Henk Hofland. Geert Mak. Hubert Smeets en Charlie Hebdo 10

NRC-redacteur Raymond van den Boogaard: 'Charlie Bullshit? Ik weet van niets.'

Na de aanslag op Charlie Hebdo verklaarde de journalist Geert Mak met een adembenemende stelligheid:

De kracht van onze westerse samenleving is onze democratie, onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid tegenover andere culturen. Maar dat is tegelijk onze kwetsbaarheid, blijkt nu ook weer.

http://www.tijd.be/detail.art?a=9587187&n=3140&ckc=1 

Dit is de mainstream-reflex, die van een woordvoerder van de gevestigde orde verwacht wordt. Wij goed, zij slecht. Punt uit. Maar voor een ontwikkeld mens blijft de vraag evenwel: hoe goed zijn 'wij' dan? Weinig westerlingen kunnen dit beter beantwoorden dan de vooraanstaande Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Jeremy Scahill, auteur van Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield (2013), een New York Times bestseller:

In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies…

As US leaders draw the country deeper into conflicts across the globe, setting the world stage for enormous destabilization and blowback, Americans are not only at greater risk—we are changing as a nation. Scahill unmasks the shadow warriors who prosecute these secret wars and puts a human face on the casualties of unaccountable violence that is now official policy: victims of night raids, secret prisons, cruise missile attacks and drone strikes, and whole classes of people branded as “suspected militants.” Through his brave reporting, Scahill exposes the true nature of the dirty wars the United States government struggles to keep hidden.

De filmversie werd genomineerd  voor een Oscar als beste documentaire van 2013. Kortom, Mak's 'wij' wordt door een journalist van wereldnaam in een alles behalve positieve context geplaatst. Maar die context verzwijgt Mak angstvallig omdat het eenvoudigweg niet past in het mainstream-borstgeroffel over 'onze' eigen voortreffelijkheid, 'onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid tegenover andere culturen.' 

In de polder is de kwaliteit van de zelfbenoemde 'politiek-literaire elite' net zo laag als het land zelf,  dus is er geen ruimte voor serieuze zelfreflectie en krijgt men ogenblikkelijk de verbale buikloop van de officiële opiniemakers opgedist. En bij gebrek aan frictie, aan tegenspraak, aan een dissidente kijk op de officieel gesanctioneerde versie van de werkelijkheid, blijft de status quo gehandhaafd. Het is absoluut ondenkbaar dat een alom gerespecteerde intellectueel als Jeremy Scahill, of wie dan ook van gelijk kaliber, in de Nederlandse mainstream uitgebreid de kans zal krijgen om over de Charlie Hebdo-demonstratie in Parijs te verklaren:

this is sort of a circus of hypocrisy when it comes to all of those world leaders who were marching at the front of it. I mean, every single one of those heads of state or representatives of governments there have waged their own wars against journalists. You know, David Cameron ordered The Guardian to smash with a hammer the hard drives that stored the files of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Blasphemy is considered a crime in Ireland. You had multiple African and Arab leaders whose own countries right now have scores of journalists in prison. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel has targeted for killing numerous journalists who have reported on the Palestinian side, have kidnapped, abducted, jailed journalists…

I think that we should remember—and I was saying this on Twitter over the weekend—that Yemen should have sent the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye as their representative. He, of course, was in prison for years on the direct orders of President Obama for having reported on secret U.S. strikes in Yemen that killed scores of civilians. Or Sudan should have sent Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was held for six years without charge in Guantánamo and repeatedly interrogated by U.S. operatives who were intent on proving that Al Jazeera had some sort of a link to al-Qaeda. So, you know, while there is much to take heart in, in terms of this huge outpouring of support for freedom of the press, hypocrisy was on full display in the streets of Paris when it came to the world leaders.

