18 - 24 April 2002
Issue No.582
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 April 2002 Issue No.582 |
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Speed reading
A prominent British journalist attacks the Weekly for publishing an "anti-semitic" interview. Frederick Bowie* responds to the charge
Al-Ahram Weekly's interview with Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin (4 April) seems to have created quite a stir back in Little England. Not only do Special Branch keep ringing the Weekly's Cairo office up to discuss the weather and the racing results, but the Guardian dispatched their intrepid reporter Rod Liddle to try and track down the criminals responsible for relaying Paulin's "anti- semitic" (sic) views.
Predictably, Liddle failed in his mission. At any other news organisation, this might have got him the sack. In the hands of a more talented writer, it might have been amusing without being offensive. But since he is neither an incompetent intern, nor a gifted novelist, but a senior Editor at the BBC, he instead got to vent his empty prejudices over nearly an entire page of yesterday's paper.
The irony of this may be lost on some of your readers, so let me fill you in on the background. The Liddle who is outraged at the publicity the Weekly provided for Paulin, a confessed anti- Zionist and emotional opponent of Israel's neo- colonial settlement policy in the Occupied Territories, is the same Liddle who for most of last year was embroiled in a row over BBC policy towards the racist British National Party. At a time when towns in the North of England were convulsed with vicious race riots, the Today programme which Liddle edits began to give significant air time to BNP leader Nick Griffin. Interviewers treated Griffin and his policies seriously, refusing to openly confront him or even name the BNP as a neo-Nazi organisation. There were reports that Liddle had instructed his team that the BNP should "never" be referred to as fascists or racists, despite their well-documented links to European fascist parties. The fact that most of their prominent leaders had criminal records for incitement to racial hatred was also largely passed over in silence.
This "softly-softly" tactic caused great resentment in the Black and Asian communities in Britain. The BNP, on the other hand, were clearly very happy with the conciliatory approach: they published the transcripts of Griffin's interviews on their web site, accompanied by a note praising the BBC for their "respect for the white community".
When challenged, the BBC claimed that their aim was simply to let the BNP unmask themselves; and Liddle pointed out that criticism doesn't necessarily mean calling people names. (Though, as in the case of Paulin, the Weekly and the Egyptian government, it would seem he still believes name-calling is the only language some people understand.)
Liddle concluded from reading the Weekly's interview with Paulin that he had been wrong to deny that "there was a new mood of anti-semitism abroad". That may seem like a rash assumption to reach on the basis of a single interview with a minor Irish poet, even if he is on the teaching staff of one of England's older universities. Indeed, the whole point of Omayma Abdel-Latif's article was that Paulin's views made him almost unique among English intellectuals. (The vehemence with which he expresses them is even more rare in non- Arab, pro-Palestinian circles).
However, Liddle's speed-reading talents do not stop there. On 7 February, he published a remarkable summary of the state of the continent of Africa, based on a two-week tour of Uganda as the guest of UNICEF, accompanied by Boris Johnson, the most inanely charming of the younger generation of Tory MPs.
Provoked by Tony Blair's anodyne claim that the West bore some responsibility for the continent's present situation, Liddle struck back. Africa's problems were largely, nay entirely of its own making. Since independence, not only has it been ruled by "gangsters", "half-wits", "ideologues", the "barking mad and the criminally insane"; but there's the "culture". Africa, according to Liddle and his UN informants (he seems never to have ventured outside his A/C 4x4 or stopped to drink in a local bar), lacks "certain sociological concepts" - a rag-bag complaint, which lumps together clitorectomy and the extended family, the absence of a Protestant work ethic and too much traditional dancing.
In other words, the natives are lazy, stupid, and incompetent, when they are not downright evil, and the only way to save them is to save them from themselves. So much for the Africa of Lumumba, Senghor and Mandela.
Apparently you can now say these things in a British daily newspaper and not get fired (or prosecuted). Liddle has nothing but praise for the "enlightened neo-colonialism" of Western charities and UN organisations. "We are witnessing," he writes, with undisguised glee, "the Swedenisation of Uganda, with an all-out assault on the country's indigenous cultural norms and mores, carried out not, this time, by a gunboat, but by the power of money." The only surprise is that he stops short of calling for the return of Ian Smith and the gold standard.
It would be easy to dismiss Liddle as a naive and rather stupid hack, which he probably is: a typical product of the new BBC culture of "dumbing down". But there's a whole programme in these two articles, and it's one which is shared, albeit unconsciously, by many other Westerners who believe themselves to be 'liberals'. It runs like this:
Where the natives are too weak, too demoralised, and too feckless to resist, thanks to AIDS and economic collapse, we can impose our plans for them by buying them off. And when they do resist, as they are resisting now in Palestine, we can always resort to violence: the ruthless violence of our smart bombs and our hired goons; and the casual purring violence of the media, which ensures that out of the two parties to the conflict, the most guilty and the most violent will always be Them, and never Us.
*Frederick Bowie is a British writer and film maker based in Belgium.
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