We are all too familiar with the-government-say-so type of journalism where what the leaders sitting atop the Barisan pile say is regurgitated as fact in the newspapers. Thus event A is narrated as what the Yang Amat Berhormat states had happened, the media mantra being "the xx Minister Datuk yy said today " We in Cronesia are in no way expected to question the veracity of the official filtered version as other than gospel truth.

Another facet of Cronesian journalism is the 'you shut up or prepare to face the consequences' message relayed to the offending parties on behalf of the Yang Amat Berhormats. We have recently on the front page of the Utusan Malaysia, Deputy Premier Najib Razak 'warning' those with the temerity to question the university admission system, and Umno Youth chieftain Hishammuddin Hussein similarly 'warning' opposition leader Lim Kit Siang not to 'play with fire' in questioning Dr Mahathir Mohamad's declaration of an Islamic state.

To a lesser degree with regard to its menacing undertone, any stance counter to prevalent and government-endorsed viewpoints can be promptly labelled 'misleading and dangerous'. By calling for more balanced reports, by less than enthusiastically espousing the Palestinian cause as well as by judging that the Cronesian media is promoting bigotry, I found my 'liberal intellectual' stand labelled as 'misleading and dangerous' by Fauwaz Abdul Aziz (Palestine conflict: The tides have changed).

Commenting on 'The blindfolded Palestinian conflict', which I jointly wrote with AB Sulaiman, Fauwaz disputes that the Malay-Muslims' righteous and moral outrage against the Jews is impelled in part as we suggested by their emotional sympathy and sense of brotherhood with their co-religionists, an attitude fanned by a rabid local media.

I naturally acknowledge that many, including Christians in the West, non-Muslims of this country as well as parts of the Israeli population itself support the Palestinian cause on principled grounds. Nor do I gainsay the essence of Fauwaz's exposition of Palestinian grievances in the face of increasing Israeli intransigence.

To clear the air clouded by Fauwaz's imputations on my co-author (it's 'AB Sulaiman', not 'Suleiman', Fauwaz), I can vouchsafe that any impartial reading would show our article in April had not condoned the illegal Israeli presence in Palestinian territories but instead referred to the 'oppressive occupation' as well as 'the policies of aggression of Ariel Sharon's hardline Likud government'.

To reiterate, our argument was on the absence of fair reporting of both sides of the story in this matter as well as others by Cronesian media.

'Penang Malays like Palestinians'

But first, let's look at one area of dissension between my views and Fauwaz's. He claims there is no justification for saying 'there are too many emotional elements (like religious prejudice and nationalism) in the stew clamouring for recognition and legitimacy to one version of truth'.

Here I'd like to bring his attention to a Mingguan Malaysia (Utusan on Sunday) focus feature on Sept 1, 2002 headlined Nasib Melayu bila jadi minoriti Orang Melayu Pulau Pinang sudah macam bangsa Palestin (Fate of the Malays when in a minority Penang Malays have become like the Palestinian race).

Now I do wonder if the marginally majority non-Muslim Chinese in our northern state do not see any emotional tinge invested in such a simile 'Penang Malays like Palestinians'?

Mind you, Mingguan which lamented the fate of Penang Malays is Cronesia's bestselling newspaper with a readership of over 1,400,000. It's very mainstream, with a very extensive reach and its sort of demagoguery is far more 'misleading and dangerous', I should think, than my comparatively mild transgression of not holding the Palestinian truth as the one and sole truth.

But it is not only the populist Malay mass media that has embraced this fashionable cause so wholeheartedly, as proved when it organised the highly successful fundraising for Palestinian refugees in the past. There is a Malay proverb that goes: Kera di hutan disusukan, anak di rumah dibiarkan which means 'some people will extend generous aid to foreigners but neglect those in their own backyard'. Why won't the mainstream media like Utusan and Berita Harian just as wholeheartedly take up the cudgels for poor Indian urban squatters and destitute estate workers, or channel some donations to the widows and orphans of Indian detainees who die while in police custody, for instance.

I found this article posted on the Puteri Umno website Nasib Melayu boleh menjadi seperti Palestin (Malays could suffer the fate of Palestinians). Once again, should I not read into this metaphor a close emotional identification of the Umno princesses with their beleaguered Muslim brethren? Why this constant use of Palestinians as a referent for the less privileged segments of the Malay community, I ask?

