SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY - NO SANCTUARY FOR PALESTINIAN SCHOLARSHIP

CounterPunch 10 May  2017

No Sanctuary for Palestinian Scholarship

by Diana Block

Edward Said mural. Lead Artists: Fayeq Oweis & Susan Greene

Battleground San Francisco State University

At a March 2017 conference of the National Association of Ethnic Studies held at San Francisco State University (SFSU), President Leslie Wong boasted about the University’s role as a sanctuary campus. He referenced  SFSU’s proud history of engaged  social justice scholarship going back to the 1968 Third World strike by students which established the first Ethnic Studies College  in the country.

To Terry Collins, an alumnus of SFSU who was a member of the Black Student Union that started the Third World strike, and is the current Board President of KPOO community radio, Wong’s words rang hollow.  “We fought for a radical vision of what ethnic studies should mean,” Collins told me.

  “Last spring students had to protest and even hunger strike just to keep Ethnic Studies alive after it was threatened with major cuts.  They won a few crumbs but so much more is needed.  And Palestinian faculty, students and programs have been under constant attack! Where’s the sanctuary for them at SF State?”

Collins, an adamant supporter of Palestine since the sixties, was referring to a series of incidents over the past year at SFSU that have targeted the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) ,Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, and the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) program which she founded.  Most recently, racist, Islamophobic posters were plastered  across campus on May 3^rd and to date there has been no public denunciation of this hate speech by President Wong.

  While such attacks are not unique to SFSU, they have been escalating at a campus which has been a battleground for social justice struggles of many types, including Palestine, over decades.
In April 2016, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, was invited to speak at SF State.  A coalition of SFSU student groups, led by GUPS, protested against his talk citing Barkat’s extreme policies of expulsion and violence against Palestinian residents, including home demolitions, evictions, lock downs and collective punishment of entire neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The day after the peaceful protest, which succeeded in interrupting Barkat’s speech, President Wong ordered a full investigation of the protest, reportedly after a telephone conversation with Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center who urged this course of action.  Hier referenced the successful prosecution of the Irvine 11, students who had interrupted the speech of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren in 2010 and were convicted of conspiracy to disrupt a public meeting in 2011.

Over the course of the next five months, GUPS members and other students, primarily women, were not only subject to an intensive, disruptive official investigation but were also targeted by death and rape threats, and a vicious online campaign by  Canary Mission seeking to derail their academic careers.  The University investigation exonerated the students on most of the charges in September 2016, but the students’ lives had been turned upside down.  None of the threats or harassment by pro-Zionist groups were ever addressed by the University.   In their statement responding to the report, GUPs pointed out the degree to which their education, lives and safety had been compromised in the name of protecting pro-Israel free speech. “Not only were we subjected to this hate monger [Barkat], but we were investigated for months and publicly smeared as violent and anti-Semitic.”

Shortly after the report exonerating the students was released, another front of assault was opened against Palestinian scholarship at SFSU.   An online petition was launched by the Middle East Forum (MEF), an Islamophobic, pro-Israel group led by Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, calling on President Wong  to terminate a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU )with An-Najah University in Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank.  The MOU was established in 2014, initiated by Dr. Abdulhadi ,with the stated purpose of encouraging exchange and partnership between the two universities and with the AMED Studies program. The petition accused An-Najah of “incitement to violence, anti-Semitism and the glorification of terrorism.”  The vilification of An-Najah, which is consistently ranked as a leading academic institution in the Arab world, was accompanied by a specific attack on Dr. Abdulhadi who was condemned for initiating the MOU and for her “record as an anti-Israel activist.” Some of the examples given included her role as a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and her service as faculty advisor for GUPS.

The catalyst for this attack was a conference, Freedom Behind Bars, held at An-Najah in March 2016. This author attended the conference as part of the Prisoner, Labor and Academic Solidarity delegation to Palestine convened by Dr. Abulhadi.  To the delegation, the conference  was an exciting model of what international academic exchange between activist scholars should be.  To the MEF authors of the anti-An-Najah petition, the conference was a threatening example of the powerful potential of unfiltered exposure to Palestinian scholarship taking place in occupied Palestine.

