Media Storm - S3E12 ‘One man’s terrorist’: Resistance and radicalism in Gaza and Beyond - with Gulwali Passarlay and Zahera Harb

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Support Media Storm’s work from as little as £3 a month on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MediaStormPodcast  The war in Gaza involves everyone, as the global community is drawn onto a battlefield of competing sympathies - sympathies that should coexist. Propagandists, Islamophobes and antisemites alike are pushing black-and-white narratives that feed violence and hate. The independent press should be a bulwark against this. But we do not think the press are doing enough. Western news media is failing to educate the public about geopolitical biases, and to expose us to worldviews that challenge our own. We cannot hand our listeners the truth, but we can better equip you to identify it. In this investigation, Media Storm uncovers firsthand stories of militancy in Northern Ireland and Apartheid South Africa which shine new light on terror and resistance: Tony Doherty, the son of a Bloody Sunday victim who sought justice through the IRA, and Black South African freedom fighters who waged war against the Apartheid. Testimonies of "terrorism" are largely absent from mainstream news. We believe that seeking out human perspectives to explain resistance and radicalism is not only a journalist’s right, but a journalist’s imperative. We have very special guests joining for our season 3 finale. They challenge listeners to look beyond the Western worldview and teach us how to spot propaganda in the news: former UN Security Council President, Kishore Mahbubani; Lebanese war reporter and journalism professor, Zahera Harb; and Afghan author and political refugee, Gulwali Passarlay. The episode is created by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia). The music is by Samfire (@soundofsamfire). Tayyibah Apabhai assisted as researcher. Learn more Download Kishore Mahbubani’s free e-book, along with 3.3 million other users: https://mahbubani.net/the-asian-21st-century/ Read Tony Doherty’s autobiography, This Man’s Wee Boy… …and Gulwali Passarlay’s: The Lightless Sky Speakers Tony Doherty @tonydutchdoc Liberation Struggle for War Veterans, South Africa Kishore Mahbubani @mahbubani_k Zahera Harb @HarbZ1 Gulwali Passarlay @gulwali_passarlay More on Media Storm Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod Email [e-mail] Website https://mediastormpodcast.com   Media Storm first launched from the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Since we began developing our season finale about terrorism and resistance here at Media Storm, world events have unfolded that make it more relevant and more difficult than we ever could have imagined. The first point to clarify is that nothing we say in this episode is an endorsement of terrorism. This episode is an inquiry of terrorism, and a case that doing so apolitically is not only a journalist's right, but a journalist's imperative. We are, of course, referring to events in Gaza, which remains under Israel. assault after Hamas killed and captured Israeli civilians, soldiers and tourists on the 7th of October. We won't, by the way, be playing the numbers game in this episode. Since then, Palestinian civilians have been killed or displaced en masse in retaliatory violence

launched by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who unleashed the nation's military Goliath on Gaza, in which two million Palestinians reside. In war, the first casualty is truth, and the battleground on which we all exist is the information battleground. Geopolitical agendas set the narrative framework and propaganda colours it. This is no less true in Western countries that celebrate their free press, particularly when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Why? Because of history. The conflict is often traced back to the 1948 Palestine War, fought between Israelis and surrounding Arab states, which ended in the declaration of a state of Israel. But its history is actually

much older than that. And it's this history, which is often absent from modern retellings, that we want to highlight today because this history tells us where Western interests come in. So we can't understand events today without it. For millennia, various people, including ascendance of Palestinians, Jews and others fought for conquered, lost and reconquered the land that is now Israel. The land changed hands many times, but from the 15th century, Islamic Arabs in the Ottoman Empire dominated the land. And then two things happened. The British defeated the Ottoman Empire after one World War

and Hitler initiated a systematic slaughter of 6 million European Jews ending with another world war. The victorious superpowers, including the United Kingdom, then decided that Jewish people deserved a homeland of their own. But instead of granting this within their own borders, they granted it in someone else. Palestinians, an ex-Ottoman territory that Britain now considered its own to divvy out. So Jews could finally settle in their promised land,

