One of the running themes of Pope Benedict’s addresses during his visit to the United States has been that of the condition of recent immigrants, with a particular outreach to the Latin American communities. The New York Times, in a recent article, described his stance as calibrated with care, and there were certainly no direct criticisms of United States policies or specific recommendations for legislation.  Nevertheless, again according to the New York Times, there was enough there for the Republican Tom Tancredo to accuse the Pope of ‘faith-based marketing’ and suggest that it was not the Pope’s job to engage in American politics.

In fact, much of what Pope Benedict said echoes the message of John Paul II and the position articulated in the United States Bishops’ 2003 document ‘Strangers No Longer’ (see http://www.justiceforimmigrants.org). Both Popes have supported the US Catholic Church in its local response to a global situation of conflict between legality and justice, between the demands of states and the needs of the poor.  That there is a balance between the right to migrate in search of a better life and the right of states to protect their borders was already articulated by Pius XII in 1952. To find that balance is something that every economically developed state is struggling to do today.  But Benedict has again taken the opportunity to remind the States of its special status as an immigrant nation and accordingly its unique tradition of welcome for the stranger.

 
So what did he do?  Clearly he spoke to the US President about the issue, with particular reference to ‘humane treatment’ and families whose lives are disrupted by the new Mexican border controls.  That is an important piece of advocacy on behalf of the voiceless. When he spoke to the US bishops he encouraged them in their Christian duty to welcome immigrants and ‘support them in their trials’.  That has been gratefully received as confirmation of the work in political advocacy and pastoral support that the US Catholic Church has undertaken.   He spoke in his interview on the way to the US of the need to look for a global solution to economic migration. Well, the elephant in the boardroom for any immigration-obsessed state is the global economic inequity which makes people risk lives and dignity just to stay alive.  Finally, he spoke directly to the Hispanic community most affected, affirming that the Christian message is in harmony with our human aspirations for a life that is full and free. He offered his people hope and encouragement in their hardships.

Was it his job to engage in American politics?  At the White House, the Pope touched on that theme which is so sensitive for every secular state, but rooted it in the logic of the very origins of the US: ‘a commonwealth in which each individual and group can make its voice heard’.  Catholics in the US have a right to be heard just as much as anyone else.   And when their spiritual leader visits, he becomes their voice.

In the past week, Hands Up For Darfur (HUFD)’s fundraising methods have come under attack. Yet for the greater good of the world’s impoverished and violated people, who cares how money is raised? Funding for aid programs facilitated by charities such as Médicins sans Frontières and Kids for Kids is constantly and desperately needed. It is our universal responsibility to contribute and respond by whatever means possible. Consequently, the £50k raised by the HUFD committee last year can and should only be seen in a positive light. Perhaps we should dismiss the £150m raised by Live Aid, another event supposedly cheapened by the shame of people enjoying themselves whilst giving to and gaining from a major charitable initiative. How dare the masses raise money, educate citizens and stand in solidarity with the world’s poor and voiceless? Controversial or not, quite frankly it works.

The fairly obvious shortcoming of Friday’s undeveloped and sensationalist attack on the Hands Up Fashion Show was its failure to distinguish its status as a fundraising as opposed to awareness raising event. As was kindly pointed out, the committee holds several educational events and programs a term dedicated to providing exposure to the massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law occurring in the region. Fundraising however, is the lifeblood of any non-profit organisation and put simply, needs to be done. The devastated refugees in the camps of Eastern Chad will not begrudge nor belittle us for the means by which their (sadly temporary) salvation comes. And neither should Max Seddon.

Furthermore, he should really get his terminology right. It is not a college commemoration ‘ball’. It is proudly a ‘fashion show’, and one for which he clearly didn’t do his research. We may be providing champagne, canapés and a catwalk showcasing the creations of dozens of the world’s designers. But one should not ignore the concerted effort to draw attention to our worthy cause throughout. A speaker from Médicins sans Frontières will open the event to discuss her experiences of the conflict. We are presenting extensive photographic exhibitions, have included several different African designers in the show itself and music from Mattafix, a band strongly affiliated with the Darfuri cause. Decadence for Darfur? Or the good old cliché of Brideshead regurgitated? How very original of you Max, how very thought-provoking. The sad truth is that HUFD, like so many other charities has had to adapt to the fact that students don’t part with £50 easily, even for a good cause. Provocative ad campaigns, appealing to the bacchanalian sides of the juvenile character-yes we are using these mediums as ‘vehicles’ for selling tickets. Perhaps we have preyed upon the abstract, detached mentality of some towards distance and far flung foreign conflicts. But at least we are a team committed to doing something asides from self publication.