Our delegation immediately issued an open letter in response to the petition, calling on President Wong  to uphold the importance and validity of the MOU with An-Najah, to reject the defamation of Dr. Abdulhadi and to expand institutional support for the AMED program.  Wong’s office issued a lukewarm response, endorsing all of the University’s exchange programs without specifically upholding the one with An-Najah.    As our open letter was rapidly gaining signatures by students and faculty at SFSU and around the country, an even more egregious act of hate speech occurred on the SFSU campus as well as at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

On the morning of October 14, 2016, students arrived at SFSU to find numerous posters with racist caricature portraits plastered all over campus, defaming Professor Abdulhadi  and Palestinian student leaders by name and labeling them “Jew Haters” and “terrorists.” The posters were signed by the Horowitz Freedom Center, a virulently anti-left and Islamophobic organization. Students immediately went across campus tearing the posters down while University administration did nothing for hours.  President Wong finally issued a statement calling the posters “bullying tactics” but did not even mention that the Horowitz Freedom Center was responsible for them or label them a hate crime.

In response to these posters, numerous articles, statements, and petitions were issued by a wide variety of media and organizations including Palestine Legal, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, UAW Local 2865, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network,  Jewish News and the Jewish Studies Department at SFSU.  They called on Wong to pursue an investigation of the posters as a hate crime and to defend GUPS, AMED, Dr. Abdulhadi and the Arab and Muslim community at SFSU. To date none of this has happened.

As Terry Collins points out, the incidents of the past year are just an intensification of long time problems  facing the AMED program and the Palestinian and Arab communities at SF State.  Dr. Abdulhadi was recruited to SFSU in 2007 from the University of Michigan, Dearborn.  Her recruitment was part of the implementation of the recommendations of a campus/community Task Force that was formed at SFSU in order to address a backlash against Palestinian and Arab students in the post 9-11 era.  According to Dr. Abdulhadi, she accepted the position at SFSU in order to create a program whose explicit purpose was the production of knowledge for social justice. Given the history of social justice engagement at SFSU, the large Arab and Palestinian population in the Bay Area, and the progressive political climate in the region, she believed that it would be an ideal place for her to develop this type of program.   In her recruitment contract she was promised two additional faculty positions for the program as well as administrative support.  However, none of these contractual obligations have ever been met.

A year after Dr. Abdulhadi was recruited in 2008, the Department of Jewish studies at SF State received a gift of $3.75 million from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund to create an endowed chair in Israel studies, which SF State boasted put it “at the forefront of an emerging new academic field.”  Since then Israel studies has continued to grow, while the AMED program has never expanded beyond Dr. Abdulhadi.  Recently Dr. Abdulhadi was told by President Wong that due to budget constraints, the only way that the two promised faculty positions could be added would be if the program itself could bring in large gifts or grants.

The problems confronting the AMED program have developed in the context of nationwide attacks on Palestinian scholarship including employment termination, disciplinary actions, suspension of student groups and cancellation of course sections.  As the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has gathered momentum on college campuses across the U.S., the Israeli government and its allies have prioritized the targeting of all scholarship and activity that includes an anti-Zionist, anti-colonial, pro-Palestinian perspective.  Meanwhile, in the same period as online harassment and academic investigations were occurring at SFSU, students at An-Najah and other Palestinian universities have been subject to a mounting wave of raids and arrests. Since it is illegal for Palestinian students to organize protests on campuses, and campus political organizations are banned, there is a constant pretext for the Israeli military occupation to arrest students arbitrarily.  The increasing criminalization of speech and activism about Palestine on U.S. campuses represents a move in the same direction.

Yet despite the election of Trump, the acceleration of openly Islamophobic  policies, and the appointment of ultra-Zionist David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel , the colonial reality of Palestine is breaking through the American wall of denial in unprecedented ways.  On April 16, 2017 the New York Times published a searing op-ed by Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader and political prisoner, indicting the Israeli colonial prison system and announcing a hunger strike by over 1,500 Palestinian prisoners which has continued into May.  A week later, Omar Barghouti,  a co-founder and leader of the BDS movement,  accepted the Gandhi Peace Award at Yale University after an international outcry pressured Israel to reverse a travel ban it had imposed on him.  And on April 27^th, the Washington Post published an interview with Palestinian parliamentarian and former political prisoner Khalida Jarrar in which she explains her support for the prisoner hunger strike and highlights the particularly cruel conditions to which Palestinian women prisoners are subjected.
Not surprisingly at the same time, the backlash has been escalating at San Francisco State.  In the beginning of April, Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast representative of Campus Watch and a graduate of SF State, accelerated the call to revoke the MOU between An-Najah and SFSU by denouncing the inclusion of former prisoners in the U.S. delegation that participated in the An-Najah conference.  And Nir Barkat, intensified the pressure on President Wong when he canceled a speaking engagement  at SFSU  claiming that SFSU hadn’t  sufficiently publicized the event  and therefore was continuing its “marginalization and demonization of the Jewish state. “