Europeans could outsource all their refugee problems, which we still love to do, and Palestinians, well, Palestinians just had to put up with it. Lesson number one, the Israel-Gaza war arose from two persecuted people being pitted against each other, and now the powers that put them there watched squeamishly from a distance. This absent context both epitomizes and explains the bias of the Western world view. In efforts to legitimize their legacies as superpowers, the leaders of the free world are taking to press conferences and feeding us a story,

not a complex human story in which truth and justice co-exists across binaries, but a black and white geopolitical story in which there is one good and one evil, one ally and one enemy. In doing so, they fuel. a bloody cycle of blame and attack, revenge and counter revenge, and its terrible worst-case conclusion, the regional eradication of an entire people. So it falls on journalists to rigorously challenge geopolitical interests, to refuse to let journalism become a weapon of war. And it falls on every single one of us reading the news and watching the conflict, to resist binaries however

temptingly simple they are. Unfortunately, in the current upset, we have seen poorly disguised anti-Semitism and Islamophobia parading as empathy under whichever banner shares its enemy. We at Media Storm do not think the Western mainstream media is doing enough to flag geopolitical interests to the public. So here they are. The United States was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948 and has hung its diplomatic legacy on the state's successes ever since. Israel is also a key Western ally against competing interests in the Middle East, namely Russian interests. Knowing this, Western audiences can begin to make sense of the pantomime in which our politicians are currently engaged, squirming in interviews under a stifling ban

against criticising Netanyahu, deflecting valid questions about the limits of British allegiance, steering all blame onto Palestinian terrorists as if we can possibly be expected to accept that that's all there is. Israel says it's preparing to attack Gaza by air, sea and land. How worried are you about Palestinians in Gaza right now? Here's UK Foreign Secretary, James Cleverley. Of course, I look at the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, caused in very large part by the decisions made by Hamas, where water pipes, rather than being used to pump water around Gaza, are being turned into rockets to fire into Israel.

I'm asking you about how worried about you are about them now. with what's to come. So we have been working to support the Palestinian people, both on the West Bank and in Gaza, for many, many, many years because we are worried about the Palestinian people. The actions, the terrorist atrocity that Hamas perpetrated will cause more difficulty for the Palestinian people.

Are you worried about them being bombed by Israel? Well, of course we're worried about the loss of life in Gaza. But the point that I have made, consistently, repeated by the Prime Minister and other world leaders, Israel does have the right to defend itself and protect itself from terrorist attacks from Hamas coming out of Gaza. And does that mean? They do have a duty to minimise civilian casualties,

and I've raised this in every conversation I've had with the Israeli government about this issue. As one Israeli human rights group stated, there is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or part of a war against terror. In this war, each claim to be driven by higher causes, Hamas by liberating Palestinians from an oppressive state,

the Israeli government by securing its people against terrorism. But their actions now are no higher than a battle of blood for blood. The only difference is that, while the global community condemns Hamas as terrorists, they put on ludicrous displays of moral gymnastics to excuse, even applaud, the Israeli regime. We understand that news outlets have no choice in platforming political leaders. Where they fall is in internalising the worldviews that these leaders construct.

Editorial agendas are subtly shifted, assumptions are presented as facts, and the media becomes a mouthpiece to power. We see this in subtle word choices. Whether we call a group a resistance or a militia shapes listeners' ideas of whether it's right or wrong. An army trumps an invading force, a conflict and a legal war. For no term is this truer than the term terrorist. One man's terrorist, you know the saying. This is not a statement of justification.

It's a statement of cause and effect. There is ample reason to call Hamas a terrorist group. There is also ample reason to call them a resistance. Before Hamas' attack triggered global outrage over civilian casualties, many Palestinians had been killed by Israeli. soldiers just this year without the world batting an eyelid. Garzans have been living in conditions many of us would consider unacceptable for ourselves, trapped in poverty in an open-air prison under heavy blockade by Israel, which

restricts clean water and medical goods. Those who resist peacefully are routinely executed and interned. In these conditions, violent rebellion is guaranteed. History is very consistent with that lesson, but instead of learning, we use the term terrorist. to shut down inquiry. The Hamas terrorists, who you don't seem to be particularly interested in, and the BBC seems to refuse to call terrorists, even though the British Parliament has legislated terrorists. In this clip, the UK's Defence Secretary Grant Shaps

turns a question about foreign policy into an accusation about the BBC's decision to not call Hamas terrorists. I read, I think it was a very unfortunate article. I think it was by John Simpson, explaining why, although the British Parliament has legislated a matter as a prescribed organisation and a terrorist, the BBC think it's not appropriate to call them terrorists. Are you aware of the off-com code and the rules for all broadcasters? This decision by the BBC is in keeping with independent guidelines

