Americans visit great injustice on their real or imagined enemies, but the Muslim population of the United States - and the millions of non-Muslims in the US who refuse to be silenced by the conformity and pseudo-patriotism of conservative America - are perhaps the nation’s greatest hope. I travel to the States from the Middle East almost every three weeks to lecture at American universities, a tough, often rancorous but rewarding experience. If you are going to condemn US policy in the Middle East, you might as well go and take the heat in the ‘Land of the Free’.

Free speech

Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls - monitored, of course - and he was growing steadily weaker. Sami al-Arian is forty-nine but he stayed on hunger strike for sixty days to protest the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. All praise, then, to the reporter John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloguing al-Arian’s little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of CounterPunch.

The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the university of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according to Sugg, Israel’s lobbyists were enraged by his lessons - al-Arian’s family was driven from Palestine in 1948 - and in 2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring ‘to murder and maim’ outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic Jihad in ‘Palestine’. He was held for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers. Al-Arian’s $50 m (£25 m) Tampa trial lasted six months; the government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400 intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in - wait for it - a dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger the impartiality of the jurors.

In December 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious charges and on those remaining, the jurors voted ten to two for acquittal. Because the FBI wanted to make further charges, al-Arian’s lawyers told him to make a plea that would end any further prosecution. Arriving for his sentence, however, al-Arian - who assumed time served would be his punishment, followed by deportation - found Moody talking about ‘blood’ on the defendant’s hands. He would have to spend another eleven months in jail. Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think tank. Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonoured and refused to testify. He was held in contempt. And continues to languish in prison.

Not so, of course, most of America’s torturers in Iraq. One of them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a ‘contract interrogator’, who has bared his soul in the Washington Post - all praise, here, by the way to the Post - about his escapades in the Fallujah interrogation ‘facility’ of the 82nd Airborne Division. Fair has been having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he deprived of sleep during questioning ‘by forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes’. Now it is Fair who is deprived of sleep. ‘A man with no face stares at me . . . pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It’s a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realise the screams are mine.’

Thank God, Fair didn’t write a play about his experiences and offer it to Channel 4, who got cold feet about The Mark of Cain, the drama about British army abuse in Basra. It quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony Marchant’s play might affect the now happy outcome of the far less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15 ‘Servicepersons’ - by angering the Muslim world with tales of how our boys in Basra beat up on the local Iraqis. As the reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa in British custody in Basra - I suppose we must always refer to his demise as ‘death’ now that the soldiers present at his savage beating have been acquitted of murder. Arab Muslims know all too well how our prisoners are treated during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who are not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it, and knew all about Mousa’s fate long before I reported it for The Independent on Sunday.

Because it’s really all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us. It’s to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in the country’s schools. Now the principal of a Connecticut high school has banned a play by pupils, based on the letters and words of US soldiers serving in Iraq. Under the title Voices in Conflict, Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski, James Presson and their fellow pupils at Wilton High School compiled the reflections of soldiers and others - including a nineteen-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq - to create their own play. To no avail. The drama might hurt those ‘who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak’, proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High’s principal. And - my favourite line - Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal time to ensure that the play would provide ‘a legitimate instructional experience for our students’.

And of course, I can quite see Mr Canty’s point. Students who have produced Arthur Miller’s The Crucible were told by Mr Canty - whose own war experiences, if any, have gone unrecorded - that it wasn’t their place to tell audiences what soldiers were thinking. The pupils of Wilton High are now being inundated with offers to perform at other venues. Personally, I think Mr Canty may have a point. He would do much better to encourage his students to perform Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a drama of massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honour killing. It would make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of Connecticut. A ‘legitimate instructional experience’ if ever there was one.

The Independent, 7 April 2007

Al-Arian was cleared of contempt in mid-December 2007 and was to remain in prison for three or four more months. But his family feared he might then be charged with criminal contempt for not testifying before a grand jury. They hoped he would be deported to Egypt, where three of his five children live - even though Egypt practises systematic torture of all ‘terror suspects’.

It’s a draw!

I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape that I do not recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?

I picked up Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It’s a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls ‘a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights’. Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is ‘afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship . . .’ A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, ‘is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them’.

Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest-lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour, Egypt, secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times (‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’ of course) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred ‘furore among Jews’ with his use of the word ‘apartheid’. The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a ‘reluctance to criticise the Israeli government’. Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in the New York Times (of course) that Carter ‘is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa’. This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book ‘is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he’s not just another pundit, and he’s not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States’. But well, yes, that’s the point, isn’t it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It’s an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as of the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter’s book is now a bestseller - and applause here, by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead of believing Mr Foxman.