 I really do sympathise with Mr. Seddon’s idealistic outrage geared towards the West’s moral corruption and relative indifference to third-world crises. If I thought it would help, I would also bravely preach about the debasement of society and corporate philanthropy in the 21st century to anyone who would listen. Even if the premises are true however, the majority of his arguments are weak and invalid. I deeply resent his self-righteous derision of a team of people who have worked phenomenally hard to produce this Fashion Show. It smacks of the very social stereotyping and snobbery he has tried so hard to expose. Are students not allowed to raise money for Darfur and get a summer job? Are only those who spend their holidays in African refugee camps deserving of the accreditation of trying to make a difference? So what if a 19 year old values teaching English on their gap year as a formative and helpful experience. That is their decision to make and not yours to patronise.

However let me take this opportunity to apologise to Max for holding the after-party at ‘Thirst Lodge’-despite the owners generously lending us the property for free I can see why the name might seem offensive. Perhaps we should have held it at ‘Filth’-that would have been far more appropriate. Or given we are talking about the plight of over a million refugees, should we have chosen ‘Escape’? Or why not ‘Imperial’? Would Mr. Seddon like HUFD to shoulder the blame for the unfortunate trend in names for Oxford clubs as well as the West’s social evils? Furthermore I am baffled by the ridiculous attempt at associating our fundraising evening with the ball held by the EAS, indeed funded by the Chinese government. The two are entirely unrelated events, run by different societies. How many people bought tickets for both? To be honest I really don’t know, but given the vast difference in the ideologies and political leanings of their organisers, probably not many.

There can be little doubt that holding a Fashion Show in aid of a humanitarian crisis provokes some deeply discomforting realisations regarding the vast gulf existing between the personal freedom of the inhabitants of Oxford and Darfur. It is important to remember however, that despite the connotations with frivolity and fantasy with which fashion is inextricably intertwined, ultimately it is a mode of creativity and individual expression. The terrible contrast that this evokes for Max, myself and many others only clarifies the urgency with which we must act in order to alleviate the plight of so many. If a film star such as George Clooney wishes to spend weeks lobbying at the UN and making films exposing the horrifying fall-out of civil war, thus making Sudan’s plight a cause célèbre, then so be it. The more people who hear of the atrocities, the more who can think and eventually act.

I would like to know of a suggested alternative from Max that will raise more than £50k in one evening. Even with that substantial sum aside, if just one person comes and understands more about the Darfur cause then the Hands Up committee will have fulfilled some of the intentions that fuelled the 6 months taken to prepare the Show. To attack and belittle the project shows a determination to publicly damage and destroy the efforts of dozens and furthermore deter people from showing their support for a deeply worthwhile project. What doe¬s such selfish article ultimately achieve for Darfur? It was with a sense of real sadness that I read the end of his piece, utterly concerned with an encompassing ‘we’ mentality of his own society’s disgusting and hedonistic notions of how to aid the underprivileged. Altruism is not purely an avenue of self-development; to end upon himself and his readers entirely neglected the pressing issue at hand. Let us keep our focus on those afflicted by the Sudanese conflict and what we as a community can do to help them. Regardless of the critics, the funding and publicity that arises from tonight’s Fashion Show is aiming to do just that.

. 

Robert Fisk’s reputation precedes him. For the past 30 years, he has unerringly sought out those places in which civil strife is most deep-seated, from Ireland to Lebanon and Iraq. His reporting has made him ‘probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain’ – and maybe the least likely to allow complacency in that country’s government to go unmentioned.

In 1988, he left The Times after an article of his about a British attack on an Iranian plane was bowlderised. Later, he moved to a more congenial position at The Independent, but his happier professional situation has not dulled his insight. Though Osama bin Laden praised Fisk’s reporting as ‘neutral’ after three interviews with him, he has not always been so well-received abroad or at home. Western conservatives have immortalised him in the slang word ‘fisking’ – definition: ‘savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the Internet’ – though Fisk himself downplays the word and describes its originator as ‘some crackpot.’

The preceding biography would seem to suggest a rather fractious left-wing firebrand, but Fisk does not fit such a stereotype. When I went to meet him, I was prepared to see my political counterarguments thoroughly shredded. However, I soon found that Fisk’s convictions are neither untempered by humour nor held without serious scrutiny.

Though his detractors denounce him as a pundit masquerading as a journalist, he might be better described as a journalist-historian, for whom recent events in the Middle East are only the latest chapter in a continuing saga of mismanagement and injustice.