On May 3, students once again found dozens of anti-Palestinian posters plastered around campus, vilifying Palestinian feminist leader Rasmea Odeh,  Students for Justice in Palestine and a Jewish Voice for Peace.  In an urgent message to Wong, GUPS responded clearly, ““Once again SFSU administration has failed to protect us and provide a safe work and study environment for students, faculty and staff.   Claims of being a sanctuary campus must be evidenced in deeds not in words. This applies equally to Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians as it applies to everybody else.”  Their email included numerous pictures of the racist posters before they were taken down.    In a Kafkaesque response, Wong responded the next day with an email claiming that he couldn’t do anything because the campus police “were unable to find any of the posters.”  He encouraged students to call the police and campus counseling if they felt unsafe.

2017 marks the tenth anniversary of the Edward Said mural which was created at SF State in a collaborative effort between students, artists and community members to honor this preeminent Palestinian scholar.  Like everything related to Palestine at SFSU, the mural has been the subject of ongoing bitter controversy, fanned by outside Zionist organizations.  The SFSU administration cites the mural as a symbol of its commitment to “healthy debate,” and “respectful solutions.”  To Terry Collins, the battle at SF State has never been about healthy debate or free speech.  “They’re trying to make an example of the students, GUPS, the AMED program because they’re standing up for Palestine’s freedom, just like the BSU stood up for Black freedom back in 1968,” Terry stresses. “It’s up to those of us in the community to have their backs!”

Diana Block is the author of a novel, Clandestine Occupations – An Imaginary History (PM Press, 2015) and a memoir, Arm the Spirit – A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back (AK Press, 2009).  She is an active member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners  and the anti-prison coalition CURB. She is a member of the editorial collective of The Fire Inside newsletter and she writes periodically for various online journals.
 

More articles by:Diana Block

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article in WEEKEND EDITION SEPTEMBER 12-14, 2014

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Breaking the Last Taboo

Gaza and the Threat of World War

by JOHN PILGER

“There is a taboo,” said the visionary Edward Said, “on telling the truth about Palestine and the great destructive force behind Israel.  Only when this truth is out can any of us be free.”

For many people, the truth is out now.  At last, they know.  Those once intimidated into silence can’t look away now. Staring at them from their TV, laptop, phone, is proof of the barbarism of the Israeli state and the great destructive force of its mentor and provider, the United States, the cowardice of European governments, and the collusion of others, such as Canada and Australia, in this epic crime.

The attack on Gaza was an attack on all of us. The siege of Gaza is a siege of all of us. The denial of justice to Palestinians is a symptom of much of humanity under siege and a warning that the threat of a new world war is growing by the day.

When Nelson Mandela called the struggle of Palestine “the greatest moral issue of our time”, he spoke on behalf of true civilisation, not that which empires invent.  In Latin America, the governments of Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have made their stand on Gaza. Each of these countries has known its own dark silence when immunity for mass murder was sponsored by the same godfather in Washington that answered the cries of children in Gaza with more ammunition to kill them.

Unlike Netanyahu and his killers, Washington’s pet fascists in Latin America didn’t concern themselves with moral window dressing. They simply murdered, and left the bodies on rubbish dumps.  For Zionism, the goal is the same: to dispossess and ultimately destroy an entire human society: a truth that 225 Holocaust survivors and their descendants have compared with te genesis of genocide.

Nothing has changed since the Zionists’ infamous “Plan D” in 1948 that ethnically cleansed an entire people. Recently, on the website of theTimes of Israel were the words: “Genocide is Permissible”. A deputy speaker of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, Moshe Feiglin, demands a policy of mass expulsion into concentration camps. An MP, Ayelet Shaked, whose party is a member of the governing coalition, calls for the extermination of Palestinian mothers to prevent them giving birth to what she calls “little snakes”.