AMY GOODMAN: Reporters Without Borders issued a statement saying it, quote, 'condemns [the] presence of "predators' in [the] Paris march," and, quote, 'is appalled by the presence of leaders from countries where journalists and bloggers are systematically persecuted such as Egypt... Russia... Turkey... and United Arab Emirates.' A Gabonese journalist covering the march expressed similar reservations about his president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, participating in the event.

GABONESE JOURNALIST: [translated] 'He banned demonstrations in his own country and is coming to a demonstration in France. That’s intolerable for us. It’s a complete hypocrisy. We’re here not only to show our outrage for what happened to Charlie Hebdo, but also to show our outrage over the fact that dictators like Ali Bongo Ondimba are present here in Paris, in a country that supports human rights, at an assembly that is in fact dedicated to freedom of expression, freedom of the press.'

AMY GOODMAN: That, a Gabonese journalist covering the march, expressing reservations about his president participating in the march, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, and then you have—you know, you have General Sisi, the dictator of Egypt, who apparently is showing his solidarity for press freedom by continuing to preside over the imprisonment of multiple Al Jazeera journalists whose only crime was doing actual journalism and scores of other Egyptian journalists that never get mentioned in the news media.

Another thing that I think is really absent from a lot of the coverage of the aftermath of this horrific massacre is that France also is a surveillance state. And France has a very Islamophobic position toward their immigrant community, but also toward second- and third-generation Arabs or people from other Muslim countries who have settled inside of France. And there’s going to be an intense—intensification of an already overreaching surveillance system inside of France.

You know, some months ago I was on the show talking about the U.S. watchlisting system, and one of the things that we heard when we were doing this report on how you end up on the no-fly list or on the watchlist was that people within the U.S. counterterrorism community, who are actually trying to prevent acts of terrorism from happening, say that they’re flooded in information and that if everyone is on the watchlist, effectively no one is on the watchlist when it comes to actually looking at who might be engaged in these kinds of terror plots.

A similar phenomenon is happening in Paris, France. You know, people talk about an intelligence failure, an intelligence breakdown. When you are putting people on these lists for monitoring or surveillance based on flimsy or circumstantial evidence, what that means is that you overload your own bureaucracy. So, on the one hand, you have a surveillance state that unfairly targets Muslims and immigrants, in both the United States and in France, and on the other hand, you have a system that is intended to stop acts of terrorism or to monitor people that are plotting acts of terrorism that has become its own hindrance, its own biggest obstacle to actually figuring out the reality of these plots.

And let’s remember, while horrifying and reprehensible, these incidents represent a relatively minor threat to Western society. You know, in terms of the actual threats facing our society, this doesn’t even rank in the top five. And so, you know, to have this kind of a reaction is not only a waste of a tremendous amount of money, but it is going to encourage, I think, future acts of terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, it is a horrific moment where people actually see it before them.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes, right. But, you know, it’s, again, the — let’s remember that the United States bombed Al Jazeera in Afghanistan very early on after 9/11, then bombed the Sheraton Hotel in Basra, Iraq, where Al Jazeera journalists were the only journalists. Then they killed one of the most famous Al Jazeera correspondents in Baghdad in April of 2003, when Victoria Clarke, George Bush’s Pentagon spokesperson at the time, basically said if you’re an unembedded journalist, you’re with the terrorists, and if you die, it’s not our fault. They shelled the Palestine Hotel, killing a Reuters cameraman and the Spanish cameraman José Couso. So, yes, we should be condemning any and all attacks, especially when they’re killing journalists, no matter who the perpetrators are, but let’s not act as though the West’s hands are clean and that any one of those world leaders marching yesterday, that their hands are clean on these matters.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Jeremy Scahill, founder of The Intercept. When we come back, we’re going to talk about the article that he’s written, "Al Qaeda Source: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Directed Paris Attack." His latest book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. This is This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/12/circus_of_hypocrisy_jeremy_scahill_on 

Geen sprake van dat deze uitstekend geïnformeerde Amerikaanse journalist door Nederlandse journalisten aan het woord zou worden gelaten over de Charly Hebdo-aanslag. Hier, in de polderklei geldt: 

Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you
Yes I am
Stuck in the middle with you

Hier is men inderdaad bang van zijn stoel te vallen en vraagt men zich angstig af hoe de trap af te komen. Het gevolg is dat de polderpers in de klei blijft steken. Toen ik gisteravond met de TGV vanuit Brussel in Amsterdam arriveerde, sprak bij het uitstappen de NRC-redacteur Raymond van den Boogaard mij aan, en vertelde hij me in Parijs te zijn geweest in verband met Charlie Hebdo. Ik reageerde met de constatering dat de hele Charlie-Hebo-affaire is ontaard in een Charlie Bullshit-zaak. Hij keek me verbijsterd aan en dus vertelde ik mijn collega dat wanneer politici als Netanyahu tijdens een photo op vooraan staan om tegen het terrorisme te 'demonstreren' deze hypocrisie misschien wel door westerlingen wordt geslikt, maar zeker niet door de rest van de wereldbevolking, omdat die uit ervaring beter weet. Wanneer de Franse president de Israelische premier uitnodigt, die een half jaar geleden direct verantwoordelijk was voor het vermoorden van meer dan 500 Palestijnse kinderen, zonder dat het Westen, op Ierland na, in de Verenigde Naties hiertegen protesteerde, dan heeft het Westen zich, wat betreft zijn 'variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid tegenover andere culturen,' volstrekt ongeloofwaardig gemaakt. Van den Boogaard keek mij aan alsof hij het, jawel, in Keulen hoorde donderen. Een tikje uit het veld geslagen wist hij alleen op te merken:

Daar ben ik het niet mee eens. Je kunt Netanyahu niet met terroristen vergelijken.

Een verklaring daarvoor kwam niet, wat mij de gelegenheid gaf om mijn gewaardeerde collega te adviseren om de reactie van Teju Cole te lezen, de Nigeriaanse-Amerikaanse auteur, die in The New Yorker van 9 januari 2015  kritisch had gereageerd op de cliché's van de blanke mainstream-pers op de aanslag. 'De wat?' vroeg Van den Boogaard. De 'New Yorker' brulde ik op orkaankracht in zijn oor. 'Ik weet van niets,' antwoordde hij verbluft. Ik: 'Daarom vertel ik het je juist, Raymond, jij en de rest van de politiek-literaire elite, zijn te provinciaals in jullie reacties. Over het algemeen lezen jullie niets wat buiten jullie beperkte blikveld valt.' Ineens spurtte Raymond  met zijn lange benen weg, mij toeschreeuwend, 'Tram 9 vertrekt, ik moet mij haasten.' En zo is het maar net. Gauw naar huis. Ik hoop maar dat hij mijn tip gebruikt, want dan leest hij eens een keer een dissidente visie, ondermeer door Cole als volgt geformuleerd:

Western societies are not, even now, the paradise of skepticism and rationalism that they believe themselves to be. The West is a variegated space, in which both freedom of thought and tightly regulated speech exist, and in which disavowals of deadly violence happen at the same time as clandestine torture. But, at moments when Western societies consider themselves under attack, the discourse is quickly dominated by an ahistorical fantasy of long-suffering serenity and fortitude in the face of provocation. Yet European and American history are so strongly marked by efforts to control speech that the persecution of rebellious thought must be considered among the foundational buttresses of these societies. Witch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition shaped Europe, and these ideas extended into American history as well and took on American modes, from the breaking of slaves to the censuring of critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech—as so many commentators have done—it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.’s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies

Maar ik durf er mijn eer en goede geweten op te verwedden dat Van den Boogaard niets over Cole's opvattingen zal melden. Net als zijn mainstream collega Geert Mak blijft hij ervan overtuigd dat 

De kracht van onze westerse samenleving is onze democratie, onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid tegenover andere culturen.

Verbale chronische buikloop is al eeuwenlang een hardnekkige kwaal bij degenen die in Nederland doorgaan voor 'welingelichte' opiniemakers.