But in this context, why, I wonder, didn’t the New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel’s cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his book? Didn’t Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn’t Israel have a deep and fruitful military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This, of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter’s book.

At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report - which doesn’t really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the Green Zone of Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate title - there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it’s written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of ‘porous’ borders and admonitions that ‘time is running out’. The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the ‘experts’ consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution, and there is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the philosophers who dragged the United States into the Iraq catastrophe. General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that ‘we are not winning, but we are not losing’. Bush’s new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he agreed with General Pace that ‘we are not winning, but we are not losing’. Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting: ‘I don’t think you can say we’re losing. By the same token [sic], I’m not sure we’re winning.’ At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - ‘we’re not winning, we’re not losing’. Pity about the Iraqis.

I pondered this madness during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that’s when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It’s a draw!

The Independent, 23 December 2006

Fear and loathing on an American campus

On the night of 11 September 2001, Al Dershowitz of Harvard law school exploded in anger. Robert Fisk, he roared over Irish radio, was a dangerous man. I was ‘pro-terrorist’. I was ‘anti-American’ and that, Dershowitz announced to the people of County Mayo, ‘is the same as anti-Semitism’. Of course I had dared to ask the ‘Why’ question. Why had nineteen Arabs flown aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania? How very odd. The nineteen murderers came from a place called the Middle East. Was there a problem out there?

I’m recalling all this nonsense because Al has been back at work attacking his old nemesis Norm Finkelstein, who has just applied for tenure at DePaul University in the US where he is an assistant professor of politics. Norm’s department has supported him but Al has bombarded faculty members with a blistering attack on Norm and all his works. Let me just explain what these works are. Finkelstein, who is Jewish and the son of Holocaust survivors, has published a number of works highly critical of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and the use Israel’s supporters make of the Holocaust of 6 million Jews to suppress criticism of Israel’s policies. Finkelstein’s book, The Holocaust Industry, earned Dershowitz’s continued fury.

Now, I’ve known Norm for years and he is a tough, no-holds-barred polemicist, angry against all the traditional supporters of Israel, especially those who turn a blind eye to torture. Personally, I find Norm’s arguments sometimes a little overwrought. In radio discussions, his voice will take on a slightly whingeing tone that must infuriate his antagonists. But Al is clearly trying to destroy Norm’s career, adding that the ‘dossier’ he sent to DePaul academics - we remember that word ‘dossier’ rather too well in Britain and, I should add, Al has absolutely no connection to DePaul University - contains details of ‘Norman Finkelstein’s . . . outright lies, misquotations and distortion’. It will be a disgrace, says Al, for DePaul to give tenure to Norm. ‘His scholarship is no more than ad hominem attacks on his ideological enemies.’ As if this is not enough, Al - who is also Jewish - takes a crack at philosopher and linguistic academic Noam Chomsky, who has supported Norm and whom Al refers to as ‘the high priest of the radical anti-Israeli left’.

Enough, I hear readers shout. I agree. But Norm’s politics department gives him top marks for scholarship and says he ‘offers a detailed argument that suggests that Dershowitz plagiarised or inappropriately appropriated large sections of others’ work in his book The Case for Israel’. Norm has a ‘substantial and serious record of scholarly production and achievement’ and has lectured at the university of Chicago, Harvard, Georgetown and Northwestern universities. So far so good. But now up pops ‘Chuck’ Suchar, the dean of DePaul’s College of Liberal (sic) Arts and Sciences, with an extraordinary recommendation that Norm should not be granted tenure. While acknowledging that ‘he is a skilled teacher’ with ‘consistently high course evaluations’, Chuck has decided ‘that a considerable amount of [his work] is inconsistent with DePaul’s Vincentian values, most particularly our institutional commitment to respect the dignity of the individual and to respect the rights of others to hold and express different intellectual positions’. Norm’s books, according to Chuck, ‘border on character assassination and . . . embody a strategy clearly aimed at destroying the reputation of many who oppose his views’.

Now I have to say that scholars who read this column will be interested to know of Chuck’s own work. I gather it has absolutely nothing to do with the Middle East, though I’m sure his study of Gentrification and Urban Change: Research in Urban Society (1992) had American readers queuing round the block of their major bookstores in search of first editions. All I do ask is how a college dean could involve himself in the same kind of ad hominem attacks against one of his own colleagues that he has accused that same colleague of being guilty of. I loved too, that bit about ‘Vincentian values’. That really does warrant a chortle or two. St Vincent de Paul - the real de Paul who lived from 1581 to 1660, not the de Paul of Chuck’s soft imagination - was a no-nonsense theologian who was captured by Muslim Turkish pirates and taken to Tunis as a slave. Here, however, he argued his religious values so well that he converted his owner to Christianity and earned his freedom. His charitable organisations - he also created a home for foundlings in Paris - became a legend which Chuck Suchar simply dishonours.