because, to quote, world affairs editor John Simpson, calling someone a terrorist means you're taking sides and ceasing to treat the situation with due impartiality. Hearing this clip, we were struck by how sinister it is for a Western politician live on air to pressurize public service journalists to submit to government language. There lies the front line between press and propaganda alive and kicking in the West. Terrorist is not just a legal definition. It is an excuse to disengage and dehumanize, to ignore valid grievances, to refuse to negotiate, to bypass legal, constitutional

and human rights, to torture, detain and assassinate without trial. When we object rectify someone as a terrorist, we turn a blind eye towards whatever motivates them as a human being. Righteous vengeance underpins terrorism in all its forms. So today on Media Storm, we will speak to people who have been convicted as terrorists and ask them why they fought. Our goal is discourse in the name of humanism and most of all peace. We'll also interrogate the Western worldview and the presence of propaganda in mainstream news with former UNC security chief, Kishore Mabubani. Then I'll see you back in the studio with Afghan author Gawali Pesale and Lebanese reporter Zahirahab to discuss everything around this media storm.

Another passenger plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. U.S. warships launched the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Free. Baghdad skyline, well, it's now flames of billowing smoke. Weapons and mass destruction were never found. You killed a million people in Iraq. The war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Mallinson.

And I'm Helen O'Owadia. This week's investigation. One Man's Terrorist, Resistance and Radicalism, in Gaza and Beyond. The political struggle in Northern Ireland claims yet another victim. We begin in Northern Ireland with the Arctic. Irish Republican Army, the IRA. The group rose to infamy during The Troubles, a 30-year conflict between Protestant Unionists

who wanted to remain part of the UK and Catholic nationalists who wanted to join the free state in the south. Just before lunchtime, a bomb exploded in a parked car just outside the officer's mess, and seven people, including a Roman Catholic padre, were killed. Like Hamas, the IRA has entered public imagination through the lens of terrorism due to its car bombing campaigns

in which hundreds of civilians were killed. Last in peace will only come to Ireland when our people are free from foreign influence and free from foreign power and foreign domination. But like Hamas, the IRA defined its own mission as resistance to a colonial oppressor, a cause supported by many within the community at large. And like Hamas, the IRA responded.

ruthlessly, targeting civilians and destroying public infrastructure and kidnapping and torturing and murdering untried prisoners in what they described as guerrilla warfare, but the states they opposed described as terrorism. But also like Hamas, the states they opposed committed similar crimes, targeting civilians and weaponizing public infrastructure and kidnapping and torturing and murdering untried prisoners. But they were called soldiers and police officers instead, and they waged their war with the moral and military backing of a global superpower behind them. Now, officially, the British Army was sent to Northern Ireland as a peacekeeping force during the troubles. On the last Sunday in January, Catholic civil rights marches came into violent

conflict with British troops in the centre of Londonderry. So when the British Army opened fired on Catholic civil rights marches in 1972, the British public was told, the troops claimed they'd shot back in self-defense at snipers who'd started the shooting. That the 14 adults and teenagers killed in the streets were gunmen for the IRA, terrorists. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustified. It took nearly 40 years for this lie to be overturned, and for the British government to admit the truth. These were innocent civilians killed in cold blood. But the damage had been done.

Bloody Sunday, as it came to be known, sparked the deadliest year of the conflict and an upsurge in recruits to the IRA. My name is Tony Doherty and my father was murdered on Bloody Sunday. Among them, the son of one of the 14 people murdered that day. Prior to Bloody Sunday, I wouldn't describe our family as a Republican family. After Bloody Sunday, I did start seeing the word. in a slightly different way. We clearly saw the British Army as an invading force,

and they treated us with absolute disdain. But I remember, actually, by the age of 10, which was just over a year after Bloody Sunday, asking my aunt, what age did you need to be to join the IRA? She laughed back at me and said, you have to be 16, but it'll be long over for the time you're 16. So people had no real idea of a long war. At that stage, people thought,

this can't go on forever. Is it a fair observation then that most people, whatever their frustrations, would have opted for peace over war? There has always been a yearning for peace. Nobody in their right mind would want to become

involved in a long-term military campaign. But what I actually found when I went to prison was a number of people who pointed towards Bloody Sunday as the sole justification of why they were there and why they had joined. I was actually taken aback. I thought it was just me, but what

effectively happened that day was that the peaceful campaign for civil rights was blasted off the streets by the British Army. It's a bit like what's happening in Palestine and Israel today. When you don't have the avenues for dialogue or the aspiration towards just outcomes, vacuums are created and and vacuums are usually filled with hate and misunderstandings. People weren't really listening to one an hour, and people become blinded by conflict, myself included. I locked in to violence, revenge and counter revenge, and as we've seen, that can go on for generations.