For years, reporters have watched Israeli soldiers bait Palestinian children by abusing them through loud-speakers. Then they shoot them dead.  For years, reporters have known about Palestinian women about to give birth and refused passage through a roadblock to a hospital; and the baby has died, and sometimes the mother.

For years, reporters have known about Palestinian doctors and ambulance crews given permission by Israeli commanders to attend the wounded or remove the dead, only to be shot through the head.

For years, reporters have known about stricken people prevented from getting life-saving treatment, or shot dead when they’ve tried to reach a clinic for chemotherapy treatment. One elderly lady with a walking stick was murdered in this way – a bullet in her back.

When I put the facts of this crime to Dori Gold, a senior adviser to the Israeli prime minister, he said, “Unfortunately in every kind of warfare there are cases of civilians who are accidentally killed. But the case you cite was not terrorism. Terrorism means putting the cross-hairs of the sniper’s rifle on a civilian deliberately.”

I replied, “That’s exactly what happened.”

“No,” he said, “it did not happen.”

Such a lie or delusion is repeated unerringly by Israel’s apologists. As the former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges points out, the reporting of such an atrocity invariably ends up as “caught in the cross-fire”. For as long as I have covered the Middle East, much if not most of the western media has colluded in this way.

In one of my films, a Palestinian cameraman, Imad Ghanem, lies helpless while soldiers from the “most moral army in the world” blew both his legs off.  This atrocity was given two lines on the BBC website. Thirteen journalists were killed by Israel in its latest bloodfest in Gaza. All were Palestinian. Who knows their names?

Something is different now. There is a huge revulsion across the world; and the  voices of sensible liberalism are worried. Their hand wringing and specious choir of “equal blame” and “Israel’s right to defend itself” will not wash any more; neither will the smear of anti-Semitism. Neither will their selective cry that “something must be done” about Islamic fanatics but nothing must be done about Zionist fanatics.

One sensible liberal voice, the novelist Ian McEwan, was being celebrated as a sage by the Guardian while the children of Gaza were blown to bits. This is the same Ian McEwan who ignored the pleading of Palestinians not to accept the Jerusalem Prize for literature. “If I only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out of bed,” said McEwan.

If they could speak, the dead of Gaza might say: Stay in bed, great novelist, for your very presence smoothes the bed of racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and murder – no matter the weasel words you uttered as you claimed your prize.

Understanding the sophistry and power of liberal propaganda is key to understanding why Israel’s outrages endure; why the world looks on; why sanctions are never applied to Israel; and why nothing less than a total boycott of everything Israeli is now a measure of basic human decency.

The most incessant propaganda says Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel.  Khaled Hroub, the Cambridge University scholar considered a world leading authority on Hamas, says this phrase is “never used or adopted by Hamas, even in its most radical statements”.  The oft-quoted “anti-Jewish” 1988 Charter was the work of “one individual and made public without appropriate Hamas consensus …. The author was one of the ‘old guard’ “; the document is regarded as an embarrassment and never cited.

Hamas has repeatedly offered a 10-year truce with Israel and has long settled for a two-state solution. When Medea Benjamin, the fearless Jewish American activist, was in Gaza, she carried a letter from Hamas leaders to President Obama that made clear the government of Gaza wanted peace with Israel.  It was ignored. I personally know of many such letters carried in good faith, ignored or dismissed.

The unforgivable crime of Hamas is a distinction almost never reported: it is the only Arab government to have been freely and democratically elected by its people. Worse, it has now formed a government of unity with the Palestinian Authority.  A single, resolute Palestinian voice – in the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court – is the most feared threat.

Since 2002, a pioneering media unit at Glasgow University has produced remarkable studies of reporting and propaganda in Israel/Palestine. Professor Greg Philo and his colleagues were shocked to find a public ignorance compounded by TV news reporting. The more people watched, the less they knew.

Greg Philo says the problem is not “bias” as such. Reporters and producers are as moved as anyone by the suffering of Palestinians; but so imposing is the power structure of the media — as an extension of the state and its vested interests — that critical facts and historical context are routinely suppressed.

Incredibly, less than nine per cent of young viewers interviewed by  Professor Philo’s team were aware that Israel was the occupying power, and that the illegal settlers were Jewish; many believed them to be Palestinian. The term “Occupied Territories” was seldom explained. Words such as “murder”, “atrocity”, “cold-blooded killing” were used only to describe the deaths of Israelis.

