outside the region, is unavailable to your readers. Because of you. At best, this is laziness. Regardless of cause, it has serious consequences.

Though most of your lies are by omission and were discussed above, the article by Daniel Freeman-Maloy, which I referred to in my original blog post shows one direct lie:

“On June 30… Potter made the following assertion: ‘Despite five days of international headlines there has been but a single death – that of kidnapped 18-year-old Israeli hitchhiker Eliyahu Asheri.’”

Freeman-Maloy pointed out that two children aged 2 and 17 had been killed on June 28 at Khan Yunis by unexploded shells. The New York Times caught these deaths, though you didn’t. On June 22, Israeli special forces assassinated a member of the al-Aqsa Martys Brigades in Ramallah. In the week June 22-28, Israeli forces wounded 6 Palestinians, including 3 children, according to PCHR. Asserting a single death was dishonest, given how much violence had been meted out to Palestinians over the summer. Not correcting it in light of information makes it a lie, the worse because several Palestinians were killed even as Canadians were reading your story of a single death.

As for your use of clichés, I have already pointed out how your story of July 1 made light of the terror of Israel’s sonic booms. But your writing is replete with clichés, of Palestinians “enflamed” with “militant rhetoric”, of Hizbollah “well-armed, well-trained and well-acquainted with the promise of martyrdom” conducting an “unprovoked kidnap raid”, of Hamas “sworn to Israel’s destruction”, of Israeli soldiers “getting their boots dirty”, Israelis worrying about “a thousand pound gorilla of a question”. All these clichés, and this is but a small sample, have the same effect: debasing the gravity of the situation, defiling and dehumanizing the victims, and confusing readers as to causes and possible solutions.

Why bother?

My original intention was to look at all of your work since the second intifada began. But I had neither the time nor the stomach for such an exercise, so instead I confined myself to the 44 stories you filed on Israel/Palestine over the past 6 months. I think we both know this was a fruitless exercise on my part in any case. Each of the things I pointed out, you will minimize, rationalize, or find some excuse for. I could tell you how to do your job better. I could give you lists of people, Palestinians and Israelis, you could interview to diversify your sources considerably, facts and arguments you could read, ideas you could expose yourself to so that you could decide where you stood and report both the range of views and justify honestly why you hold yours.

But we both know what would happen if you were fair: if you interviewed a more diverse set of sources, conveyed the massive disparities and the power interests at work, and showed something other than contempt for the lives and thoughts of Palestinians. We know that a person who was fair would not sit long as Middle East Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star, but would face pressure for being, in your words, “overempathetic to the plight of Palestinians” (Interesting that you used “plight” in your email to me. In the past six months you used the word “plight” three times, always to describe Israelis – air force commander Halutz, Israel in general, and tank gunner Shalit, never to describe Palestinians). That pressure would eventually cost such a person his or her job. And whatever you have done with it, no doubt it is a comfortable and interesting job. In the society we’re in, to get and keep such a job requires either overt or covert partisanship for the powerful. Your reporting is a mix of both, and neither you nor our society are going to change any time soon. My hope is not for you, then, but for your readers. I hope that some of them realize that going to you for information on the Israel/Palestine conflict is a good way to be deceived and confused, and that there are far better sources.

Sincerely,

Justin Podur

Amu the Film

Last night I went to the preview screening of the Toronto opening of Amu the Film. It was a treat because the director, Shonali Bose, and the producer were there for Q & A afterwards. It is actually a very clever political film because it is very strong and honest as a film and the politics are not at all contrived. The opposite is true, in fact: the politics are conveyed through a very human story that is also a very political story.

I won’t get into the plot or spoil it, since it is a suspense film and a detective story. But this is a good place to talk about the politics of this political film.

This is a detective story in which the detectives are a couple of youths. No state-sponsored police piecing together the story here, and that stands to reason, because it is the state that is the criminal. The political events the characters deal with, decades later, are the pogroms against Sikhs that took place in New Delhi in 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The film is an indictment of the state, because the pogroms that occurred could not have occurred without the active organization of the state. Politicians provided electoral lists and organized mobs to pull Sikhs out of their homes and kill them. Police stood by or participated in the killing. And decades later there has been no justice. Instead, the killers and organizers walk in impunity, after thousands of people were killed.