You describe this cycle of violence when people don't listen to each other and characterise each other, as you say, with hate and misunderstanding. This points to my main question today with the terrorist label. Is there a risk that this feeds into that cycle of not understanding, not listening? Absolutely. I think the use of the word terrorist or terrorism, it's a heavily weighted emotional and propaganda term. And it's normally used by states.

What I witnessed growing up was state terrorism. I mean, I was convicted as a terrorist. When I went to prison, I did reflect in a sort of infantile way at times on the fact that the person who killed my father, who was Soldier F, hadn't spent a single day in prison for his murder and the murder of four-hour young innocent people within the space of 15 minutes. And yet here, the son of one of those murdered people was classed as a criminal. Here's the thing. If you had been there on Bloody Sunday, you were absolutely terrorised by what you saw. Thousands of people were forced to scatter under heavy gunfire, and those who couldn't get away were basically slaughtered, like animals in the street.

Was that terrorism? Of course it was. But it was also legitimised by the state propaganda, and there's nobody better at it than the British in my view. you will carry your terrorist conviction for the rest of your life. Does it bother you? I don't really care of the British government decided to describe the IRA as a terrorist organisation.

I have no regrets about becoming a member. What I am concerned about is the legitimacy of the cause. I think if I was in Gaza today, I would be part of the resistance. I have absolutely no doubt about it because it's very, very difficult to see peace and justice while you're subject to such abuse and discrimination is the resistance and fallible, of course, or not. Some of the activities of the IRA are very difficult to justify

and certainly not glorify, but it doesn't take away from the cause. How do you define a terrorist? A person who uses unlawful, violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims. At least according to the Oxford Dictionary. Internationally, there's no consensus. Russia and the Arab Emirates called the Taliban a terrorist group. The UK and EU do not.

New Zealand and Canada deem the proud boys, who stormed the US capital in support of Donald Trump, a terrorist group. The USA does not. There's Mr. Mandela. Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a New South Africa. You might see Nelson Mandela as a figurehead of peace, who led South Africa out of the apartheid. And yet he was on US terrorist watch lists until 15 years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Why?

Partly because he'd led the military wing of the ANC African National Congress. in a campaign including car bombs and sabotage that did kill dozens of civilians. But also because this resistance group, which ultimately toppled the apartheid and became the country's main political party, was funded by the Communist Soviet Union. The real threat to our security is the danger of communist aggression. The ANC may have been on the right side of racial justice, but they were on the wrong side of the Cold War.

And for this, many former fighters continue to pay a price. The aparthe government treated us as the terrorists, and even today we are still suffering. Today, many of the survivors of the war against apartheid who fought under Mandela himself live in a township on the outskirts of Cape Town called Belar. They said I was welcome to come and hear their stories, as long as I brought some beer and a round.

Sam's head to barbecue. My combat name in exile I was called Pindyla. The first man I spoke to was a combat trainer for new recruits. Yet even he tells me violence is never a route chosen lightly. Did you ever have reservations about using violence as a method to fight? Yes, at times you took decisions yet you wouldn't like to take because of the circumstances that pushes you to take that decision. You see because of the apartheid government it was so violent.

I had to take that decision because of what was happening in the country and to me also. You see here, I have a scar. Yeah, just above your right eye. Yeah. Yeah, I was bitten while I was still young by the police. How old are you? Sixteen. We cannot allow this.

allow this thing to continue. Something needs to be done. And who's going to do it if I cannot do it? And what was the goal of the violence? The aim was not to kill, but it was to push the government to the table where the negotiating can be done. It was unfortunate for those who died. Each war has its own casualties, you see, but it wasn't our wishes for them to be. affected. So this was a war and you didn't see yourselves as terrorists, you saw yourselves as an army? I don't see myself that we were terrorists because we were fighting for the just cause. There's no longer apartheid government. Now we should live all together black and white equally. That's what I was fighting for. And one of the guys here told me that you were his platoon commander and that

was in Uganda. Will you just tell us what the training in Uganda involved? We're training them in political classes and also we trained them in firearms, also how to use explosives and also how to use bombs? And how old were the trainees? Some were at the age of 13, 14, 16, 17 and How old were you when you started fighting? I've joined the ANC when I was 17. And I saw that I'm still young. Freedom now. Education later.