Recently, a BBC reporter, David Loyn, was critical of another British journalist, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News. Snow was so moved by what he had seen in Gaza he went on YouTube to make a humanitarian appeal. What concerned the BBC man was that Snow had breached protocol and been emotional in his YouTube piece.

“Emotion,” wrote Loyn, “is the stuff of propaganda and news is against propaganda”. Did he write this with a straight face?  In fact, Snow’s delivery was calm.  His crime was to have strayed outside the boundaries of fake impartiality. Unforgivably, he didn’t censor himself.

In 1937, with Adolf Hitler in power, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times in London, wrote the following in his diary: “I spend my nights in taking out anything which will hurt [German] susceptibilities and in dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them.”

On 30 July, the BBC offered viewers a masterclass in the Dawson Principle. The diplomatic correspondent of the programme Newsnight, Mark Urban, gave five reasons why the Middle East was in turmoil. None included the historic or contemporary role of the British government.  The Cameron government’s dispatch of £8 billion worth of arms and military equipment to Israel was airbrushed. Britain’s massive arms shipment to Saudi Arabia was airbrushed. Britain’s role in the destruction of Libya was airbrushed. Britain’s support for the tyranny in Egypt was airbrushed.

As for the British invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they didn’t happen, either.

The only expert witness on this BBC programme was an academic called Toby Dodge from the London School of Economics. What viewers needed to know was that Dodge had been a special adviser to David Petraeus, the American general largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this, too, was airbrushed.

In matters of war and peace, BBC-style illusions of impartiality and credibility do more to limit and control public discussion than tabloid distortion. As Greg Philo pointed out, Jon Snow’s moving commentary on YouTube was limited to whether the Israeli assault on Gaza was proportionate or reasonable. What was missing – and is almost always missing – was the essential truth of the longest military occupation in modern times: a criminal enterprise backed by western governments from Washington to London to Canberra.

As for the myth that “vulnerable” and “isolated” Israel is surrounded by enemies, Israel is actually surrounded by strategic allies. The Palestinian Authority, bankrolled, armed and directed by the US, has long colluded with Tel Aviv. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Netanyahu are the tyrannies in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar — if the World Cup ever gets to Qatar, count on Mossad to run the security.

Resistance is humanity at its bravest and most noble. The resistance in Gaza is rightly compared with the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto – which also dug tunnels and deployed tactics of subterfuge and surprise against an overpowering military machine. The last surviving leader of the Warsaw uprising, Marek Edelman, wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian resistance, comparing it with the ZOB, his ghetto fighters. The letter began: “Commanders of the Palestine military, paramilitary and partisan operations – and to all soldiers [of Palestine].”

Dr. Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian doctor renowned for his heroic work in Gaza.  On 8 August, Dr. Gilbert returned to his hometown, Tronso in Norway which, as he pointed out, the Nazis had occupied for seven years. He said, “Imagine being back in 1945 and we in Norway did not win the liberation struggle, did not throw out the occupier. Imagine the occupier remaining in our country, taking it piece by piece, for decades upon decades, and banishing us to the leanest areas, and taking the fish in the sea and the water beneath us, then bombing our hospitals, our ambulance workers, our schools, our homes.

“Would we have given up and waved the white flag? No, we would not! And this is the situation in Gaza. This is not a battle between terrorism and democracy. Hamas is not the enemy Israel is fighting. Israel is waging a war against the Palestinian people’s will to resist. It is the Palestinian people’s dignity that they will not accept this.

“In 1938, the Nazis called the Jews Untermenschen – subhuman. Today, Palestinians are treated as a subhuman people who can be slaughtered without any in power reacting.

“So I have returned to Norway, a free country, and this country is free because we had a resistance movement, because occupied nations have the right to resist, even with weapons – it’s stated in international law. And the Palestinian people’s resistance in Gaza is admirable: a struggle for us all.”

There are dangers in telling this truth, in breaching what Edward Said called “the last taboo”.  My documentary, Palestine Is Still the Issue, was nominated for a Bafta, a British academy award, and praised by the Independent Television Commission for its “journalistic integrity” and the “care and thoroughness with which it was researched.”  Yet, within minutes of the film’s broadcast on Britain’s ITV Network, a shock wave struck – a deluge of emails described me as a “demonic psychopath”, “a purveyor of hate and evil”, “an anti-Semite of the most dangerous kind”.  Much of this was orchestrated by Zionists in the US who could not possibly have seen the film. Death threats arrived at a rate of one a day.