All over the United States, however, Norm’s academic chums have been condemning Suchar’s mean-spirited performance; even in Beirut, where Norm has lectured, academics of the American University have insisted that he be granted tenure in his department, Arabs supporting a Jewish professor and son of Holocaust survivors. Of course, I grant that all this is a little heavy for the real world and I do have a secret desire to take Norm, Chuck and Al and bang their bloody heads together. But what is happening at DePaul University is a very serious matter in the anodyne, frightened academic world that now exists in the US. Norm’s moment of truth comes up in May. As they say, watch this space.

The Independent, 14 April 2007

Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure in June 2007, and placed on ‘administrative leave’ until 2008. But on 5 September 2007 he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with DePaul University on undisclosed terms. The university described Finkelstein as ‘a prolific scholar and outstanding teacher’ - which obviously begs the question of his departure. Dershowitz condemned the university’s statement as a ‘compromise’. What the good Saint Vincent would have thought of it all doesn’t bear thinking about.

How Muslim middle America made me feel safer

Every time I enter the United States, I wonder what the lads in Homeland Security have in store for me. But last week, Chicago was a piece of cake. I was arriving from Lebanon, I told the young man at the desk, and I was to address a Muslim conference. ‘Gee, you must have had a bad time out there in Lebanon,’ he commiserated, stamping my passport in less than thirty seconds and handing it back to me with a scriptwriter’s greeting: ‘There you go, partner.’ And so I passed through the barrier, saddled up my white Palomino in the parking lot, and rode off towards the crescent Islamic moon that hung over Chicago. Hi Ho Fisk, away!

I had forgotten how many American Muslims were south-west Asian rather than Middle Eastern in origin, Pakistani and Indian by family rather than Syrian or Egyptian or Lebanese or Saudi. But the largely Sunni congregation of 32,000 gathered for the Islamic Society of North America’s annual gig were not the hotdog-sellers, bellhops and taxi-drivers of New York. They were part of the backbone of middle America, corporate lawyers, real estate developers, construction engineers, and owners of chain-store outlets. Nor were these the docile, hang-dog, frightened Muslims we have grown used to writing about in the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. To about 12,000 of these Muslims in a vast auditorium, I said the Middle East had never been so dangerous. I condemned the Hizballah leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, for saying he had no idea the Israelis would have responded so savagely to the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of three others on 12 July 2006. Later, a worthy imam told me: ‘I thought what you said about Sheikh Hassan [sic] was almost an insult.’ But that clearly wasn’t what the audience believed.

When I told them that as American Muslims, they could demand a right of reply when lobby groups maliciously claimed that a network of suicide bombers was plotting within their totally law-abiding community, they roared. But I warned them that I would listen carefully to their response to my next sentence. And then I said that they must feel free to condemn - and should condemn - the Muslim regimes that used torture and oppression, even if these dictators lived in the lands from which their families came. And those thousands of Muslims rose to their feet and clapped and yelled their agreement with more emotion and fervour than any rabble-rousing non-Muslim yelling about ‘Arab terrorism’. This was not what I had expected.

While I was signing copies of the American edition of my book on the Middle East some hours later - the real reason, of course, for going to Chicago - these same people came up to me to explain they were not American Muslims but Muslim Americans, that Islam was not incompatible with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Some had stories of great tragedy. One young man had written out a short sentence for me to inscribe in the front of his copy of my book. ‘To my parents and siblings,’ he had written on a pink slip, ‘who perished in the hands of the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Yousos Adam.’ I looked up to find the young man crying. ‘I am against war, you see,’ he said, and vanished into the crowd. There were other more ingratiating folk around: the Pakistani broadcaster, for example, who wanted me to talk about his country’s peace-loving principles - until I began describing the continued secret relationship between Pakistan’s intelligence service and the Taliban, at which the interview was swiftly concluded.