Impunity, Bose understands, is a recipe for the repetition of atrocities. And a very similar pattern of state-organized terror and massacre occurred in Mumbai in 1992-1993 after activists from the Hindu right party destroyed the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. The Mumbai riots altered the demography of the city and set the stage for bombings and brutal gang violence that continues today, and is documented remarkably in Suketu Mehta’s book on Mumbai, ‘Maximum City’.

It happened again in Gujarat in February 2002, just about five years ago now, starting with the burning of a train and culminating in a series of massacres of several thousand. One of the most searing political essays ever written is Arundhati Roy’s article on this Gujarat pogrom. Bose refers to this, again cleverly and subtly, in Amu.

Bose leaves no doubt that these events were not ‘communal riots’ between religious communities, but state-orchestrated terrorism serving very specific political agendas. She has another message as well, and that is a celebration of the courage of the people who resisted, who hid people from the killers, who risked their own lives to save others. This kind of courage was rampant in India in these moments, and Bose’s film celebrates some of those who showed it. Finally, by putting the film out there, Bose is making her own attempt to fight impunity, to prevent us from forgetting who committed these atrocities and who they served. India will continue to be distorted by this kind of violence until the truth, and justice, are served. Bose’s film is a step in that direction, and she has had no favours from the Indian authorities in taking that step. The censors cut parts of her film, and whether people see the film or not will depend on grassroots efforts. Watch it, get others to watch it, discuss it.

An Open Letter to Mitch Potter, on Truly Disgusting Racism


http://www.zcommunications.org/an-open-letter-to-mitch-potter-on-truly-disgusting-racism-by-justin-podur

Dear Mitch Potter,

It has been some time since you wrote me on September 10, 2006, in response to my blog post at killingtrain.com of July 28, 2006. You wrote me with serious concerns that I had maligned your reputation, attaching, in your words, a slur to your name, and doing so ‘cavalierly’. I should have replied sooner, and for that I apologize.

I cannot, however, apologize for what I called you, ‘a truly disgusting racist’. In fact, going over your work over the past six months, I have to add that you are lazy, a liar, and a cliche-ridden writer.

I looked at your work on the Israel/Palestine conflict, including the Lebanon war but excluding solely domestic issues in Israel, from June 29 2006 to December 18 2006. That is 44 stories.

If the stories are an indication, you were in the region from June 29 – July 25, then again from September 2-September 16, again from October 30 – December 18. During that six month period you filed 4 stories from Gaza and 4 from Ramallah. You filed one from Pesagot Settlement in the West Bank and another from Haifa. You filed the other 34 stories from Jerusalem. If, as you suggest, it was premature to call you a truly disgusting racist after reading one story in which you liken Palestinians to rodents, perhaps we can agree that 44 stories (over 80,000 words) is enough to start to discern patterns.

The strong language (“truly disgusting racist”) came to mind for two reasons after reading your article (“After Hamas, another Somalia?”, July 9, 2006). First, because I knew instantly upon reading it that you would never liken Israelis to rodents, nor indeed to any other kind of animal, and you did not ever do so in any of the 44 stories I read, though you did use many disparaging terms to describe Palestinians and Lebanese (I’ll return to that below). Second, and more importantly, because your flippant use of language throughout your reporting obscures Israel’s genocidal policies towards the Palestinians.

Disgusting racism: Obscuring the disparity, causes, and consequences

‘Genocidal’ is another strong word. It means, according to the UN Genocide Convention, attempts to destroy a group of people. Most people only accept the definition if it also includes attempts to physically destroy a group, not just to culturally destroy them and displace them. With the whole world, starting with Canada, assisting in Israel’s starvation of the Palestinians, while Israel casually (should I say ‘cavalierly’?) kills dozens of Palestinians every week, and given the direction of Israel’s political and military changes, I think the label genocidal applies. So does Ilan Pappe, a historian at Haifa University, and one of the diverse Israeli expert sources that are readily available that you don’t speak to, favouring a homogeneous group of military and strategic studies experts from think-tanks close to the state.

