Here is another one, it is called war of words. Be an independent person,
make your own and see things your way.
Have a nice reading.

peace
modou
:: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

THE MIDDLE EAST'S WAR OF WORDS
by Sam Kiley
[The Evening Standard, UK, 5 Sept]: It all seems a bit silly, at first - two
foreign-reporting grandees locking horns over just one word.
Last week The Independent's Robert Fisk accused the BBC of buckling to
Israeli pressure to drop the use of "assassination" when referring to
Israel's policy of knocking off alleged "terrorists". Not true, blustered
John Simpson, auntie's world affairs editor in The Sunday Telegraph.
The corporation, he insisted, had simply reaffirmed its house rules that
only prominent political figures could be assassinated - though he didn't
offer an alternative term for the killing of ordinary folk. He bitterly
resented Fisk's allegation that the Beeb had been got at.
It is certainly true that the pro-Israel lobby has forced the BBC and CNN in
particular to agonise over the use of loaded terms. In war, words are a
weapon, we all know that. And few belligerents have been so good at
hijacking language to its own cause than Israel. The Jewish State has
deliberately set out to bend English to serve its own ends. It is entirely
natural that it should.
Taking its prompt from its Big Brother, the USA, which coined Orwellian
terms such as "collateral damage" for dead civilians, and "degrading the
enemy" for slaughtering the oppo', Israel has come up with a few choice
terms for oldfashioned military tactics.
The Fisk-Simpson debate, however, has reached new levels of pomposity, as
each of them flourished their professional standards like peacock plumes.
Not since the bitter name-calling squabble over Israel and the Palestinians
between the Telegraph's proprietor Conrad Black and Lord Gilmour in the
pages of Black's Spectator, have readers had to endure such an apparently
meaningless argument.
But I have a little experience of this sort of thing and, yes, words matter.
In an 11-year stint for The Thunderer, I'd lived out a childhood ambition to
be its Africa correspondent, served my time in the Balkans and the Middle
East, been shot, jailed, and had my ribs cracked. I'd faced (mock) execution
twice and had more of a whizz-bang time than any young man could want.
Then last month I threw it all in, because of the words I was asked to use,
or not to use.
More than two score Palestinians have been bumped off over the past year on
suspicion that they have, or might be, planning to kill Israelis. These
operations have been described by the European Union and Britain as
"assassinations" and "extra judicial killings". Human rights groups call
them murders by death squads.
The Israelis call them "targeted killings". Palestinian towns and villages
have been subjected to various forms of what we call siege. According to the
Israelis, a "breathing closure" allows some movement in and out; a
"suffocating closure" speaks for itself. Children shot dead by Israeli
snipers and ordinary soldiers at riots are killed in "crossfire".
Both sides manipulate the use and meaning of language, of course. As we have
seen at the United Nations racism conference in Durban, Israel's enemies
have tried to rob the words "genocide", "racism" and "apartheid" of their
real meanings by insisting that Israel is guilty of all three.
Fortunately the USA has walked out of the conference in protest at these
grotesque libels of the Jewish State. Still, for the Palestinians, every
dead Palestinian is a "martyr" on the West Bank and in Gaza - whether they
chose to die or were killed by accident. And reporters often forget to
mention that the Palestinians are not just fighting to end the occupation of
their land: most want to destroy Israel and drive all the Jews into the sea.
Both sides seek to censor their crimes and celebrate their causes. Under
intense pressure from thousands of (mostly pro-Israeli) e-mail writers, PR
pros and politicians, many of these ghastly non-terms have crept into the
lexicon of Middle Eastern news coverage.
But in the war of words, no newspaper has been so happy to hand the keys of
the armoury over to one side than The Times, which is owned by Rupert
Murdoch's News International. Murdoch is a close friend of Ariel Sharon,
Israel's prime minister.
Knowing these details, and that Murdoch has invested heavily in Israel, The
Times' foreign editor and other middle managers flew into hysterical terror
every time a pro-Israel lobbying group wrote in with a quibble or complaint,
and then usually took their side against their own correspondent - deleting
words and phrases from the lexicon to rob its reporters of the ability to
make sense of what was going on.
So, I was told, I should not refer to "assassinations" of Israel's
opponents, nor to "extrajudicial killings or executions". The professional
Israeli hits in which at least four entirely innocent civilians have been
killed were, if I had to write about them at all, just "killings", or best
of all - "targeted killings". The fact that the Jewish colonies on the West
Bank in Gaza were illegal under international law because they violated the
Geneva Convention was not disputed by my editors - but any reference to this
fact was "gratuitous".
The leader writers, meanwhile, were happy to repeat the canard that
Palestinian gunmen were using children as human shields.
One story which referred to Sharon's "hard-line government" and to a
Palestinian village which was "hemmed in on three sides" by settlements was
ripped out of the paper altogether after the first edition. These terms were
deemed unacceptable, even though Sharon would have sued had I called him a
softie; even though the settlements have all been built as military camps,
and that the thesis of the piece, on the eve of the Arab League summit in
Jordan, was that support for Yasser Arafat and participation in the "Al Aqsa
Intifada" (another phrase The Times hated, since they thought it
romanticised the uprising) was dwindling.
No pro-Israel lobbyist ever dreamed of having such power over a great
national newspaper. They didn't need to. Murdoch's executives were so scared
of irritating him that, when I pulled off a little scoop by tracking,
interviewing and photographing the unit in the Israeli army which killed
Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy whose death was captured on film and
became the iconic image of the conflict, I was asked to file the piece
"without mentioning the dead kid".
After that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit.







_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>

To view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html

<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>