Then there was the young man with Asiatic features who said softly that he was ‘Mr Yee, the Guantanamo imam’ - who turned out to be the same Mr Yee foully and falsely accused by the US authorities of passing al-Qaeda-type messages while ministering to the supposed al-Qaeda prisoners at America’s most luxurious prison camp. But there was no bitterness among any of these people. Only a kind of growing pain at the way the press and television in America continued to paint them - and all other Muslims in the world - as an alien, cruel, sadistic race. One woman produced an article of June this year from the Toronto Star about the Israeli town of Sderot, the target of hundreds of Palestinian missiles from Gaza. ‘Under fire at Israel’s Ground Zero,’ ran the headline. ‘Do you believe in this kind of journalism, Mr Fisk?’ the woman demanded to know. And I was about to give her the ‘both sides of the picture’ lecture when I noticed from the article that just five Israelis had been killed in Sderot in five years. Yes, every life is equal. But who at the Star had decided that an Israeli town with one dead every year equalled the Ground Zero of Manhattan’s 3,000 dead in two hours? All dead are equal in the Canadian press it seems, but some are more equal than others.

And I couldn’t help noticing the degree to which the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman is stoking the fires. This is the same man who wrote a few years ago that the Palestinians believed in ‘child sacrifice’ - because they allowed their kids to throw stones at Israeli soldiers who then obligingly gunned them down. Most egregiously for the Muslims I spoke to, Friedman was now ‘animalising’ - as one girl put it beautifully - the Iraqis, and she presented me with a Friedman clipping which ended with these words: ‘It will be a global tragedy if they [the insurgent Iraqi enemy] succeed, but . . . the US government can’t keep asking Americans to sacrifice their children for people who hate each other more than they love their own children.’

So there we go again, I thought. Muslims sacrifice their children. Muslims feel hate more than they love their children. No wonder, I suppose, that their kiddies keep getting Israeli bullets through their hearts in Gaza and American bullets through their hearts in Iraq and Israeli bombs smashing them to death in Lebanon. It’s all the Arabs’ fault. And yet here in Chicago were Muslims dismissing all the calumnies and sophistries and lies and saying they were proud to be Americans. And I guess - for a man who wakes each morning in his Beirut apartment, wondering where the next explosion will be - that I felt a little safer in this world.

The Independent, 9 September 2006

Will the media boys and girls catch up?

Watching the pathetic old lie-on-its-back frightened Labrador of the American media changing overnight into a vicious Rottweiler is one of the enduring pleasures of society in the United States. I have been experiencing this phenomenon over the past two weeks, as both victim and beneficiary. In New York and Los Angeles, my condemnation of the George W. Bush presidency and Israel’s continued settlement-building in the West Bank was originally treated with the disdain all great papers reserve for those who dare to question proud and democratic projects of state. In the New York Times, that ancient luminary Ethan Bonner managed to chide me for attacking American journalists who - he furiously quoted my own words - ‘report in so craven a fashion from the Middle East, so fearful of Israeli criticism that they turn Israeli murder into “targeted attacks” and illegal settlements into “Jewish neighbourhoods” ’.

It was remarkable that Bonner should be so out of touch with his readers that he did not know that ‘craven’ is the very word so many Americans apply to their grovelling newspapers (and quite probably one reason why newspaper circulations are falling so disastrously). But the moment that a respected Democratic congressman and Vietnam veteran in Washington dared to suggest that the war in Iraq was lost, that US troops should be brought home now - and when the Republican response was so brutal it had to be disowned - the old media dog sniffed the air, realised that power was moving away from the White House, and began to drool.

On live television in San Francisco, I could continue my critique of America’s folly in Iraq uninterrupted. Ex-Mayor Willie Brown - who allowed me to have my picture taken in his brand-new pale blue Stetson - exuded warmth towards this ‘ornery’ Brit (though he claimed on air that I was an American) who tore into his country’s policies in the Middle East. It was enough to make you feel the teeniest bit sorry - though only for a millisecond, mark you - for the guy in the White House. All this wasn’t caused by that familiar transition from Newark to Los Angeles International, where the terror of al-Qaeda attacks is replaced by fear of the ozone layer. On the east coast, too, the editorials thundered away at the Bush administration. Seymour Hersh, that blessing to American journalism who broke the Abu Ghraib torture story, produced another black rabbit out of his Iraqi hat with revelations that US commanders in Iraq believe the insurgency is now out of control.

When those same Iraqi gunmen this week again took over the entire city of Ramadi (already ‘liberated’ four times by US troops since 2003), the story shared equal billing on prime-time television with Bush’s latest and infinitely wearying insistence that Iraqi forces - who in reality are so infiltrated by insurgents that they are a knife in America’s back - will soon be able to take over security duties from the occupation forces. Even in Hollywood - and here production schedules prove that the rot must have set in more than a year ago - hitherto taboo subjects are being dredged to the surface of the political mire. Jarhead, produced by Universal Pictures, depicts a bitter, traumatised Marine unit during the 1991 Gulf War. George Clooney’s production of Good Night, and Good Luck, a devastating black-and-white account of Second World War correspondent Ed Murrow’s heroic battle with Senator McCarthy in the 1950s - its theme is the management and crushing of all dissent - has already paid for its production costs twice over. Murrow is played by an actor but McCarthy appears only in real archive footage. Incredibly, a test audience in New York complained that the man ‘playing’ McCarthy was ‘overacting’. Will we say this about Messrs Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld in years to come? I suspect so.

