What
You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter
Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber?
Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel's Night
In his special
report Alexander Cockburn interviews former Wiesel colleague
and Holocaust survivor Eli Pfefferkorn. What Raul Hilberg, the
Holocaust's greatest historian, really thinks about Wiesel's
"Night". Also
in this special issue: Is Hugo Chavez Hitler or Father Christmas?
Larry Lack tells the full story of Venezuela's hand-outs to Uncle
Sam's Shivering Poor. Plus, Jeffrey St Clair profiles the Endangered
Visigoth and traces the rise and possible fall of Rick Pombo,
destroyer of nature.CounterPunch
Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember,
we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition
of CounterPunch. Please
support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter,
which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or
by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
Had the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage
crisis lasted three months, it would have been unthinkable for
U.S. TV to start airing, on the seventh day, a series that mimicked
the real-life drama that was taking place in the Olympic village.
All the more so if the series had painted the Palestinian hostage-takers
in a favorable light, while it contrasted "good Israelis"
with "bad Israelis" and focused on stereotypical anti-Semitic
Jewish traits.
It's not difficult to imagine
the uproar that the airing of such a series would have provoked
in the U.S. and Europe. Thousands of protesters would have taken
to the street to voice their condemnation of what they would
have described as "a vile exploitation of a human tragedy
for monetary and propagandist gains".
That's what I felt as I watched
the first episode of the TV series "Over There". It
depicted the tribulations of a troupe of American soldiers as
they went from one crisis situation to another during their stint
in Iraq. Thrown-in for good measure in this episode were the
travails of a mother whose husband was deployed inIraq while
she had to struggle with the injustice meted upon her early-teens
son by the American educational system. Another character represented
a blonde, blue-eyed pretty female marine who went AWOL upon returning
home from Iraq. Her first exploit was to beat the daylight out
of an evil-looking, curly dark-haired Middle-Easterner who tried
to accost her in the lobby of her motel, though not before telling
him: "I think I killed your cousin in Iraq." Immediately
after that, she was seduced in the shower by another blonde,
blue-eyed female prostitute who then robbed her of all her money
before leaving her to wake up alone in bed.
Meanwhile, the Arabs of Iraq
were shown in stark Hollywood black&white fashion: on the
one hand, the men were depicted as gruff, socially ultra-conservative,
and stubbornly regressive in their treatment of women; on the
other, the episode gave us a beautiful young Iraqi woman who
somehow turned out to be the wife of an old "sheikh",
the religious leader of the village. At a highly improbable village
meeting where Iraqi men and women mingled freely, the sheikh
was asked what he wanted the American pipeline company to build
for his village in return for allowing the pipeline to go through
(i.e. by promising not to blow it up occasionally). The white-bearded
Sheikh insisted that it be a mosque. His young, wife, egged on
by the unsympathetic company engineer, voiced her preference
that the company build a school. Her husband immediately declared
her to be a heathen and led the village in trying to stone her,
only for her to be saved by the chivalrous American GIs.
And since this is definitely
a three-handed, five-legged, bi-cephalus monster of a series,
we have the sympathetic GIs cast in roles designed to project
the best humane face possible: the most likable, the most sympathetic
bunch of "non-killers" you could ever hope to meet.
Except I suppose when they are attacked by crazed Iraqi Arab
fundamentalist Muslims.
Interestingly, American TV
did not exploit the Vietnam war in similar fashion. An article
dedicated to Vietnam-related TV series on the site of the Museum
of Broadcast Communicates states: "During the war itself
(the Vietnam war) was virtually never touched in television fiction-except,
of course, in disguised form on M*A*S*H." This all changed
with "Magnum, P.I." in 1980. " Before 1980, Vietnam
vets were "often portrayed as unstable and socially marginal".
After 1980, the Vietnam "veteran emerged as a hero."
Veterans were thereafter respectable enough to become "central
characters in television fiction". And with the advent
of political correctness applied unequally, it became uncouth
to utilize theretofore certain stereotypical villain-types. But
what's a series or movies to do without a villain? And where
to find one? Enter one hundred million Arabs and more than a
billion Muslims.
A two-minute part of a single
episode in a TV series, judged to be "anti-Semitic"
by B'nai Brith, would have provoked a hurricane of denunciations.
Why are Arab-Americans not reacting similarly to a whole TV series
that depicts them in such a negative light, and exploits the
tragedy of the Iraqi people while their blood is still flowing
in the streets of Baghdad, Ramadi, Falluja, and Tal Afar? Where
are the ADC press campaigns and protest rallies?
To whom will Arab Americans
turn when large numbers of them are hounded, en masse, into the
concentration camps currently being built by Halliburton's subsidiary
KBR, after the next spectacular Al-Qaeda attack against the fatherland?
Preposterous? Think again.
The Bush administration's disinformation campaign, reinforced
by the corporate media machine is so powerful, that a recent
Zogby poll found that 85 per cent of U.S. soldiers in Iraq believe
they are there "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11
attacks", a result Zogby himself described as "bewildering".
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.