You were in Gaza in July 2006. To get there you would have had to go through various checkpoints and fortified walls, something most Palestinians are not allowed to do. You were in a place where, by now, probably the majority of children are chronically malnourished and will suffer long-term developmental problems because of it. The two references to Gaza’s children that I found in your stories, though, were as follows. First, you noted how, because Israel had destroyed all the electricity supply in Gaza, that ‘entrepreneurial street kids who normally can be found hawking gum yesterday switched to candles at Gaza City intersections’ (“The war of nerves in Gaza”, June 30, 2006). Second, that after Israeli planes flew over Gaza to create sonic booms (a story I will return to) you could hear children crying, which was ‘hardly surprising, given that half of the territory’s 1.4 million Palestinians are 15 or younger.’ (“Sonic onslaught in Gaza”, July 1, 2006)

At any time, you could have looked around and seen what some (no one you would talk to, perhaps) call the Apartheid Wall but which you referred to, when you wrote about it (before July 2006), as the ‘separation barrier’ or the ‘security barrier’. Does being Middle East Bureau Chief mean you have some say over the selection of graphics? Could you have published maps of the wall and the checkpoints, the cantonization of the West Bank, the locations of the artillery strikes in Gaza, or the cluster bombs in Lebanon? Could you have published them alongside the locations where all the Qassams or Katyushas landed in Israel? Could you have published the lists and numbers of casualties on both sides?

All this might have given your readers a better chance to understand what Israel is doing. And what Israel is doing is controlling every detail of Palestinian life, including such details as whether a person will live or die, watch their child or parent live or die, be taken off to prison to be tortured, watch their child or parent be taken, be allowed to leave their home, be allowed to leave their town through a massive gate in the massive wall, be allowed to see a loved one, be allowed to see a doctor, have food or fuel or medicine. These details are missing from your stories. So is the agenda behind them missing, which is to take the land of the Palestinians, remove them from it, and destroy those who resist. Both the details and the agenda are things you are in a position to know. The consequences are so serious for so many (starving, murdered, terrorized) people that presenting the conflict as if there is parity, the way you do in some stories, or from the point of view of Israel, the way you do in others, is not innocent deception, but complicity in a major, ongoing crime. That is what is truly disgusting about what you have done.

Human rights organizations document the disparity. According to B’Tselem, from the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000 to the end of January 2007, Palestinians had killed 1020 Israelis, 704 of whom were civilians, 119 of whom were children. According to the PCHR, up until September 2006, when you sent me your email, Israel had killed 3859 Palestinians, 3069 of whom were unarmed, 724 of whom were children. It had completely demolished 2831 Palestinian homes and partially destroyed 2427. It had leveled 37 square kilometers (an area 10% the size of Gaza) and destroyed 677 industrial facilities.

You also must know that the disparity has grown in recent years. For the period during which I looked at your work (July 2006 – December 2006), Israeli forces killed 479 Palestinians, wounded 1650, and arrested 1570. By contrast, Palestinians killed 4 Israeli security personnel and 2 Israeli civilians.

In your two stories on Louise Arbour’s visit to the region on November 22 and 23, you framed the issue in a way that assumed parity even as you reported massive disparity, with paragraphs like: “As Qassams keep falling (eight more yesterday, landing without causing injury) and Israel Defense Forces operations against Palestinian rocket-launchers in Gaza intensify (five dead yesterday, two of them civilians) Arbour diagnoses the violent stalemate as an acute ‘protection-of-civilians deficit,’ and “One day after decrying ‘massive’ Israeli violations of human rights against Palestinian civilians, Canadian Louise Arbour got a close-up view of Israeli suffering yesterday”. Here you made sure to put the word ‘massive’ in quotes, perhaps to ensure that you not be seen calling Israeli human rights violations ‘massive’ (what would be ‘massive’ in your opinion, I wonder?). You separated Arbour’s words from your own when she was calling Israeli human rights violations ‘massive’, but you were willing to paraphrase her giving advice to the victims: ‘To paraphrase Arbour’s approach, a different message to the Palestinians might be, ‘Behave like a state. Be legal. Respect and enforce the law, including international law against rocket attacks on civilians.’ How you or Arbour thinks that imprisoned Palestinians suffering periodic massacres who starve at the whim of an occupying power that periodically massacres them can ‘behave like a state’ is unclear but a lack of clarity about the situation is precisely what your stories induce. But the worst line in your stories on Arbour is your approving introduction to Arbour’s most repulsive statements: “in that spirit, she is not about to be drawn into debate about the uneven death toll of the continuing violence.” Mitch, the uneven death toll matters. It matters on its own merits, and it matters as a clue to the causes, effects, and possibilities for a solution to the conflict. Your presentation, your endorsement, of Arbour’s cowardly refusal to ‘be drawn into debate’ about this basic and fundamental point, helps obscure clear thinking and understanding about what is being done to the Palestinians.

