A celebration of the life and legacy of John Pilger, whose journalism and films took on power, uncovered hidden agendas and gave voice to the voiceless across the world
John Pilger describes the growing boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. Based on the anti-apartheid campaign that helped bring down the racist regime in South Africa, BDS is becoming a catch-cry for freedom in countries whose governments continue to ignore the Palestinians’ struggle against another form of apartheid and which Nelson Mandela has described as “the greatest moral issue of our time”.
John Pilger reminds us of the struggle by an extraordinary few in Israel against the repression and lawlessness of the occupation of Palestine. They are the inspiration to break the loud silence in the Jewish diaspora.
If you got your news only from the television, you would have no idea of the roots of the Middle East conflict, or that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation.
Ethnic cleansing attended the birth of Israel but, more than 50 years later, the country is still in denial about its bloody past. Those who speak out risk their jobs.
Tony Blair’s heroic peacemaking is not as it seems. Take the Middle East. When Blair welcomed Yasser Arafat to Downing Street following 11 September, it was widely reported that Britain was backing justice for the Palestinians.
Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Cornell, once wrote that western foreign policy was formulated “through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence”.
No front pages in the west mourn victims of the enduring bloodbath in occupied Palestine, the equivalent of the Madrid horror week after week, month after month.
The Palestinians are no longer alone; Israel, despite the craven intimidation of some of its supporters, has ceased to be immune from truthful media criticism.
Last October, in the early hours of the morning, a young expectant mother called Fatima Abed-Rabo awoke with intense labour pains; and she and her husband Nasser set out in a friend’s car for the hospital in Bethlehem, in Israeli occupied Palestine.
The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a “great mission to rid the world of evil”, to borrow from President Bush.