We rarely think about the cost of violence to those who committed. And we also often. often forget when we talk about violent rebellion that many of those involved are recruited as children. There was no age restriction. When you are 18 years and apart, then you can join the army. But on the reparation movement, there was no age restriction. The youngest one in the army was 12 years old.

So we come to the army when I was 14 years. It was a very painful experience because we wanted as boys to be teachers or to be a law or something like that, but we were forced of fighting this conflict because we saw our parents the way they were treated by the white regime. As we grow up in that trauma, that's when this movement of underground started. I was imprisoned, I was sentenced to death sentence. We gave our lives to the struggle and there was no payment that we were paid. It was only our sacrifice with our lives. with our lives.

The scars of violent rebellion last a lifetime. And the reality is that many involved are exploited not just by the powers they oppose, but the ones they choose to serve. They were the seniors, but they never experienced what we have experienced on the ground. If you look in our government of today, coming from prison, they got every benefit.

But for us, it's not happening. Mandela's and all the... those leaders were in prison when we fight. And we took them out. We put them in the parliament today. So we thought by now we are going also to be honoured for what we did. But we have never been honoured. Brian Matasi, Ayanda and Vallani and Master Samandi met me as representatives of a group

called Liberation Struggle for War Veterans, or LSWV. Why are they still mobilizing? Because after all they've sacrificed, and even after being vindicated by history, they continue to pay the price of having been looked on by the world as criminals. They're still treated as a terrorist even now. The veteran is eating in the dustbin.

The veteran, you find the veteran under the bridge. My kids will die next to the street. When we came back from exile, there were some promises. All people were coming. from exile, we are supposed to be commensated, to build a shelter, to take care of yourself, to take care of your kids too. That egg never been implemented at all.

There's not anything that we receive it. That's why we decided to form up the LSWP. We were criminalized. We were not recognized as freedom fighters. You know the revolution still goes on. We take it where our forefathers left it. Maybe our children will take it where we left it. I take it.

I take it. The West, by its own admission, has not always been on the right side of history, and this includes its declarations of terrorism, which is why an independent media must be critical of the moral parameters its politicians put in place. When I arrive in America and I turn on the television and I watch a news channel, I feel I've been cut off from the rest of the world. It's such an insular, self-absorbed discourse that takes place. place. Kishore Mahbubani warns that Western News is not always as independent as we think.

Mahbubani is a leading academic and distinguished fellow at the National University of Singapore, but for much of his career he worked as a diplomat, serving as Singapore's ambassador to the UN and two-time president of the UN Security Council. I asked him first to define what he means by the Western worldview. In the past, the Western worldview was somewhat diverse. He were talking 20 years ago. The French president Jacques Chirac and the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder fiercely opposed the war in Iraq, you know.

But now my sense is that, to put it very bluntly and forgive me for being so provocative, the European Union's foreign policy has been hijacked by the Anglo-Saxon world. which are US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand too. And how influential or representative is the Western world view compared to others? If you add up the total population of the Western countries, they make up at best 12% of the world's population. 88% of the world lives in a non-Western world. Right now, as you and I speak,

we are going through a major historical transition away from the era of Western domination of world history towards a more natural world order where China and India and other Asian countries will once again become stronger and more powerful actors. My full interview with Kishore exploring these geopolitical dynamics in more depth will be available in full for Patreon subscribers.

You can access that via the link in the show notes. So we in Western democracies credit ourselves with having a free press. But is it your perception that our news media is not as independent as we think it is, that it has been guilty of perpetuating a very subjective Western worldview. The puzzling thing about the United States is that on the one hand, it has the world's best universities,

and it has the world's best-known academics. It has the world's most powerful and influential newspapers, right? It has the freest media in the world. Now, you add up all these factors. Americans should be among the best informed people in the world. But sadly, they are among the most ignorant. They don't understand the nuances of this new world that is emerging. I live in New York for over 10 years, and I read the New York Times every day.