Presenting massive disparity in victimization and crimes as if there is parity helps the victimizers. Helping victimizers who are conducting a campaign of massacre and ethnic cleansing is disgusting racism.

Disgusting racism: The partisan use of language

Another element of your racism comes from your use of language.

You likened Palestinians to rodents, something I cannot let you off the hook for even when you accompany it with quotations from sociologists. Not when you never used any animal analogies about Israelis, and never would.

You describe the Palestinian capture of an Israeli tank gunner by saying they “seized” him (September 12 and November 9). But the 1019 people Israel seized to take off to prisons, many of whom were children, many of whom were tortured, were ‘arrested’ or detained, never ‘seized’.

Further on your use of the word “seized”, you use it elsewhere to make reactions to Israel’s aggression and destruction sound opportunistic. Hizbollah ‘seized’ the leadership (July 16, quoting Buttu) and ‘seized’ the moment (July 14). Indeed, when Israeli shelling killed 7 members of the same family, Palestinians ‘seized on’ this, too, to end a ceasefire (how awful of them to treat the massacre of a family as a sign of the end of a ceasefire).

When you describe Palestinians’ Qassam rockets, which you know and have stated are militarily ineffective and basically a gesture of defiance, you describe them as a ‘scourge’ (November 26) and a ‘blight’ (November 28). You never used such words for Israeli shelling, bombing, and gunfire, which regularly kill dozens of people. These you usually describe as ‘errant’ (November 10 and November 23), although once, and only once, you used the world ‘horrific’ (November 13) to describe the massacre of 19 people by shellfire you elsewhere called ‘errant’.

By far your most disgraceful use of language comes from the story (July 1) in which you make light of Israeli sonic booms to terrorize Gaza’s population, already starving in the dark. This is so repugnant that readers might not believe it unless quoted at length:

”Then, two teeth-rattling whumps course through your body at thousandth-of-a-second intervals, packing so colossal a wallop they simply defy description. Whump-whump. You, my friend, have just been carpet-boomed. Something in the neighbourhood of 139 decibels of wakey-wakey courtesy of your friendly, neighbourhood Israeli F-16 warplane… How to explain the oomph of a sonic boom in Toronto terms? Say that someone chops down the CN Tower and it lands beside your head. Say they chop down a second CN Tower and it lands on the other side a nanosecond later. And say that, at the very moment of impact, a cardiac surgical team shouts, “Charging to 120 – Clear!” and proceeds to defibrillate your torso. You laugh at the alarm clock on the bedside table, and your earlier worries you might sleep through its ring. Not to worry. Another F-16 should be by in an hour or so. And another after that.

‘Wakey-wakey’, ‘Oomph’, ‘Whump-whump’, ‘boom-boom’, and ‘carpet-boomed’, are how you write about the threatening actions of an air force that destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, dropped 500-pound bombs into crowded apartment complexes, and has killed hundreds of people in the very zone from where you wrote your clever quips.

Compare this story to your piece on people in Haifa on July 15, who were going through ‘fretful days’ because Hizbollah’s rockets, which you had described as ‘terrifying’ (July 14) had fallen on them. You celebrated the ‘resilience of the thriving port city’ and the ‘resilience’ of its mayor. I saw no references to Palestinian ‘resilience’ in the 44 stories of yours that I read. Nor did I see any reference to Israel’s sonic booms, to say nothing of its artillery and bombing attacks, being ‘terrifying’.

As for the mayor of Haifa, who in your eyes exemplifies Haifa’s resilience, you quote him saying about the Palestinians and Lebanese that “now we have the right to take them hostage. We have the right to destroy them.” You let this pass without comment, but you referred to Nasrallah’s speeches (July 16) as ‘invective rich’ and ‘counterfactual bluster’.

On July 22, you explained an alliance between Hamas and Hizbollah by using a ‘timeworn Arabic adage, ‘Me and my brother against my cousin. What the Hamas-Hezbollah dynamic augurs now is the possibility of a religious realignment that could introduce the other half of that parable: Me and my cousin against the world. Or, if not the world, Israel.’ Would it ever occur to you to explain Israeli politics or alliances by reference to timeworn Hebrew adages, or would that seem to you to be anti-semitic? It would, to me.