And then there’s Syriana, Clooney’s epic of the oil trade which combines suicide bombers, maverick CIA agents (one of them played by Clooney himself), feuding Middle East Arab potentates - one of whom wants real democracy and wealth for his people and control of his own country’s resources - along with a slew of disreputable businessmen and east coast lawyers. The CIA eventually assassinates the Arab prince who wants to possess his own country’s oil (so much for democracy) - this is accomplished with a pilotless aerial bomb guided by men in a room in Virginia - while a Pakistani, fired from his job in the oil fields because an American conglomerate has downsized for its shareholders’ profits, destroys one of the company’s tankers in a suicide attack.

‘People seem less afraid now,’ Clooney told an interviewer in Entertainment magazine. ‘Lots of people are starting to ask questions. It’s becoming hard to avoid the questions.’ Of course, these questions are being asked because of America’s more than 2,000 fatalities in Iraq rather than out of compassion for Iraq’s tens of thousands of dead. They are being pondered because the whole illegal invasion of Iraq is ending in calamity rather than success.

Yet still they avoid the ‘Israel’ question. The Arab princes in Syriana - who in real life would be obsessed with the occupation of the West Bank - do not murmur a word about Israel. The Arab al-Qaeda operative who persuades the young Pakistani to attack an oil tanker makes no reference to Israel - as every one of bin Laden’s acolytes assuredly would. It was instructive that Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 did not mention Israel once.

So one key issue of the Middle East remains to be confronted. Amy Goodman, whom I used to enrage by claiming that her Democracy Now! programme - broadcast from a former Brooklyn fire station - had only three listeners (one of whom was Amy Goodman), is bravely raising this unmentionable subject. Partly as a result, her ‘alternative’ radio and television station - how I hate that prissy word ‘alternative’ - is slowly moving into the mainstream. Americans are ready to discuss the United States’ relationship with Israel. And America’s injustices towards the Arabs. As usual, ordinary Americans are way out in front of their largely tamed press and television reporters. Now we have to wait and see if the media boys and girls will catch up with their own people.

The Independent, 3 December 2005

Brazil, America and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Strange things happen when a reporter strays off his beat. Vast regions of the earth turn out to have different priorities. The latest conspiracy theory for the murder of ex-Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri - that criminals involved in a bankrupt Beirut bank may have been involved - doesn’t make it into the New Zealand Dominion Post. And last week, arriving in the vast, messy, unplanned city of São Paulo, it was a Brazilian MP’s political corruption scandal, the bankruptcy of the country’s awful airline Varig - worse, let me warn you, than any East European airline under the Soviet Union - and Brazil’s newly nationalised oil concessions in Bolivia that made up the front pages.

Sure, there was Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s long letter to President Bush - ‘rambling’, the local International Herald Tribune edition called it, a description the paper’s headline writers would never apply to Mr Bush himself - and a whole page of Middle East reports in the Folha de São Paulo daily about the EU’s outrageous sanctions against the democratically elected government of ‘Palestine’ - all, alas, written from wire agencies.

But then in steps Brazil with its geographical immensity, its extraordinary story of colonialism and democracy, the mixture of races in São Paulo’s streets - which outdoes the ethnic origins of the occupants of any Toronto tram - and its cocktail version of Portuguese, and then suddenly the Middle East seems a very long way away. Brazil? Sure, the Amazon, tropical forests, coffee and the beaches of Rio. And then there’s Brasilia, the make-believe capital designed - like the equally fake Canberra in Australia and the fraudulent Islamabad in Pakistan - so that the country’s politicians can hide themselves away from their people. One thing the country shares with the Arab world, it turned out, is the ever-constant presence and influence and pressure of the US - never more so than when Brazil’s right-wing rulers were searching for commies in the 1940s and 50s. They weren’t hard to find.