It's such a joy to read it every morning. But it's also one of the most ardent newspapers in the world. And presumably this isn't just a New York Times problem. Frankly, I referred to it as the Anglo-Saxon media. problem. Because the Anglo-Satine media, including British newspapers and Australian newspapers, are incredibly condescending when they write about the 88% of the world's population who live outside the West and make absolutely no effort to understand why do they view the world so differently from the West. Okay, so let's talk about what that worldview actually looks like. Having grown up

in the UK myself, I'd say a big part of the West's self-perception is its pursuit of a moral mission to promote human rights and democracy around the world. Does this view of the West hold up outside the West? When the West claims that it represents the highest values of human rights and democracy, certainly in their domestic societies, they are doing very well. The question is in their foreign policy, Western countries, including the United States, sacrifice human rights and democracy when there's a clash within their interests and their values. So for example, the United States was the first modern developed Western country to reintroduce torture in Guantanamo.

And what was shocking to the rest of the world was that no European government dared to publicly criticize the United States for reintroducing torture. The rest of the world saying, now, what's going on here? I thought you guys are in favor of human rights and democracy. Why do you have double standards? You mentioned Guantanamo, which is very relevant for this episode because Guantanamo Bay is one of the ultimate symbols of the war on terror. Well, not just a symbol.

It's a hugely controversial American detention facility for terror suspects, overwhelmingly for Islamic terror suspects. It's based in Cuba, which Cubans aren't very happy about, and it was opened by the US government after 9-11. It's widely attested to engage in awful methods of talk. against prisoners who've been interned, which basically means they've been imprisoned without trial. And people have disappeared inside for decades, and people are still inside. Now, this is all done and can only be done in the name of counter-terrorism,

which brings me on to my next question. In attempting to bridge this divergence between Western and non-Western world views, how accepting should we be of the West's narrative of, its war on terror. Do people from other world views agree with our definition of who and what constitutes a terrorist? Every civilized society in the world abhors terrorism. That is not the issue, but when the United States announces a global war on terror, that was a huge oversimplification because each terrorist group has got its own separate agenda. You've got to understand each group and figure out ways and means of dealing with them individually to find political

solutions to what was troubling them, and not just focus on the military dimension in trying to eradicate terrorism. Now, let me give you a good example with the Iraqi invasion. It was sadly an illegal invasion, as Kofi Annan said, and many of my Arabic friends predicted that U.S. forces would be attacked by terrorists after they... defeated the army of Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, all their predictions came true. Something maybe I'm hearing in that answer is perhaps the term terrorist, especially used as a globally sweeping label, could conceal more than it reveals because it doesn't allow us to understand the human grievances behind the terror tactics,

which we need to do if we want to diffuse that violence. Is that a fair reading? Absolutely. You've got to understand different things. cultures and learn to work with them. Let me just give you a very simple example. When the United States invaded Iraq, it didn't even know that the Sunnis were a minority and that the Shias were a majority. And so when the United States completely dismantled the army of Saddam Hussein, it created an explosive situation.

Now, that reflects deep cultural ignorance. So what the United States and the West should be sensitive to is to ensure that they don't give cause for the radical Muslim agenda to be supported. How can the media break out of a worldview that has shaped the understanding of most of the journalists inside it? In the next part of this episode, we'll dive into two more contexts from the Middle East to ask where and why those worldviews diverge from the West's, and how all this ties in to the war on terror. That takes us back to the studio.

Thanks for sticking around. The Hulu original series Murdoch Death and the Family dives into secrets, deception, murder, and the fall of a powerful dynasty. Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit podcast, this series brings the drama to the screen like never before. Starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark.

Watch the Hulu original series Murdoch, Death and the Family. Streaming October 15th on Disney Plus. Welcome back to the studio and to MediaStorm, the podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. This week, we are looking at the fine political line between terrorism and resistance and how the mainstream media should tiptoe that line. And with us are very special guests.

The first guest is our very special. very own teacher of journalism. That's right. Before becoming director of international journalism studies at City University of London, where many, including Matilda and I, learned our craft, she reported on the front lines in her native country, Lebanon, during the Israeli occupation in the country's south, and went on to anchor Tel-Leban, as well as presenting a number of popular political programs. She's published across international news outlets, as well as authoring a collection of books on reporting in the Middle East. Welcome to the studio Sahara Hub. Thank you so much. How does it feel? Yeah, being questioned by your former students.

