There is something about blogging which requires instant
response, and when just a week or two has passed since an event, it seems
untimely to blog about it. This post is untimely in that sense, as it contains
some of the things I have thought in response to some events which now seem not
so recent.
I was struck by the under-reporting of some of the most
extreme acts of violence by the Assad regime in Syria in what are hopefully its
final weeks. Among the most brutal of its acts have been assaults on
Palestinian refugee camps in Syria.
“Camps” is perhaps a misnomer, as these are really towns as
old as many American or Australian cities, built of concrete, rather than the transient
communities of tents and shacks the name conjures up. Some, like
Dera’a, are “official”
camps administered by the
UNRWA, with kindergartens and health centres.
More people live in “unofficial camps”, like
Yarmouk, which has born
the brint of regime attacks, a
densely built-up suburb of
Damascus, with multistory houses, hospitals, schools,
heavy traffic,
satellite dishes,
electricity supply. (Read
Arun
with a View for evocative descriptions of Yarmouk;
listen
to an interview with a resident; read a 2010
BBC report on
life in the camps; or read the
account
by solidarity tourist Sarah Shourd, who talks of a place of poetry readings,
parks and boutiques.)
In July, there were reports of security forces firing on
un-armed anti-regime demonstrations in Yarmouk.
Here
is a distressing video of the aftermath of one of the attacks on Yarmouk in
August. The violence peaked early in September with
four days of
artillery bombardment, followed by ground assault (including the
storming
of the hospital and mass arrest of injured civilians). Later in September,
there were
reports
of Palestinians killed and burnt by Assad’s forces and their bodies displayed in
public, and of “
sweeping”
operations against Palestinian regime opponents, of
snipers
firing on children and old men. There have been reports of
rape
used as an act of war, and of summary
executions of
civilians, adult and child, male and female. This month, it is Dera’a camp,
South of Damascus and closer to the Jordan border, that has been under attack,
with heavy
shelling
around the mosque and many killed.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in these attacks,
and thousands injured. Some
269 Palestinians
have been killed in the Syrian conflict, most by regime forces (the PLO
claims
over 400) out of a
total death
toll of around 30,000 (of whom around two thirds are civilians). The
Syrians claim the camps harbour terrorists and pose a danger to the country’s
security.
The under-reporting of these horrific events is in contrast
to the ways in which Israeli operations (which also claim to be against
terrorists and necessary for security) are reported. When Israel has deployed
aerial bombardment or ground assault on Palestinian communities, it is front
page news across the Western mainstream media, and especially liberal media. In
response, and quite legitimately, thousands march through Western streets,
demonstrate outside Israeli embassies. Others boycott Israeli products; still others
attack synagogues or desecrate Jewish graves. Progressive Jews in the diaspora
write letters to editors denouncing Israel’s actions and disassociating
themselves, “as Jews”, from the violence. How many demonstrations have their
been in Western cities about Assad’s violence? How many letters and boycotts
have Western trade unionists and intellectuals organised to protest about the
deaths in Syria.
Syria’s operations are comparable in scale and excessive in
intensity – so why the quiet response? It seems to me the only plausible
explanation is that for the mainstream Western media, and especially liberal
media, Palestinian lives are not valuable in themselves, but of value only in
relation to the acts of Israel. Palestinians are never the story for the
liberal media; it is always Israel that is the story.
(Just to be clear, I am not at all suggesting the Western
media is wrong to report, or Western liberals wrong to protest, Palestinian
deaths at Israeli hands. For the sake of comparison, in the much shorter
Lebanon and Gaza conflicts of
2006 and
2009, there were respectively
1200 Lebanese civilians and 200-900 Palestinian civilians killed. For further
reading on Syria, I recommend
Pulse
Media and
Qunfuz.)
I was also struck by the under-reporting of the
extraordinary acts of courage and dignity in Libya, when thousands of Libyan
civilians, most notably in
Benghazi,
physically invaded the strongholds of the militias which have made life a
misery for Libyan people since the revolution. Specifically, it was Islamist
militias which were rejected, and most especially the militias associated with
the horrific slaying of the
American
ambassador in Benghazi, an act which appalled the city. The
uprisings
against the militias were spontaneous, self-organised mass acts of ordinary
people from a wide cross-section of Libyan society, including devout Muslims
and in particular Sufis: acts of democratic rage, perhaps, or patriotic rage,
or just decent rage.
Here, the quiet response of Western mainstream media, and
especially conservative media, was in contrast to the obsessive attention to
the horrible spectacle of mob violence “provoked” in the preceding days by the dirty
little Innocence of Muslims youtube
video.
I am not for one second arguing that the Islamist rage was
not worth reporting and condemning and dwelling on at length; its reach and
intensity shows its geopolitical significance. What I’m suggesting is that the
comparative media neglect of the democratic rage is telling. The conservative mainstream
media, at least in 2012, is only interested in Muslims and Arabs if they play
the role of fanatical jihadis – just as the liberal media is only interested in
Palestinians if they play the role of victims of Israel.
Genocide denial and
rape culture