In 1941, a newly belligerent America - plunged into a world war by an attack every bit as ruthless as that of 11 September 2001 - had become so worried about the big bit of Brazil that juts far out into the Atlantic that it set up military bases in the north of the country without waiting for the authorisation of the Brazilian government. Well, Washington needn’t have worried. The sinking of five Brazilian merchant ships by German U-boats provoked huge public demonstrations that forced the right-wing and undemocratic Getúlio Vargas government to declare war on the Nazis. Hands up those readers who know that more than 20,000 Brazilian troops fought on our side in the Italian campaign right up to the end of the Second World War. Even fewer hands will be raised, I suspect, if I ask how many Brazilian troops were killed. According to Boris Fausto’s excellent history of Brazil, 454 died in combat against the Wehrmacht. The return of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force helped to bring democracy to Brazil. Vargas shot himself nine years later, leaving a dramatic suicide note which suggested that ‘foreign forces’ had caused his country’s latest economic crisis. Crowds attacked the US embassy in Rio.

Well, it all looks very different today when a left-wing Brazilian leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - who also found himself threatened by ‘foreign forces’ after his popular election - is trying to make sense of the Bolivian nationalisation of Brazil’s oil conglomerates, an act carried out by Lula’s equally left-wing chum up in La Paz, Evo Morales. I have to say that the explosion inside Latin America’s fashionable leftist governments does have something in common with meetings of the Arab League - where Arab promises of unity are always undermined by hateful arguments. No wonder one of Folha’s writers this week headlined his story ‘The Arabias’.

But can I let that place leave me? Or does the Middle East have a grasp over its victims, a way of jerking their heads around just when you think it might be safe to immerse yourself in a city a world away from Arabia? After two days in Brazil, my office mail arrives from the foreign desk in London and I curl up on my bed to go through the letters. First out of the bag comes Peter Metcalfe of Stevenage with a photocopied page from Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence is writing about Iraq in the 1920s, and about oil and colonialism. ‘We pay for these things too much in honour and innocent lives,’ he says.

I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials . . . delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours.

My next day’s Brazilian newspaper shows an American soldier lying on his back in a Baghdad street, blasted to death by a roadside bomb. Thrown into the fire to the worst of deaths, indeed.

Then in my mailbag comes an enclosure from Antony Loewenstein, my old journalistic friend in Sydney. It’s an editorial from The Australian, not my favourite paper since it’s still beating the drum for George W. on Iraq. But listen to this:

Three years ago . . . elite Australian troops were fighting in Iraq’s western desert to neutralise Scud missile sites. Now, three years later, we know that at the same moment members of our SAS were risking their lives and engaging with Saddam Hussein’s troops, boatloads of Australian wheat were steaming towards ports in the Persian Gulf, where their cargo was to be offloaded and driven to Iraq by a Jordanian shipping company paying kickbacks to - Saddam Hussein.

And I remember that one of the reasons Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard gave for going to war against Iraq - he’s never once told Australians that we didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, by the way - was that Saddam Hussein’s regime was ‘corrupt’. So who was doing the corrupting?

I prepare to check out of the São Paulo Maksoud Plaza hotel. Maksoud? In Arabic, this means ‘the place you come back to’. And of course, the owner turns out to be a Brazilian-Lebanese. I check my flying times. ‘São Paulo/Frankfurt/Beirut’, it says on my ticket. Back on the inescapable beat.

The Independent, 13 May 2006

From Cairo to Valdosta

There’s a helluva difference between Cairo University and the campus of Valdosta in the Deep South of the United States. I visited both this week and I feel like I’ve been travelling on a gloomy spaceship - or maybe a time machine - with just two distant constellations to guide my journey. One is clearly named Iraq; the other is Fear. They have a lot in common.

The politics department at Cairo’s vast campus is run by Dr Mona El-Baradei - yes, she is indeed the sister of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency - and her students, most of them young women, almost all scarved, duly wrote out their questions at the end of the turgid Fisk lecture on the failings of journalism in the Middle East. ‘Why did you invade Iraq?’ was one. I didn’t like the ‘you’ bit, but the answer was ‘oil’. ‘What do you think of the Egyptian government?’ At this, I looked at my watch. I reckon, I told the students, that I just had time to reach Cairo airport for my flight before Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence lads heard of my reply.

Much nervous laughter. Well, I said, new constitutional amendments to enshrine Egypt’s emergency legislation into common law and the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood supporters were not a path to democracy. And I ran through the US State Department’s list of Egyptian arbitrary detentions, routine torture and unfair trials. I didn’t see how the local constabulary could do much about condemnation from Mubarak’s American friends. But it was purely a symbolic moment. These cheerful, intelligent students wanted to see if they would hear the truth or get palmed off with another bromide about Egypt’s steady march to democracy, its stability - versus the disaster of Iraq - and its supposed economic success. No one doubts that Mubarak’s boys keep a close eye on his country’s students.