I just feel at home, actually. Oh, good. And now our second guest is also an author. He is the man behind The Lightless Sky, an Afghan refugee boy's journey of escape to a new life. Among a number of impressive positions, he has been president of the United Afghan Peace Movement and chairperson of the Afghan youth movement, advocating for refugee youth since his own political exodus from Afghanistan in 2006. He was shortlisted for the Nansen Refugee Award by the UN High Commission for Refugees and has spoken across news outlets on displacement and immigration policy.

Thank you for joining us, Gulwali Pasale. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. So in the first half of this episode, we heard from and about military groups that have been seen by their communities as resistance fighters, but labelled internationally as terrorists, while engaging in many of the same tactics

as the official armies and governments that they oppose. And we want to start with a theoretical talk about some of the language and imagery that dominates this topic in the international press. Zahirah, this is why we invited you on. So among your publications is a book called Channels of Resistance in Lebanon, which looks at perceptions of Hezbollah

and the role of international and national media in propaganda. Now, for any listeners who don't know, Hezbollah is a Shiite Muslim political party and military group. It was founded in Lebanon in the wake of the 1982 war when Israel invaded. The group opposes Israeli and Western attempts to exert influence in the region with a mantra of anti-colonialism and Islamic nationalism. It has been designated in part or in full, a terrorist group by much of the international community, including the US, EU, UK and Arab League. However, within Lebanon, it won the single bigger share of the votes in the 2022 general election. Just to start off, maybe Zahiro, would you tell us how can we understand this vast difference in perception of Hezbollah within Lebanon and without it? First of all, can I just say that Israel occupation of parts of Lebanon started in 78 and lasted till 2000.

So you have a long period of occupation presence in something. parts of the country. So during that time, Hezbollah was designated as a terrorist group by the United States only. The EU, UK, did not see it at that time as a terrorist group. This whole notion of Hezbollah being identified or classified as a terrorist group came into existence in the wake of the Syrian uprising. At the time when Hezbollah fighters took part in fighting alongside the Assad regime, the Ba'ath regime in Syria. Iran also aiding the rebels in the Houthis in Yemen. Post-2011, really, when we started seeing that shift in the terrorism label, it contradicted the fact that Hezbollah is a political

party in Lebanon. They have their military faction. In Lebanon, they still have a lot of popularity. Hezbollah has actually established collaboration alliances across the spectrum, different religious sects, different political parties in the country stand with Hezbollah on the kind of like front that you talked about the anti-imperialist, the idea that, you know, we don't want foreign entity to come and dictate what, you know, the people of Lebanon should be doing or how they should be running their country. So you cannot actually speak about Lebanese politics without including Hezbollah as a major political player in the country. So would it be fair to? say that within Lebanon and Hezbollah is viewed primarily as a resistance group rather than an

Islamist group or an Islamic group. It's both. For them, these two identities actually do not contradict each other. They are one for them. How did you balance this whilst you were reporting when your own country was facing this occupation, how did you remain impartial? I wasn't impartial. So let's take it from there. So I reported between 19, 91, you know, throughout to 2000, basically. And there was two major Israeli assaults on Lebanon in 93 and in 96. And it's the time when you feel like you can't be impartial. You are a journalist, you are a reporter covering what's happening, you are an eyewitness, but you are also a citizen experiencing the same horror that is inflicted on your own people by a foreign military

force. So in these kind of situations, there's never a question of, am I impartial, am I not impartial. The question would have been at that time, are we telling the truth? It's reporting the facts. Being factual was more important to us than this whole idea of impartiality and objectivity. So these traditional journalistic values of impartiality and of non-intervention, do you think these principles need to be rethought then when reporting on conflicts that are inherently unequal? The answer is yes. So actually this is something that I have been arguing for some time now. We are taught about objectivity. We are told about journalism, norms and values. And it's the same values that are inherited from the Western doctrine of understanding what journalism

is about, right? But then, you know, what does objectivity mean? in the context of having this foreign military force, inflicting harm on your own people. And that question stayed with me. You know, someone accused me at one point that I teach my students not to be objective. You're here, you can tell me. I don't teach them not to be objective. What I actually do is I try to critically push them to think and to question and then decide for themselves, you know, what do they understand?

of the meaning of objectivity in, you know, context that they are not used. Contacts outside liberal democracies, do you consider that someone reporting in Ukraine now not being an objective journalist? Are Ukrainian journalists now asked to be objective journalists in a sense that do they have to be objective? You know, all these questions actually came back to me with the Ukrainian conflict. Yeah. You know, I'm watching and I'm thinking, this is how it should be covered.