As a rookie journalist in Newcastle, Fisk ‘used to read history books on Sunday afternoons,’ to gain a sense of perspective. He compares the huge American bases in Iraq to crusader castles. As for the argument that withdrawal from Iraq will lead to civil war, he notes scornfully that David Lloyd George had stood up in Parliament in 1920 and said exactly the same thing about the same country, as well as claiming that the British came to it ‘not as conquerors but as liberators.’ Glancing back over three failed American wars, he predicts: ‘Americans must leave Iraq, they will leave Iraq, they can’t leave Iraq. That is the equation that turns sand into blood.’

Furthermore, in defiance of the stereotype of the liberal as the man who sees the past as another, unenlightened country, Fisk’s articles and speeches are suffused with a deep respect for history. He says of politics today: ‘Where are the Roosevelts? Where are the Churchills? In the old days,’ he observes, ‘people had an extraordinary ability to plan ahead’ – but no one bothered to draw up a detailed plan for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Instead, Fisk believes that the Bush administration went into Iraq with only the ‘visceral need of empire to expand’ and the dictum that ‘we can go to Baghdad, so we will go to Baghdad.’ Fisk is equally perceptive in diagnosing the failures of the left. ‘In America,’ he remarks, ‘the academic left will not talk to the poor. They talk about how they can get their message out to, and network with, other academics…what they don’t do is go down to the person at the truck shop serving coffee, who’ll see a chance for better pay and education and join the Marines.’

Fisk, in contrast, is not afraid to talk to those whom academics reject. One of his key insights into the Iraq war is drawn from a letter from a veteran with a son in the military who mentions that a changed US Army Code now highlights adventure and aggression instead of service to one’s country.

Fisk also possesses an old-fashioned sense of the power of language. In a stance very similar to George Orwell’s in his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ he can locate behind most euphemisms and imprecisions an act of moral blindness which can ‘semantically destroy the reality,’ and which begins ‘in the brains of journalists.’ Journalists, with their ‘osmotic, parasitic’ reliance on government sources, fear being branded as ‘unpatriotic, potentially subversive.’ Thus journalists begin to refer to occupied territories as ‘disputed’ and to preface quotations unquestioningly with the phrase ‘US officials say…’ Nonetheless, the readers are not always fooled.

‘Most people in most places are quite bright…2,000 people come to hear me in LA, not because they want to hear from Bob, but because they know they’re not getting the full story.’

However, Fisk’s long years of experience can be a fault as well as a virtue. The natural stance of the historian is chronic pessimism, and, unlike the politician, he is not required to offer solutions. He has never voted in an election, and when asked how he would advise the next generation of Western leaders, he concludes: ‘I see no hope anywhere in the Middle East. It’s a deeply depressing situation. My crystal ball is broken.’

Furthermore, Fisk’s worst offences against truth and ethics tend to spring from his occasional inability to break free from history, to concede that the issues and moral equations of the past are not necessarily those of the present: namely, those instances in which a sense of postcolonial guilt overwhelms rational argument. Fisk sums up Iraq as ‘the battle against the occupation forces by the insurgency,’ as though there were only one unified insurgency and the suffering citizens of Iraq were those of colonial India or Africa.

However, most journalists would agree that suffering alone does not give the victim a carte blanche for a violent response. Fisk himself might have learned that lesson when he was attacked in a fit of anti-Western sentiment by a group of Afghan refugees.

Instead, Fisk wrote forgivingly of his assailants that their ‘brutality was entirely the product of others’ and that ‘The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us – by B-52s, not by them…If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.’ To state that the cruelty of these Afghans – or of the 9/11 terrorists – was entirely the product of Western foreign policy is an act of startling condescension: why should the Afghans lack the moral insight to distinguish between those politicians and soldiers actually responsible for bombing them and a random Englishman accidentally caught in the crossfire?

Holding all innocent individuals of one race accountable for the sins of the few is no more attractive in Afghans than in Western racists. Fisk’s desire to attribute nefarious schemes to former colonial powers also leads him to endorse some embarrassing conspiracy theories, as though he would like to believe America and Israel not only wickeder but smarter than they are. In truth, most of the conservatives I have spoken to claim that they would have liked nothing better than to have left Iraq the day after the Baathists fell. They are guilty of political naiveté and arrogance, perhaps; but they are not nineteenth-century imperialists.

After thirty years in the Middle East, however, Robert Fisk can be forgiven for letting his anger come to the fore. The precise political conclusions that he pushes, after all, could never outweigh the invaluable service that he has rendered to the casual British reader: reminding them that the printed word is always a distortion of reality, that journalists have vested interests too, and that the phrase ‘officials say’ is not necessarily a guarantee of truth, or even an attempt at it.