Something similar happened to the Australian commentator Mike Carlton last month. In his regular column in the Sydney Morning Herald, Carlton produced a rare piece of journalism about Israel and the Palestinians; he identified the oppressors and their victims. He was careful to limit his attack to “a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hard-line, right-wing Likud party of Netanyahu”. Those who had previously run the Zionist state, he implied, belonged to “a proud liberal tradition”.

On cue, the deluge struck. He was called “a bag of Nazi slime, a Jew-hating racist.”  He was threatened repeatedly, and he emailed his attackers to “get fucked”.

The Herald demanded he apologise. When he refused, he was suspended, then he resigned.  According to the Herald’s publisher, Sean Aylmer, the company “expects much higher standards from its columnists.”

The “problem” of Carlton’s acerbic, often solitary liberal voice in a country in which Rupert Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the capital city press — Australia is the world’s first murdocracy — would be solved twice over. The Australian Human Rights Commission is to investigate complaints against Carlton under the Racial Discrimination Act, which outlaws any public act or utterance that is “reasonably likely … to offend, insult, humiliate another person or a group of people” on the basic of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin.

In contrast to safe, silent Australia — where the Carltons are made extinct — real journalism is alive in Gaza.  I often speak on the phone with Mohammed Omer, an extraordinary young Palestinian journalist, to whom I presented, in 2008, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.  Whenever I called him during the assault on Gaza, I could hear the whine of drones, the explosion of missiles. He interrupted one call to attend to children huddled outside waiting for transport amidst the explosions. When I spoke to him on 30 July, a single Israeli F-19 fighter had just slaughtered 19 children. On 20 August, he described how Israeli drones had effectively “rounded up” a village so that they could savagely gunned down.

Every day, at sunrise, Mohammed looks for families who have been bombed. He records their stories, standing in the rubble of their homes; he takes their pictures. He goes to the hospital. He goes to the morgue. He goes to the cemetery. He queues for hours for bread for his own family. And he watches the sky. He sends two, three, four dispatches a day. This is real journalism.

“They are trying to annihilate us,” he told me. “But the more they bomb us, the stronger we are. They will never win.”

The great crime committed in Gaza is a reminder of something wider and menacing to us all.

Since 2001, the United States and its allies have been on a rampage.  In Iraq, at least 700,000 men, woman and children are dead as a result. The rise of jihadists – in a country where there was none – is the result.  Known as al-Qaeda and now the Islamic State, modern jihadism was invented by US and Britain, assisted by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The original aim was to use and develop an Islamic fundamentalism that had barely existed in much of the Arab world in order to undermine pan-Arab movements and secular governments. By the 1980s, this had become a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA called it Operation Cyclone; and a cyclone it turned out to be, with its unleashed fury blowing back in the faces of its creators. The attacks of 9/11 and in London in July, 2005 were the result of this blowback, as were the recent, gruesome murders of the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. For more than a year, the Obama administration armed the killers of these two young men — then known as ISIS in Syria — in order to destroy the secular government in Damascus.

The West’s principal “ally” in this imperial mayhem is the medieval state where beheadings are routinely and judicially carried out — Saudi Arabia. Whenever a member of the British Royal Family is sent to this barbaric place, you can bet your bottom petrodollar that the British government wants to sell the sheiks more fighter planes, missiles, manacles. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, which bankrolls jihadists from Syria to Iraq.

Why must we live in this state of perpetual war?

The immediate answer lies in the United States, where a secret and unreported coup has taken place.  A group known as the Project for a New American Century, the inspiration of Dick Cheney and others,  came to power with the administration of George W Bush. Once known in Washington as the “crazies”, this extreme sect believes in what the US Space Command calls “full spectrum dominance”.

Under both Bush and Obama, a19th-century imperial mentality has infused all departments of state. Raw militarism is ascendant; diplomacy is redundant.  Nations and governments are judged as useful or expendable: to be bribed or threatened or “sanctioned”.

On 31 July, the National Defense Panel in Washington published a remarkable document that called for the United States to prepare to fight six major wars simultaneously. At the top of the list were Russia and China – nuclear powers.

