The Imperial Messenger by Belen Fernandez

Author:Belen Fernandez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2011-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Someone who openly adopts a state founded on a policy of ethnic cleansing as a personal “badge of pride” does not, of course, qualify as an unbiased commentator on the Middle East. Consider Friedman’s celebrated treatment of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which he professes to initially take “seriously as a blot on Israel and the Jewish people,” and which causes him to “boil … with anger—anger which I worked out by reporting with all the skill I could muster on exactly what happened in those camps.”35 Laboring “day and night” on a four-page spread for the New York Times, Friedman acknowledges being driven by “conflicting impulses” to both “nail [Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and [Ariel] Sharon … in the hope that this would help get rid of them” and to “prove Begin and Sharon innocent.”36 Surmises the impending Pulitzer recipient: “Although an ‘objective’ journalist is not supposed to have such emotions, the truth is they made me a better reporter.”37

Actually, the truth is that Friedman’s emotions enable him to cast himself, and not the two thousand slaughtered Palestinians, as the real victim of Sabra and Shatila, an arrangement spelled out quite clearly in his recounting of his exclusive interview with Israeli commander in Lebanon, Major General Amir Drori:

I must admit I was not professionally detached in this interview. I banged the table with my fist and shouted at Drori, “How could you do this? How could you not see [what was happening in the camps]? How could you not know?” But what I was really saying, in a very selfish way, was “How could you do this to me, you bastards? I always thought you were different. I always thought we were different.”38

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