I fervently hope that on the other side of the coin, no group in Cronesia is viewed in the light of oppressors of the vulnerable-as-Palestinians Malays.

Picking and choosing statistics

A minor clarification I'd like to make at this juncture is that while malaysiakini titled our work 'The blindfolded Palestinian conflict', my suggested heading had been 'Blindfolding reason to the Palestinian conflict'. The slightly different nuance conveyed by my emphasis on the word "reason" would have better suited the overall tone of our discourse.

For it is 'reason' that is the prerequisite for sifting the facts at hand, and as to err is only human, we need to recognise that no one is cognisant of all the facts all the time. That's why any 'liberal intellectual' would encourage a wider reading from a wider variety of sources, and not just Cronesian ones, which to his credit, Fauwaz has done as seen from his painstakingly researched article to rebut ours which had appeared some 40 days earlier.

One of the authors Fauwaz seems to have read is French Muslim convert Roger Garaudy who was tried in Paris for Holocaust heresy. Garaudy was found guilty by the court in 1998 and fined 240,000 francs (US$40,000) under the loi Gayssot law.

That particular piece of legislation is most unfortunate in that it cedes the moral high ground to the Holocaust revisionists. A law barring academic rigour on the epic tragedy runs contrary to my own earlier assertion that every contested 'truth' should be open to scrutiny. However, my point here is that with his spirit of inquiry, Fauwaz has gleaned a range of information to impart to his readers (very commendable), even if his apparent reading material (like Holocaust-denier Garaudy) can only to serve to entrench his already held beliefs.

Disparate sources may yield information that differ slightly or by much. I'll take as an example a statistic presented by Fauwaz pertaining to the Al-Aqsa Intifada death toll: 'It's the 3,000 Palestinian/400 Israeli deaths within the last three years ' he quotes, giving a ratio of something over 1/10 Jewish casualties to Palestinian, that has turned world public opinion against the Jews.

The 3,000 figure is accurate. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society puts the number at 3,007 deaths between Sept 9, 2000 and June 4, 2004. It is with the Israeli death toll that Fauwaz has exercised a personal subjectivity in choosing (from the variable figures possibly at his disposal) the lower ratio of 1/10 compared to the generally accepted 1/3 cited by more objective sources.

One statistic I came across gave the number of Israeli civilian and security forces killed to be 963 persons between Sept 29, 2000 and May 16, 2004. The preferred method of dispatching Jewish civilians is through suicide bombing which claimed 402 lives, a figure corresponding to the 400 deaths cited by Fauwaz above. What he omitted to account for was the civilian victims of shooting numbering 93, vehicle ambush 67 and drive-by shooting 28. Seventeen Israeli civilians died at the hands of a lynch mob.

Almost 40 percent of the Israeli non-combatants killed by Palestinians were women and girls.

Last month, Palestinian gunmen ambushed the car of 34-year-old Tali Hatuel. The Jewish settler, eight- months-pregnant with what would have been her first son, and her four daughters aged 11, 9, 7 and 2, were shot at close range. The girls were apparently executed while hugging one another.

The Voice of Palestine, official mouthpiece of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, in its initial report said only that 'five settlers' had been killed, but failed to identify the victims as a heavily pregnant woman and four young girls.

In a later broadcast, the radio called the woman and her daughters 'terrorists', which is the view it takes of Jewish settlers. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera referred to the killing as a 'resistance strike'. I could not locate the report at all when I searched Utusan Malaysia's online archives.

As we can see, there are different slants to portraying the same incident depending on who the news disseminators are. When the Cronesian media is batting so vociferously for the Palestinian side, we all need to stop and ask ourselves what it has witheld or preferred not to highlight.

The discredited poll

It is not only the partisan mainstream media who are guilty of partial disclosure. Even writers in the alternative media commit a similar sin of omission, as Fauwaz did when he evoked last November's EU poll of 7,500 Europeans which named Israel the biggest threat to world peace.

What Fauwaz failed to mention was that the European Commission had apologised almost immediately to Israel for the leaked poll, and that the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, holder of the rotating EU presidency, expressed his "surprise" and "indignation" how the poll question had been framed in such a misleading manner.