On May 22, 2007, the Guardian carried a front page story disclosing Iranian plans to invade Southern Iraq over the summer. Contrary to what one might expect from such a explosive allegation, in an article which talks of ‘firm evidence’ and a real strategic threat, the Guardian based its entire report on the testimony of a single, unnamed US official, parroting the official American line and repeating totally without question his unsupported and unverifiable claim – and all this in the front page of our leading centre-left broadsheet.

Would the newspaper have accorded so much credibility to a comparable claim by Iran? No. That would be about as likely as Robert Fisk becoming a strident neo-con, or Chomsky confessing a sneaking affection for the principles of American foreign policy.

We have here in Britain many news sources, some of which – like the Guardian – claim objectivity and fairness to be among their primary traits. However, it is an unavoidable fact that each and every one of our news sources – our papers, radio, television broadcasts, even much of the Internet – suffers from some level of bias, be it right-wing, left-wing, or a tendency to meander between the two.

To a certain extent this is taken for granted; we all know that the Independent is likely to reflect the attitudes of those noisily bewildered citizens clotting our streets in support of Rabbit Rights; we all know the Telegraph is, indeed, the ‘Torygraph’; we all know (or suspect) that Sky News, The Sun, and The Times may well discreetly toe the Murdoch line on important issues.

Thus a certain degree of bias becomes accepted, even loved. Many of us may have chuckled at the blatant spin that party politics produces. So we simply learn to take journalism with a pinch of salt, and think little else of the trend’s effects – the phrase ‘don’t believe everything you read in the papers’ is so well-used as to have no discernible effect on our judgement.

This bias, however, is far more pervasive and damaging in our media than the almost comically obvious distortions of the Daily Mail might lead us to expect. Our media, including apparently critical, balanced and fair institutions like the BBC, Times, and Guardian, and even the more avowedly iconoclastic Independent or New Statesman, practise self-censorship, manipulation of the truth, and a hidden slant in favour of the government or major corporate interests.

Articles about the Middle East and about the environment, in particular, have long been plagued by this veiled partiality. ‘Leftie Bollocks!’ I hear you say. ‘Probably written by some sort of anarchist, or a small Gallic ape covered in cheddar.’ Perhaps, or perhaps not.

I ask you to consider two factors. Firstly, that our media is primarily composed of corporate entities that depend on advertising for the majority of their income, and secondly, that in order to have news to report, journalists and editors must take steps not to alienate their main source of raw information, the government.

Newspapers, in order to maintain revenue, often fail to report stories critical of their sponsors or manufacture false debate on important issues in order to keep some editorial leeway – hence why we still can see the tiny minority of climate change sceptics being afforded prominence comparable with the overwhelming majority of scientific opinions.

As mentioned, our media must maintain good relations with the government in order to get much of its information, and nowhere can this policy of pandering to official ‘reality’ be more evident than in the manipulation of foreign news.

Consider the eagerly swallowed ‘45 minute’ claim in 2003, the allegations of WMDs, the non-existent SCUDs threatening to spread destruction across the globe – and then consider that Hans Blix, UN weapons inspector, had repeatedly reported that 95% of Saddam’s armaments had been destroyed as early as 1998, with the other 5% reduced to obsolescence.

Consider language: Israeli attacks are legitimate responses to Palestinian aggression; Palestinian attacks are fundamentally incomprehensible acts of hate against those who just happen to have seized their lands and put them into occupation.

Consider the numbing elaborations of the West’s great existential threat – ‘Islamo-fascism.’ ‘Why are we hated so?’ ask our pundits. Our politicians give the answer. It’s our values – of course! bikinis, booze, and sausages have driven fanatics into skyscrapers! – not, despite the repeated protestations of Bin Laden and company, the fact American and British oil interests bend the Middle East to their will and that American troops occupy sacred Islamic lands.

In his book Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky highlights how these and other factors serve to grossly corrupt the independent capacity of our media. He draws attention to the methods used by government and corporate entities to exert control over the mass media: the malevolent effects of lobbyists or vocal and well-funded pressure groups; the threat of lawsuits; and the manipulation of a perceived Communist or terrorist threat.

All this, he argues, amounts to the propagation of disinformation, lies and pretty pictures – and we call it ‘Public Relations’. Truth is thus manipulated without us even realising it, and, more damagingly, any criticism of the prevalent model ends up looking nonsensical, or worse, like pandering to terrorists and Third World despots.

A recent study by Cardiff University’s Department of Journalism, of over 2,000 news stories from the four ‘quality’ dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and from the Daily Mail, found that over 80% of articles were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second hand material, provided by news agencies and the PR industry.

With statistics like these, it is no wonder that the integrity of our media is under threat. This article is neither of the Left nor the Right, nor is it a Chavista-style denunciation of our government and media as imperialist: we continue to have one of the most open and admirable media cultures in the world. But don’t believe everything you read in the papers.