In the same story of July 22 you demonstrated your mind-reading capacities: “Hezbollah, with its daily shower of random rocket fire into northern Israeli towns and cities, is clearly intent upon killing civilians.” I saw no statement from you about what Israel’s intent was in all the massacres of civilians that have occurred while you have written about the conflict. As you may know (but haven’t yet reported that I saw), estimates of deaths in the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006 are that Israel killed over 1100 Lebanese, most of whom were civilians, and that Hizbollah killed 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians. And yet, even now, I bet you are willing to stand behind your statement that Hizbollah was ‘intent on killing civilians’ but that Israel was not. You are willing to impute motives and intent to some, but not others.

These are all signs of racism, and they are disgusting.

Laziness, lies, and cliches

It would be too much to expect you to cover the carnage proportionately by reporting on Palestinian suffering 80 times as much as Israeli suffering (of course 80 times underestimates the disparity, since Israelis control every detail of Palestinian life and use that control to abuse, humiliate, and degrade at whim). But rather than fail to capture this incredible disparity, you inverted the relationship and gave a disproportionate voice to the victimizers. In your 44 stories, you used about 170 sources. 100 of these were Israeli, 39 were Palestinian, and 31 were other (Lebanese, US, or European). To say you used 39 Palestinian sources overstates the case: You used two sources (Diana Buttu and Saeb Erekat) 3 times each, and another (Ghassan Khatib) twice: all three of these are on the same negotiating team and members of the same political faction. You have about a half-dozen other sources (businessmen Sam Bahour and Ali Abu Shahla, academics Naji Shurab and Nader Izzat Said, mental health spokesman Marwan Diab), and another half-dozen man-on-the-street interviews. The rest of the Palestinian voices in your articles come second-hand, from television or other media.

Your list of Israeli contacts seems much more impressive, by contrast, particularly in think tanks and universities. The majority of your stories, even on Palestinian questions, are anchored by analysts at Israeli think tanks (Shalem Center, Jaffee Center, Reut Center), by Israeli analysts writing in newspapers (Alex Fishman in Yediot Aharonot), or Israeli academics (at Tel Aviv University or the Hebrew University in Jerusalem). Most of your stories follow a predictable pattern: Some news reported from wire services or media, followed by some analysis by an Israeli columnist in Ma’ariv or Yediot Aharonot, concluding with some analysis by an Israeli expert at a think-tank or university. Recent stories following this pattern are December 18, December 15, December 1, and November 28. Your recourse to Israeli experts and Palestinians close to President Abbas, and the absence of government officials from Hamas, leads to an especially unbalanced view of the fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah. Do you consider yourself to be part of the boycott against the government the Palestinians elected? You frequently mention how Hamas is supported by various Muslim countries, but I didn’t see (I may have missed) references to the supply of cash and weapons to Fatah in Gaza by the US. In the context of starvation, that supply and support makes the conflict in Gaza more of a proxy war than a civil war. But that perspective, widely understood by many Palestinians and Israelis, people both inside and outside the region, is unavailable to your readers. Because of you. At best, this is laziness. Regardless of cause, it has serious consequences.

Though most of your lies are by omission and were discussed above, the article by Daniel Freeman-Maloy, which I referred to in my original blog post shows one direct lie:

On June 30th Potter made the following assertion: Despite five days of international headlines there has been but a single death “that of kidnapped 18-year-old Israeli hitchhiker Eliyahu Asheri.”

Freeman-Maloy pointed out that two children aged 2 and 17 had been killed on June 28 at Khan Yunis by unexploded shells. The New York Times caught these deaths, though you didn’t. On June 22, Israeli special forces assassinated a member of the al-Aqsa Martys Brigades in Ramallah. In the week June 22-28, Israeli forces wounded 6 Palestinians, including 3 children, according to PCHR. Asserting a single death was dishonest, given how much violence had been meted out to Palestinians over the summer. Not correcting it in light of information makes it a lie, the worse because several Palestinians were killed even as Canadians were reading your story of a single death.

As for your use of cliches, I have already pointed out how your story of July 1 made light of the terror of Israel’s sonic booms. But your writing is replete with cliches, of Palestinians ‘enflamed’ with ‘militant rhetoric’, of Hizbollah “well-armed, well-trained and well-acquainted with the promise of martyrdom” conducting an ‘unprovoked kidnap raid’, of Hamas ‘sworn to Israel’s destruction’, of Israeli soldiers ‘getting their boots dirty’, Israelis worrying about ‘a thousand pound gorilla of a question’. All these cliches, and this is but a small sample, have the same effect: debasing the gravity of the situation, defiling and dehumanizing the victims, and confusing readers as to causes and possible solutions.