But the questions I was asked after class told it all. Why didn’t ‘we’ leave Iraq? Are ‘we’ going to attack Iran? Did ‘we’ really believe in democracy in the Middle East? In fact ‘our’ shadow clearly hung over these young people. Thirty hours later, I flicked on the television in my Valdosta, Georgia, hotel room and there was a bejewelled lady on Fox TV telling American viewers that if ‘we’ left Iraq, the ‘jihadists’ would come after us. ‘They want a Caliphate that will take over the world,’ she shrieked about a report that two children had deliberately been placed in an Iraqi car bomb which then exploded. She ranted on about how Muslim ‘jihadists’ had been doing this ‘since the 1970s in Lebanon’. It was tosh, of course. Children were never locked into car bombs in Beirut - and there weren’t any ‘jihadists’ around in the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. But fear had been sown. Now that the House of Representatives is talking about a US withdrawal by August 2008, fear seems to drip off the trees in America.

Up in the town of Tiger, Georgia, Kathy Barnes is reported to be looking for omens as she fears for the life of her son, Captain Edward Berg of the 4th Brigade, US 3rd Infantry Division, off to Iraq for a second tour of duty, this time in George Bush’s infamous ‘surge’. Last time he was there, Mrs Barnes saw a dead snake and took it as a bad sign. Then she saw two Canadian geese, soaring over the treetops. That was a good sign. ‘A rational mind plays this game in war time,’ as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution eloquently pointed out. ‘A thunderclap becomes a herald, a bird’s song a prophecy.’

Dr Michael Noll’s students at Valdosta are as smart and bright-eyed as Dr El-Baradei’s in Cairo. They packed into the same lecture I had given in Egypt and seemed to share a lot of the same fears about Iraq. But a sullen seminar that same morning was a miserable affair in which a young woman broke down in anger. If ‘we’ left Iraq, she said in a quavering voice, the jihadists, the ‘terrorists’, could come here to America. They would attack us right here. I sighed with frustration. I was listening to her voice but it was also the voice of the woman on Fox TV, the repeated, hopeless fantasy of Bush and Blair: that if we fail in Iraq, ‘they’, the monstrous enemy, will arrive on our shores. Every day in the American papers now, I read the same ‘fear’ transformed into irrationality. Luke Boggs - God, how I’d love that byline - announces in his local paper: ‘I say let the terrorists rot in Guantanamo. And let the Europeans . . . howl. We are a serious nation, engaged in the serious business of trying to kill or capture the bad guys before they can do us more harm.’ He calls Guantanamo’s inmates ‘hardcore jihadists’.

And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll’s seminar isn’t spouting this stuff about ‘jihadists’ travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the ‘terror’ warnings, the supposed ‘jihadist’ threats, the red ‘terror’ alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden’s job for him: he has crushed this young woman’s spirit and courage. But America is not at war. There are no electricity cuts on Valdosta’s warm green campus, with its Spanish-style department blocks and its narrow, beautiful church. There is no food rationing. There are no air-raid shelters or bombs or ‘jihadists’ stalking these God-fearing folk. It is the US military that is at war, engaged in an Iraqi conflict that is doing damage of a far more subtle kind to America’s social fabric.

Off campus, I meet a gentle, sensitive man, a Vietnam veteran with two doctor sons. One is a lieutenant colonel, an army medical officer heading back to Baghdad this week for Bush’s ‘surge’, bravely doing his duty in the face of great danger. The other is a civilian doctor who hates the war. And now the two boys - divided by Iraq - can hardly bring themselves to speak to each other.

The soldier son called this week from his transit camp in Kuwait. ‘I think he is frightened,’ his father told me. A middle-aged lady asked me to sign a copy of my book, which she intends to send to her Marine Corps son in Baghdad. She palpably shakes with concern as she speaks of him. ‘Take the greatest care,’ I find myself writing on the flyleaf to her Marine son. ‘And come safe home.’

The Independent, 24 March 2007

Trying to get into America

This is the story of the internet, a passport and a chocolate mousse. The first told lies, the second was useless and the third never eaten.

It started when I set off for Santa Fe to read from my new book on the Middle East. There was to be an interview with that infamous radio host Amy Goodman, and an awful lot of people booked to listen to Bob of Arabia. US immigration cheerfully ran my little red passport through their computer scanner. It’s full of visas from pariah countries, but this didn’t seem to trouble the lady from Homeland Security. What worried her was something different. ‘It doesn’t scan,’ she said. No, I said nonchalantly. I was sent into a large room full of angry would-be visitors to the United States. A tall man scanned my irises and took my fingerprints. So that’s that, I thought. Not so. Forty-five minutes later, another lady from Homeland Security - I still don’t like that word ‘homeland’, with its dodgy echo of the German Heimat. I only needed thirty-six hours in the States, I said. To give a lecture without a fee. Hundreds of people would be present.

