I got out an egg just now and turned on the kitchen radio and Brian Lehrer asked Brooke Gladstone of On the Media, who is in Cairo, about how Egyptians regard the Libyan intervention. This is a question I care deeply about. “The people I’ve spoken to, the human rights activists I’ve spoken to speak with disappointment about the double standard, the realpolitik that allows–” she paused– “America to take some action again Libya but none in Bahrain or in Saudi Arabia.”
This is a lie.
What human rights types in Egypt and across the Arab world say is that there is a double standard between Libya and Gaza. I don’t doubt for a minute that Gladstone is reporting accurately that they also see the double standard operating in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. But always the first case is: Gaza, an occupied people under siege, where Israel is shelling once again.
Gladstone’s failure to say what she knows is actually a disaster, and I can’t start to explain it without talking about power politics and the Jewish presence in the media with our collective attachment to Zionism; but the reason it is a disaster is that prominent liberal reporters are, in a process of manufactured consensus, shaving what they know to be the truth, and thereby refusing to move the American conversation on Palestine forward toward any acknowledgment of the Palestinian people as human beings with rights.