Why bother?

My original intention was to look at all of your work since the second intifada began. But I had neither the time nor the stomach for such an exercise, so instead I confined myself to the 44 stories you filed on Israel/Palestine over the past 6 months. I think we both know this was a fruitless exercise on my part in any case. Each of the things I pointed out, you will minimize, rationalize, or find some excuse for. I could tell you how to do your job better. I could give you lists of people, Palestinians and Israelis, you could interview to diversify your sources considerably, facts and arguments you could read, ideas you could expose yourself to so that you could decide where you stood and report both the range of views and justify honestly why you hold yours.

But we both know what would happen if you were fair: if you interviewed a more diverse set of sources, conveyed the massive disparities and the power interests at work, and showed something other than contempt for the lives and thoughts of Palestinians. We know that a person who was fair would not sit long as Middle East Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star, but would face pressure for being, in your words, ‘overempathetic to the plight of Palestinians’ (Interesting that you used ‘plight’ in your email to me. In the past six months you used the word ‘plight’ three times, always to describe Israelis: air force commander Halutz, Israel in general, and tank gunner Shalit, never to describe Palestinians). That pressure would eventually cost such a person his or her job. And whatever you have done with it, no doubt it is a comfortable and interesting job. In the society we’re in, to get and keep such a job requires either overt or covert partisanship for the powerful. Your reporting is a mix of both, and neither you nor our society are going to change any time soon. My hope is not for you, then, but for your readers. I hope that some of them realize that going to you for information on the Israel/Palestine conflict is a good way to be deceived and confused, and that there are far better sources.

Sincerely,

Justin Podur

Mitch Potter’s letter:

Sept 10, 2006

Mr. Podur,

Whatever you may think of my work, how in good conscience do you come to brand me “a truly disgusting racist” in a public forum?

I have been called many things in my time in the Middle East — in fact, the dominant thrust of my critics after nearly five years of reporting from the region is that I am overempathetic to the plight of Palestinians. But “truly disgusting racist” is an altogether new low.

You completely misunderstand the intent of the phrase “lemming-like,” which in fact was written to remind readers of the terribly mismatched battles in Gaza, battles that I have written about repeatedly since 2002. It goes like this: whenever an Israeli armoured column so much as nudges the edge of a refugee camp, lightly armed gunmen from Izzidine al-Qassam Brigades, Al Aksa Martyr Brigades and as many as a half-dozen other groups at any given time pour forth to their almost certain death.

I have asked Palestinian militant leaders many times why they pursue this particularly self-defeating strategy of confronting Israeli tanks, when these very same groups have demonstrated a greater military sophistication in the planning and execution of certain other attacks, such as the June 24 tunnel-born raid that resulted in the capture of Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit.

The answer is that the reaction is by rote. Or, rather, lemming-like. When tanks are on the doorstep, emotion takes over, and many Palestinian fighters launch themselves spontaneously into the losing end of a decidedly unfair fight. Some Israeli military officials, in fact, have been quoted as calling these engagements “unfair” in Israel’s favour for that very reason.

According to sociologists I have spoken to and quoted extensively from Gaza (Google my article the “Lost Boys of Gaza” for context) the impulse is somehow connected to feelings of powerlessness. In other words, Palestinian fighters are drawn out not by the promise of certain death, but rather, the subconscious need to feel they are somehow taking control of a situation that has left their entire community powerless.

Sociologists also say a similar impulse contributes to the high casuality rate among Palestinian boys. In Palestinian society, as in the broader society of the Arab world, the father is the traditional symbol of power and authority. Yet many of the boys of Gaza appear to be turning away from their helpless fathers and instead identify more with the “father figure” of armed gunmen in their streets, who are the only ones to demonstrate strength. There are many terrible ways that children die by Israeli weaponry. But one of them, I believe, includes the fact that the children are drawn to being with the militants in the streets.

It is sick. And the sickness, in my view, is one of the by-products of multiple generations of Israeli occupation.

The reality of daily print journalism is that not every story comes replete with the context it deserves. There is neither the space nor the time. And the story you cite on your Blog could have benefited from more.

That said, I have written dozens of lengthy, contextual reports from Gaza, the West Bank and many points beyond that have an afterlife on the Web. I challenge you to find even one to support the slur you so cavalierly attach to my name.

Sincerely,

Mitch Potter

Middle East Bureau Chief

Toronto Star of Canada