The New Nation - Internet Edition

Dr Bouthaina Shaaban

WHEN the Israeli army killed James Miller, the British producer who was making a film about the Palestinian children under Israeli occupation, the Israelis, at the time, claimed that the Palestinians killed him.

Miller was holding a white flag and going out of the house with British journalists when he was shot on the neck by Israeli snipers who are well trained to carry out such assassinations. Today, after five years that were spent in a legal and media battle by the family of Miller it has become certain that the Israeli soldiers killed him although the Israeli judicial system exonerated the commander of the unit, then.

The difference between the story of James Miller and the stories of other journalists, producers and cameramen killed deliberately by Israeli snipers or missiles, the latest of whom is the Palestinian cameraman, Fadel Shana, who was working for Reuters and was killed by the Israelis on April 16, 2008, is that the family of James Miller had the resolve and the resources to pursue the Israelis for their crime whereas most Palestinians who live under the Israeli occupation do not have such means.

In addition to shuttering the cameras of Miller, Shana and scores of others so they do not record their horrid crimes and transmit them to the world, the Israelis use these killings to terrorise other journalists and cameramen so they daren't get close to record their crimes against humanity. So no close ups of the Palestinian infants and children killed by the Israeli soldiers.

That was their reason for crushing the body of Rachael Kouri, the American peace activist, so that international support that dares to come to the Palestinian territories is terrorised, and the Palestinians are left alone to be killed in the dark by the Israelis with no pictures and documentary evidence to highlight these crimes.

This is precisely the reason that forced the representatives of "civilized" and "democratic" countries like the US, France and Belgium to walk out of the UN Security Council when the Libyan representative Ibrahim Al Dabashi described the state of Palestinian people as "no different from a Nazi camp", although it has become common knowledge that the Israelis use these experiences in oppressing and terrorising the Palestinian people.

Lest these "democracies" are accused of cracking down on the free media, they release this kind of information in fifty or a hundred years, when the public opinion has shifted focus to something completely different.

Within this framework we should understand what was published in the New York Times on April 20 by David Barstow under the title: "Message Machine: Behind Military Analysts, The Pentagon's Hidden Hand".

The article explains how the Pentagon used "Military experts" in the summer of 2005 in a campaign to generate favourable news coverage of the administrations wartime performance when it was confronted with fresh waves of criticism over Guantanamo Bay. "The effort", the paper says, "has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air".

Anyone who follows such a topic will find dozens of examples in a controlled media - coverage that points in one direction whereas events and reality point at a completely different direction.

It is no exaggeration to say that this discrepancy between events and the news or the analysis circulated about these events has become a major cause for the suffering of humanity. There's no escape from the wars in which people are slaughtered, lives are destroyed and childhood assassinated without having the ability to make any of that reach the media.

The latest example of this discrepancy is the controversy that has taken place between former US president Jimmy Carter and Condoleezza Rice. Rice said that the administration had "warned president Carter not to go to the Middle East region, and in particular not to get in touch with Hamas."

In a statement issued by the office of Carter in Atlanta we read: "President Carter respects Rice and believes that she is an honest person, but she continues, probably, unintentionally, to issue inaccurate statements"; Carter's statement added: "No one in the State Department or any other official has asked president Carter not to go to the Middle East, and no one ever suggested to him not to meet with Hamas".

To see that the falsification of facts has reached the highest echelon of American diplomacy is certainly a source of concern, especially as the US is claiming to embark on an effort to reshape the Middle East and the world.

The question is what is the criteria of this reshaping? Is it based on the premise that you can kill and destroy any country or any people so long as you take precautions not to let any one know what you are doing?

Is this the reason why so many journalists and cameramen were killed in Iraq and Palestine in an unprecedented victimisation of the media? This means that the media has become as important as the story they are trying to tell. But who is using them, and how, and to what purpose?

Dr Bouthaina Shaaban is Syria's Minister of Expatriates. A professor of English literature, she taught at Damascus University and abroad for several years, until 2002.