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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Why Blair Prefers to Shoot the Messenger
Chances are the reader has never heard of Andrew Walker. Well, Walker writes what I consider one of the most concise, readable and educative columns in the country’s newspapers. As a reporter and journalism teacher it is not surprising that his column frequently dwells on the quality of Nigerian journalism; “I am”, he said in introducing himself in his last column in the Sunday Trust of June 17 “a British journalist living and working in Abuja, where I sub-edit newspapers, and try to get young Nigerian reporters to improve their writing and newsgathering skills.” Last Sunday’s column was of course not his first as his self-introduction might suggest. I presume he had to introduce himself to establish his bona fides for discussing the subject of his article, which was the condemnation of the British mass media by Mr. Tony Blair, the outgoing British Prime Minister. For Blair the British media is simply more commentative than factual.
“I read with interest,” Walker said in the opening paragraph of an open letter to Blair, “your argument on the state of the media in Britain, and the coverage it generated, and I believe you would be satisfied with the way things work in Nigeria.”
Blair’s grouse against the British media was that they spent at least as much time interpreting news as they did in reporting it. Blair would rather journalists simply acted as conduit pipes. In which case, said Walker, Blair would find the Nigerian media very much to his taste. “In news pages of papers, or the hourly broadcast bulletins, reporters,” said Walker,
Clearly Blair’s philosophy of the mass media has no role in it of journalism as a watchdog. Rather he would prefer that journalists acted as the lapdogs of the Establishment, or presumably better still, as its attack dogs against the enemy. Blair’s most recent attack against the mass media is only one in his long series of media bashing since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq went awry.
Speaking to an invited audience of military offers and academics in January on board a British worship, Blair, for the umpteenth time, tried to blame the British anti-war mood on the mass media. But, as The Independent of London argued in its editorial comment of January 13 on Blair’s accusation, nothing could be more “mendacious.” As the newspaper pointed out in the editorial aptly titled “A mendacious attack by Mr. Blair to cover up his fatal misjudgment,” the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, first under the guise of dispossessing the country of its alleged weapons of mass destruction (wmd), and then under the guise of exporting democracy to the Middle East at gun-point - itself a contradiction in terms – when no wmd could be found in Iraq, was a highly unpopular war right from start. Indeed it could be argued that if the British media was guilty of anything it was its failure to adequately report the extent of the war’s unpopularity.
One of Blair’s “mendacious” claims was that
The Independent interpreted this, in my view correctly, as a repeat of the Anglo-American spin linking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to the spread of “Islamic terror” at a time when there was never any evidence of such a linkage.
In his reflection on the lessons of his decade as British leader in The Economist of June 2, Blair repeated the same spin about the “evil ideology” of so-called Islamic terror. As usual he completely rejected any responsibility for the consequences of his foreign policy – and of course that of his comrade-in-arms, President George Bush – in radicalizing of Muslims in and outside Britain.
“The new terrorism” Blair said in his essay,
The logical question to ask here – a question that Blair conveniently dodges - is whether or not the Muslim sense of victim hood and grievance is justified. Most rational and reasonable people would think it is. When the world’s only superpower and its British poodle invades your region under false pretences of searching for wmd and of bringing democracy to you but instead proceeds to confirm your worst fears that its all about your oil-wealth, you will be more than justified to feel a sense of victim hood and grievance. (You will also feel your intelligence insulted by Blair’s crude attempt to divide Muslims into good and bad).
And this, the London Independent on Sunday (January 7) revealed, was exactly what the Anglo-Americans have done in Iraq. The newspaper revealed how the Anglo-Americans had finalized a plan to give the American and British oil companies up to 75% of the profits of Iraqi oil, the third largest in reserves, for the next 30 years. And while they expropriated the region’s wealth, they have “rendered” its people to ghost prisons in Europe and elsewhere for torture, and ferreted even more to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba which is a legal no-mans land. Then when all else seems to have failed, they have brought even more troops into Iraq to keep its people under the boot. Yet for Blair, there is absolutely no linkage between these terrible policies and the outrage even ordinary Muslims, who have no sympathy for the methods of “Islamic terrorists”, feel.
And yet this same Blair was the one who popularized his deputy, Gordon Brown’s famous phrase about being tough on the source of crime as one should be with crime itsrlf. Surely it follows that the best, if not the only, way to eradicate “global terrorism” is to re-examine and change those policies that create and feed it, in the first place.
But as is typical of the generality of politicians the world over, Blair would rather shoot the messenger than examine the merit or otherwise of the message.
Needless to say, our own ex-president, General Olusegun Obasanjo has been Blair’s fellow traveler; only the other day he chose to blame the Nigerian media rather than himself for his portrait as a president who sought to perpetuate himself in power. And to drive home his hatred for the media, he refused to sign the Freedom of Information Bill into law, saying among other things, that it was never brought to him, contrary to the claim by his own legislative liaison, Mrs. Florence Ita-Giwa, that she had done so.
Back to Blair, because he would rather shoot the messenger and blame the victim, he decided in his final days in office to cap his hatred for Muslims and Islam by rewarding Salman Rushdie, whose specialty is to insult Muslims and their religion, with a knighthood. Of course the excuse would be that Rushdie is being rewarded for his contribution to world literature. But everyone knows he was an obscure author until he decided to insult and ridicule Islam in his infamous novel, The Satanic Verses. Literary wise little had been heard of him since then.
To see how Rushdie’s knighthood is a clear case of provocation, I invite the reader to try and imagine how the Western Establishment would react if, say Iran, was to reward a well-established anti-Semitic writer with a national honour. You would not have to imagine hard guessing the huge uproar the western media and its politicians would have gone up in.
Well, Blair and his ilk can go on to shoot the messenger and blame the victim for their own policies, but of one thing they can be sure: no policy based on exploitation, injustice and spin can ever succeed in winning the hearts and minds of any people anywhere in the world. |