‘To pilger’ seems appropriate in Pilger’s anti-Israel diatribe

DAVID SAKS

The word even briefly found its way into the 1991 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary of New Words, which defined it as “conducting journalism in a manner supposedly characteristic of John Pilger, or, more specifically, as presenting information in a sensationalist manner to support a foregone conclusion; using emotive language to make a false political point; treating a subject emotionally with generous disregard for inconvenient detail; or making a pompous judgement on wrong premises”.

Pilger was successful in getting the word removed a few years later and to date remains the darling of those for whom the Western, ethnically white democracies epitomise the ultimate in human villainy. It goes without saying that one of his regular targets over the decades has been Israel.

Pilger himself does not deny engaging in what some call “advocacy journalism” and which others – too few of them, unfortunately – more correctly describe as propaganda.

In a revealing interview with the Progressive, he dismissed the idea of impartiality and objectivity altogether, saying journalists who claimed to be objective were channels for the official, establishment point of view and therefore ciphers and transmitters of lies.

In this respect, he strikingly resembles Ilan Pappe, the Israeli-born historian (the term, in his case, should be used with caution) who has quite unabashedly admitted to manipulating the historical record so as to conform with his ideological views

(“We do [historiography] because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers… there is no such thing as truth, only a collection of narratives.”)

On September 11, Pilger delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture in Adelaide, Australia, speaking on the just-concluded Gaza conflict. His audience were given exactly what they expected and wanted to hear, namely a characteristically emotive, bizarrely one-sided narrative of wanton brutal crimes against a wholly innocent and helpless Palestinian population, not just in the late conflict but from Israel’s establishment onwards.

On September 21, an entire page of the Sunday Times was devoted to reprinting an edited form of his address, with accompanying images. 

What can one say about the credibility and integrity of someone who, in commenting on the seven-week war between Israel and Hamas, cannot bring himself to even mention the missile barrage that preceded and thereby provoked the war, nor the sustained rocket fire at Israeli towns that continued right until its conclusion?

Pilger likewise failed to record the dozens of sophisticated infiltration tunnels leading deep into Israel that Hamas had constructed, nor the massive stockpiles of weaponry that these contained.

Information coming to light in the wake of the Israeli ground operation, suggests that a campaign whose original aim was primarily to impair Hamas’ ability to fire missiles, had stymied at the eleventh hour what may well have been a catastrophe of 9/11 proportions. Chillingly, captured weaponry included items needed to carry out large-scale abductions: tranquillisers, handcuffs, syringes, ropes and the like.

None of this makes it into the Pilger thesis. In terms of his frankly defamatory screed, Palestinian citizens were wantonly slaughtered during the war. For Pilger and his ilk, Hamas is a democratically elected liberation movement, not the radical Islamist faction that initiated a conflict in the certain knowledge that Gaza’s civilians would be in the firing line.

It is inconsequential (or, more likely, Zionist propaganda) that Hamas deliberately buried its military infrastructure in residential areas, including in and around hospitals, schools and mosques, and openly called upon Gazans to ignore Israeli warnings to evacuate areas where attacks were imminent.

And how do the multiple warnings issued to Gaza civilians by the IDF, not to mention the last-minute abortion of attacks where civilians deaths were expected to ensue, square with the Pilger thesis of Israeli soldiers running amok, massacring helpless men, women and children at will?

All of this information was readily available to any genuinely professional journalist who wanted to present as accurate a picture of what happened as he could. For “advocacy journalists” of the Pilger stamp, however, anything that contradicts the “essential truths” they believe they are preaching, are to be disregarded, or otherwise waved aside as lies emanating from the oppressor.  

The flagrant abuse of the most basic journalistic standards when it comes to the Israel-Palestine question, something mirrored by the equally shameful distortion of fundamental academic principals on university campuses the world over, must rank as one of the greatest scandals of our age. Above all, it is not about being pro-Palestinian but about conducting an implacable ideological war against Israel.

When, in the latest conflict, the bombs started falling and women and children began dying, Hamas’ well-oiled propaganda machine quickly set about calling on the world to rescue them from Zionist “genocide”. Yet again, we saw multiple voices in the world media willing to play that game, regardless of the irony that by providing the Jihadist group with the propaganda victories they sought, they were making themselves complicit in encouraging the very deaths of innocents they purported to deplore.

It all suggests – if not demonstrates outright – that those excoriating Israel in such extreme terms, Pilger included, are not motivated by any real feelings of compassion for the Palestinians, but by their blinkered hatred of the Jewish state.