Not only that, Fauwaz also failed to reveal that, significantly, Palestine was not listed among the choice of 14 putative threatening countries. Supposing it had been, might the 7,500 polled have picked 'Palestine' as the second biggest threat to world peace? By leaving out altogether the opposing side to the conflict equation, the poll can be nothing short of flawed.

What 'Blindfolding reason to the Palestinian conflict' had asked was for the public to be more discerning by looking behind the screaming pictures and reading between the lines when accessing self-censored Cronesian media reports which amplify the official stance.

Imputing that the authors of 'Blindfolding reason' don't find local or Muslim opinions credible or rational, Fauwaz challenges: "Let's listen to what the Europeans have to say shall we?"

Well, a public opinion poll can tell us as much about who commissioned the poll and those being polled as the question being posited. Looking at history, have not the Europeans been the chiefest persecutors of the Jews, culminating in the tragic Holocaust? Now if the poll had been conducted among Canadians, Americans and Mexicans, would the outcome have been the same? Or imagine for a moment that it is the East Asians (South Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese) surveyed. In that event, might North Korea have emerged as the biggest threat to world peace instead?

I repeat: Perception of 'truth' is relative.

Another thing which Fauwaz didn't tell readers is that the EU poll came against a backdrop of increasing anti-semitic attacks in Europe over the past year. It is pertinent to understand that no event resides in a tabula rasa (clean slate). Each event lies within a context of what happened earlier, what is happening around it currently, and its implications on a future turn of events.

Yet when Cronesian media chronicles Israeli atrocities so one-dimensionally, it does not provide readers a context or a broad overview. The demolition (granted it's an excessively harsh reprisal) of a house belonging to the family of a suspected terrorist could have been in response to a suicide bombing with scores of civilian casualties. But of this we are not reminded, although admittedly each time the Israelis hit back harder than they got.

For comparison, didn't the British employ a similar tactic when fighting the communists in Malaya? They had uprooted and herded Chinese communist sympathisers into patrolled New Villages that were put under curfew. This was to choke the supply line to insurgents hiding in the jungle. So weren't the villagers 'punished' too even though they were not directly involved in the fighting? But do we apply this broader perspective to the Israelis? Obviously not.

In fact I can illustrate this short shrift in providing a context by filling in the gaps where Fauwaz talked about the Arab-Israeli wars.

Avenging Arab humiliation

The loss of Palestine is a potent symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the hand of the Western powers and Zionists. Fauwaz appears to have felt the sting when his high school classmates gloated over the defeat of the Arab armies to Israel between the years 1948 and 1982.

Given our self-effacing culture at home, such disdainful boasts, e.g. "Israel's the best!" or "We kicked your ***!" attributed by Fauwaz to his Jewish classmates are an anathema to the gentle-natured Malay-Muslim audience, and will only reinforce its conviction that Israeli Jews are arrogant upstarts deserving of their hostility.

However, among the background details which Fauwaz failed to mention are that the 1948 war (War of Independence to the Jews, al Nakba or The Catastrophe to the Arabs) had been fought to "drive the Jews into the sea" as the Arabs would not recognise the legitimacy of Israel.

The Six-Day War of 1967 came in the wake of Arab leaders' calls for the total destruction of Israel and the 1973 Yom Kippur war was so-called because Egypt and Syria launched their attack on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar Yom Kippur (more in end note).

Had the Arabs not started some of the wars, and lost them resulting in the "stretching (of) the boundaries of Israel" which Fauwaz takes such strong exception to, Israel would control a much smaller land area today.

In other instances, Israel is the unprovoked target. In the first Gulf War of 1990, Iraq which had invaded Kuwait started also to launch Scud missiles on Israeli cities but without eliciting any retaliation. During this war, some Palestinians openly celebrated the Iraqi attacks. In view of this, should anyone be shocked that there is no love lost between some grudge-holding Israelis and Palestinians in the aftermath?


Part 2 tomorrow

Z SUNDAY is a Joe Public who reads the local print media for its unfunny and unintentional imitation of black and gallows humour. The truth may be out there but he doesn't expect to extract it from the Malaysia Boleh chaff in local newspapers.