In one sense, a war against Russia has already begun. While the world watched horrified as Israel assaulted Gaza, similar atrocities in eastern Ukraine were barely news. At the time of writing, two Ukrainian cities of Russian-speaking people – Donetsk and Luhansk – are under siege: their people and hospitals and schools blitzed by a regime in Kiev that came to power in a putsch led by neo-Nazis backed and paid for by the United States. The coup was the climax of what the Russian political observer Sergei Glaziev describes as a 20-year “grooming of Ukrainian Nazis aimed at Russia”.  Actual fascism has risen again in Europe and not one European leader has spoken against it, perhaps because the rise of fascism across Europe is now a truth that dares not speak its name.

With its fascist past, and present, Ukraine is now a CIA theme park, a colony of Nato and the International Monetary Fund. The fascist coup in Kiev in February was the boast of US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, whose “coup budget” ran to $5 billion. But there was a setback.  Moscow prevented the seizure of its legitimate Black Sea naval base in Russian-speaking Crimea. A referendum and annexation quickly followed. Represented in the West as the Kremlin’s “aggression”, this serves to turn truth on its head and cover Washington’s goals: to drive a wedge between a “pariah” Russia and its principal trading partners in Europe and eventually to break up the Russian Federation. American missiles already surround Russia; Nato’s military build-up in the former Soviet republics and eastern Europe is the biggest since the second world war.

During the cold war, this would have risked a nuclear holocaust. The risk has returned as anti-Russian misinformation reaches crescendos of hysteria in the US and Europe. A textbook case is the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner in July. Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its Nato allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian “separatists” in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible. An editorial in The Economist accused Vladimir Putin of mass murder. The cover of Der Spiegel used faces of the victims and bold red type, “Stoppt Putin Jetzt!” (Stop Putin Now!) In the New York Times, Timothy Garton Ash substantiated his case for “Putin’s deadly doctrine” with personal abuse of “a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike face”.

The Guardian’s role has been important. Renowned for its investigations, the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why, even though a wealth of material from credible sources shows that Moscow was as shocked as the rest of the world, and the airliner may well have been brought down by the Ukrainian regime.

With the White House offering no verifiable evidence – even though US satellites would have observed the shooting-down — the Guardian’sMoscow correspondent Shaun Walker stepped into the breach. “My audience with the Demon of Donetsk,” was the front- page headline over Walker’s breathless interview with one Igor Bezler. “With a walrus moustache, a fiery temper and a reputation for brutality,” he wrote, “Igor Bezler is the most feared of all the rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine …nicknamed The Demon  … If the Ukrainian security services, the SBU, are to be believed, the Demon and a group of his men were responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 … as well as allegedly bringing down MH17, the rebels have shot down 10 Ukrainian aircraft.” Demon Journalism requires no further evidence.

Demon Journalism makes over a fascist-contaminated junta that seized power in Kiev as a respectable “interim government”. Neo-Nazis become mere “nationalists”. “News” sourced to the Kiev junta ensures the suppression of a US-run coup and the junta’s systematic ethnic cleaning of the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine. That this should happen in the borderland through which the original Nazis invaded Russia, extinguishing some 22 million Russian lives, is of no interest. What matters is a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine that seems difficult to prove beyond familiar satellite images that evoke Colin Powell’s fictional presentation to the United Nations “proving” that Saddam Hussein had WMD. “You need to know that accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence,” wrote a group of former senior US intelligence officials and analysts, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.”

The jargon is “controlling the narrative”. In his seminal Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said was more explicit: the western media machine was now capable of penetrating deep into the consciousness of much of humanity with a “wiring” as influential as that of the imperial navies of the 19th century. Gunboat journalism, in other words. Or war by media.

Yet, a critical public intelligence and resistance to propaganda does exist; and a second superpower is emerging – the power of public opinion, fuelled by the internet and social media.

The false reality created by false news delivered by media gatekeepers may prevent some of us knowing that this new superpower is stirring in country after country: from the Americas to Europe, Asia to Africa.  It is a moral insurrection, exemplified by the whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. The question begs: will we break our silence while there is time?

When I was last in Gaza, driving back to the Israeli checkpoint, I caught sight of two Palestinian flags through the razor wire.  Children had made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and they’d climbed on a wall and held the flag between them.

The children do this, I was told, whenever there are foreigners around, because they want to show the world they are there — alive, and brave, and undefeated.

This article is adapted from John Pilger’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture, delivered in Adelaide, Australia, on 11 September. Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com