‘I’ll see my supervisor to see if we can get you in,’ she cheerfully announced. Long live America, I breathed. Until she came back and told me her supervisor would not let me travel. The lads and lassies who are supposed to stop Osama bin Laden attacking America were now making sure I couldn’t read from a book in Santa Fe. Much deft technical work allowed me to give the talk and the reading by satellite, right into the Santa Fe lecture theatre. Then came the blow. One of the organisers had told the New Mexican - a newspaper I would now like to buy and close down - that the US authorities had refused me entry because my ‘papers were not in order’. Which was true enough, up to a point. But within hours, the internet - a vile institution which I do not use - was awash with stories that the United States had banned my entry to America because of my critical articles about the Bush administration or because I had long ago interviewed bin Laden or because I was so horrible that no democracy would ever let me stain its front doormat.

This twaddle followed me round the world. In Australia to launch my book, I was asked - on ten radio and television shows and in four lectures - how it felt to be banned from the United States. I must have spent a total of two hours collectively explaining that this was untrue. I had simply travelled on an old passport that was no longer valid for entry to the US. It was useless. In Scotland, a university academic introduced me to his audience by announcing that my articles ‘must at last have got up the nose of the Bush administration’ because I had been banned. The internet bullshit followed me to Dublin and then to Cork and then to Belfast. Nothing, it seemed, could switch off the message.

Robin Harvie, the publicist for Fourth Estate, my publishers, called the passport office in London and secured an interview with an ‘examiner’ - a word that seems to reek of Heimat - to secure me the new computer-coded passport that the Americans now demand. I have, after all, to be in New York for the American launching of my book on 8 November. To the passport office I travelled. They were polite, humorous, cheerful and understood the problem. Ah, but I had two passports, didn’t I? That would require a letter from The Independent explaining that I worked in the Middle East and that Israeli visa stamps were ‘incompatible’ - I liked that bit - with entry to Arab countries, and that two passports were necessary. A call to the foreign desk of the paper and a fax arrived at the passport office in three minutes. All well and good, my examiner said. But the set of passport pictures I had brought didn’t fit. Would I like to take a new set in the photo machine at the end of the corridor? I did. ‘See you again soon,’ the machine jauntily told me as I left.

No good, my ‘examiner’ told me. My spectacles had reflected light on to the lower half of my eyes. Why not take the pictures without your glasses on, he suggested. I knew what this would mean. In future, every Arab visa officer would now demand that I take my glasses off when I approached their desks. And I no longer had the right £3.50 in change for the machine. So I ran round to Victoria Station, barged into Marks and Spencer and asked them to break a £10 note for me. No luck. I would have to buy something to get the change. I went round the shelves like an animal to find the smallest and cheapest item, seized a chocolate mousse and headed back to the cash desk.

I pounded back to the photo machine at the passport office, chucked the chocolate mousse at Harvie (he doesn’t eat chocolate), shoved another £3.50 into the slot, tore off my glasses and stared sightlessly at the screen. ‘See you again soon,’ the voice announced again, just a little bit nastier in tone. Back to the examiner - a woman this time - who promised me a new passport one hour before I had to set off for Oxford and then to Heathrow for the European part of my book launch. It was around midday that The Independent phoned me. ‘The passport office need new pictures again.’

Now for a word I don’t usually use on the comment page. Aaaaaagh! Back to the passport office. The earlier pictures were too blurry, something my examiner had failed to spot when she accepted them. Of course they were too blurry. Because without my spectacles I couldn’t see the bloody screen. And with my spectacles, of course, the glass would reflect on my eyes again. I grabbed Harvie. ‘Put your head in the bloody doorway and tell me what my image looks like on the screen before I throw the money in,’ I pleaded. Four more flashes. ‘See you again soon,’ the machine snarled at me. I kicked it.

Back to the examiner. Yes, all’s well. But the passport would not now be ready for another four hours. And I had to be in Oxford for a lecture in three hours. I told Harvie he could DHL the new passport to me in Ireland. ‘You’re not allowed by law to do that,’ another examiner snapped. Harvie was muttering under his breath, the way an anarchist does when plotting crimes. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick it up first thing in the morning and try to reach you before you leave for Heathrow.’ And at 8 a.m., there he was in his bicycle clips, holding out a brand-new passport. I raced for the airport. I snapped open the cover of the passport and looked at those glorious imperial words on page one. ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance . . .’ I could just see the Homeland Security boys cringing at this admonition from our foreign secretary. That will sail me into the United States on 8 November. Or will it?⁴⁰

The Independent, 22 October 2005