'MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate mediaMEDIA ALERT: EXTRA ZERO
An Exchange With The Independent’s John Rentoul
In the wake of the July 7, 2005 London bombings, the Independent’s John Rentoul commented:
“A Muslim friend of mine in the East End of London says that the sense of victimisation and injustice goes so deep among his fellow religionists that he sometimes despairs. 'This all goes back to the burning of The Satanic Verses,' he says. It was in 1988 that we should have realised that we were up against a culture - he doesn't like the term 'Muslim community' - that tended to irrationalism and self-pity. Salman Rushdie did not create that culture, but he provided a focus for it and fed its sense of grievance.
“The Iraq issue serves much the same purpose today.” (Rentoul, 'Islam, blood and grievance,' The Independent, July 24, 2005)
According to Rentoul, then, the invasion of Iraq and the mass slaughter that followed was feeding irrational self-pity in Muslims. He added:
“The worst succour that the anti-war left in Britain can give to the terrorists, however, is to entertain the idea that there is a moral equivalence between the deliberate killing of civilians and the casualties of military action in Iraq. Of course, people who think the war was unjustified feel passionately about civilian deaths. But let us get two things straight. First, even Iraq Body Count, an anti-war campaign, puts the total attributable to coalition forces at under 10,000, rather than the figure with an extra zero that is the common misconception of anti-war propaganda. And second, the purpose of the invasion of Iraq, whatever you think of George Bush's motives, was not to kill civilians.”
Noam Chomsky commented on the recurring theme of “moral equivalence” in a rare BBC interview:
"The term moral equivalence is an interesting one. It was invented, I think, by Jeane Kirkpatrick [former US ambassador to the United Nations] as a method of trying to prevent criticism of foreign policy and state decisions. It is a meaningless notion, there is no moral equivalence whatsoever." (BBC Newsnight interview with Chomsky, May 21, 2004; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/3732345.stm)
Rentoul’s “extra zero that is the common misconception of anti-war propaganda” had of course been provided by the 2004 Lancet study of mortality in Iraq, which estimated that 100,000 more Iraqis had died since the March 2003 invasion than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. We were to believe that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School, Columbia University, Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriya University, and The Lancet (and its peer-reviewers) - the organisations behind the 2004 study - were all anti-war propagandists.
It is easy to understand why Rentoul would be so perturbed, now, by the suggestion that an additional “extra zero” should be added to the 100,000 figure - because it is now likely that one million Iraqis have died as a result of the war.'
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