There’s no denying that the summer’s most talked about political film, Fahrenheit 9/11, is a devastating critique of both the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq. It is both amusing – peppered with ‘Bush-isms’ and laced with entertainingly told anecdotes about the US intelligence agencies using their new-found powers to infiltrate such potential terrorist threats as a bunch of biscuit-munching, sweater-wearing peace activists in Fresno, California – and disturbing. Few of us will have been aware, for instance, that US troops were hooked up to rock music in their tanks as they pounded away at Iraqi cities.
However, the film also raises important questions about Moore’s style of film-making and his role as a polemicist. There is, to say the least, something a little disingenuous about the manner in which the film opens with clips of Al Gore campaigning in the closing days of the 2000 election while Moore intones about wishing the past four years of the Bush presidency had been a bad dream. Moore may – like the rest of us – have wished that to be so. However, he could have told viewers (as, admittedly, his books do) that in 2000 he was actually busily campaigning for Ralph Nader, the egotist who helped Gore lose to Bush and who threatens once again to split the left vote this year.
Moore’s treatment of Iraq raises similar issues. Yes, there’s a case to be made that Bush used 9/11 to manoeuvre America into an unrelated war in Iraq and Moore brings home, perhaps a little too graphically, the human cost to both Iraqis and the American troops and their families. But Moore could make that case without shading some of the facts about the conflict and the nature of Saddam’s regime. Is it really right, for instance, for Moore to illustrate pre-war Iraq with pictures of carefree children playing at a fairground? And while it may well be true that Iraq ‘never threatened’ America or killed any of its citizens, we need to remember that, aside from human rights abuses at home, Saddam invaded two of his neighbours in the space of ten years, while lobbing scuds at both Saudi Arabia and Israel.
And, yes, it is amusing to illustrate America’s ‘coalition of the willing’ with a list of some of the more minor countries – Palau, Costa Rica and Romania – that backed the war, but where was the mention of the others – Britain, Spain, Italy, Japan, for instance – whose power cannot so easily be ridiculed?
My enemy’s enemy
It’s not often that the words of that great scourge of New Labour, Nick Cohen, grace the pages of Progress. But, for the second issue running, ‘On the radar’ finds itself in agreement with him. In a brilliant piece of analysis, Cohen picked apart the contradictions in the left’s attitude towards the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘Traditional leftwingers,’ wrote Cohen, ‘would have regarded Saddam’s totalitarianism and the Taliban’s terror regime as their worst nightmares. They would have shown solidarity with its victims. Even if they opposed wars to end dictatorships as a greater evil, they would have supported their comrades once the war was over.’ Cohen went on: ‘Iraqi democrats and socialists can barely get a hearing in the liberal West. What progress there is towards democracy is regarded with widespread indifference or, on occasion, a morally disgraceful desire for Saddamist and Al Qaeda “insurgents” to succeed.’
What a shame that Cohen’s words went unheeded by the Guardian, which, on the very same day they were published, printed an op-ed piece lauding the ‘real war of liberation’ being fought by the ‘resistance’ in Iraq.
Funny friends. Part II
Last issue, we noted with interest the somewhat unholy alliance between the far-left Respect coalition and the fundamentalist Muslim Association of Britain. Unfortunately, our suggestion that, on balance, the left should probably steer clear of anti-semites and homophobes appears to have fallen on deaf ears – or at least those of London Mayor Ken Livingstone. As was widely reported in July, the Mayor decided to share a platform with Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (an organisation banned in several Arab countries for its extremism).
Unsurprisingly, al-Qaradawi is not exactly at the cutting edge of progressive politics. BBC Monitoring reports him as saying last year: ‘Oh God, destroy the usurper Jews, the vile crusaders and infidels.’ He has defended suicide bombers – ‘the weapons of the weak’ – and wife beating, and says the only question about homosexuality – ‘a sexual perversion’ – is the method by which gays should be murdered.
It ill behoves us to offer Ken advice on whom he should or should not welcome to the Greater London authority’s offices.
But perhaps he might like to think twice before he next visits a synagogue or leads the gay pride parade. Sometimes, you can’t be friends with everyone.
End of the peer show
Congratulations to Ben Summerskill, executive director of Stonewall, for a timely piece in the Guardian on the hypocrisy of many of the House of Lords’ ‘family values’ campaigners. Take, for instance, the redoubtable Baroness O’Cathain, who led the fight against the repeal of section 28. While the Baroness was a director of Thistle, wrote Summerskill, the hotel group succeeded in introducing pornographic films into almost all of its bedrooms. Days after Summerskill’s piece appeared, however, the families crowd were at it again, attempting to wreck the government’s civil partnership bill in the Lords. Amongst those voting against the government were Lord Parkinson (who quit Margaret Thatcher’s government after getting his secretary pregnant); Earl Jellicoe (who resigned from Ted Heath’s government after admitting his use of prostitutes); and Lord Stevenson of Ludgate, former chair of Express newspapers – publishers of that great custodian of family values, the Daily Star. They were all supporting an amendment proposed by – you guessed it – Baroness O’Cathain.
Minority report
Finally, last time ‘On the radar’ took issue with Tessa Jowell’s claim that most people recognise that the print media – as opposed to broadcasters – offer opinion, not facts. We hope that over the summer the culture secretary might have found time to read a poll of newspaper readers carried out by the Commission for Racial Equality. It found that readers of the ‘red top’ Sun, Mirror and Star and the middle-market Mail and Express generally had a lower opinion of minorities than readers of the Telegraph, Guardian, Times and Independent. In the case of asylum seekers, it was particularly marked: 48 percent of ‘red top’ readers and 41 percent of middle-market papers held a low opinion of them, as against only 26 percent of quality newspaper readers. Moreover, the Guardian’s media analyst, Roy Greenslade, notes that the figures for the Sun, Mail and Express would no doubt have been far worse if Mirror readers had been polled separately and not lumped in with these asylum-hating, rightwing scandal sheets.