Right, because there's not been any kind of pretense of non-partisan perspective. And outside Ukraine, I mean, within our media and most of the Western media, the position has very clearly been in opposition to Russia and in solidarity with Ukraine. We've had the language of the media being really suggestive. I mean, even with Ukrainian military forces that have historically been depicted in Western press as terrorist threats, such as the Azov Battalion, which has been reported in Western media before is a kind of breeding ground for neo-Nazi ideology.

Since the Russian invasion, the language has been exclusively, these are resistance groups, these are resistance fighters, and the Russian army has been described as an invading force, and the war has been described as an illegal invasion. So do you approve of this use of language in the Western press? Yes. Yes. Yes, and a kind of, is it a mighty force invading? Yes. Do they have the right to invade? No. And I'm saying this and I'm thinking of Lebanon. We are an independent state. We were invaded. Okay. And at that time in the 90s, when I was, I did for a year and a half, I did freelance reporting for BBC Arabic from Beirut. And for the sake of impartiality, I was asked not to refer to the, you know, military op.

operation against Israeli soldiers, you know, occupying soldiers in South Lebanon as resistance. Wow. So I had to call them militias. Wow. I'm just going back into my own reporting. And it was all for the sake of impartiality. So I was always given a lesson in we need to be impartial. We need to be objective.

So we need to stay away from terminology that is controversial. My position in this is more towards like, let's look at it as a positive. move. You really need to apply the same thing that you have applied to Ukraine, to other conflicts. Yeah. That's my, what I want to do is take this conversation, this argument forward and say, let's apply this to other conflicts. This is where we lose Zahira, but thank you so much for teaching us once again. Do you have a takeaway message for our listeners before you go? I just want to say thank you so much for having me and you're a testimony the fact that I don't teach my students not to be objective. Just to be critical. Rightly so. Be critical and question

all the time. We would love to know your reflections on the conversation we just had, Gulali, given the Western news media's very clear positioning on conflict in your own native country, Afghanistan. Now, the Taliban takeover was described as a tragedy, the Sunai militant political movement being defined as a terrorist group by countries like Canada, Russia, and the UAE, and widely seen in alliance with terrorist groups, although it defines itself legitimately as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Do you approve of the tone of Western reporting on events in Afghanistan, or do you see hypocrisy? feel like there's both. I feel like the Western media have, the way things have been described, the way things has happened, especially in the last two years. And there has been some media trying to softenistan and the Taliban. And in the last 20 years, it was a different story. And I feel the Afghan people have suffered because of these, not just words, these are not just language. This has consequences. So they were saying there's 20 terrorist groups in Afghanistan. They were spending billions in trillions in the country. We lost 190 or so thousand people.

75,000 security forces for what in the name of fighting terrorism and then suddenly some of these guys who were supposedly terrorists the country was handed over to them we saw the British forces in American forces at Kabul airport whilst the Taliban was walking into Kabul

so it just contradict the whole thing what was the point of occupying in invading Afghanistan in the first place of course we hear about Osama Bilat in Al-Qaeda and the 9-11 and so on there are good reasons for the West or for the US to go into Afghanistan but the way they have stayed there, the way they have described the situation

and how the Afghans went through the situation, you know, suffering, and now we have abandoned and betray them. The West realized the seriousness of the situation that the Taliban were, you know, they told the NATO countries of the West that, you know, you have your watches and we have the time. So they realized there was no point continuing this unwinnable fight. So the West was trying to change its language. And change the narrative. It seems to me that often the difference between what we see as terrorist

and what we see as legitimate isn't the military tactics of that group. It's the politics. You know, the narrative on the Taliban can change very quickly and it's not got very much to do with the nature of that group. It's got more to do with like the US's foreign policy agenda. And I have a really good example, I think, which came to my mind and that's female Kurdish fighters. from the beginning of the war in Syria in 2011,

Kurdish women fought ISIS alongside men, even establishing their own women's defence unit. And this earned them pride of place in Western media. We had stories of beautiful, strong, badass Kurdish women. You know, the Daily Mail called them inspirational and incredibly brave. CNN chose them as the most inspirational women of the year in 2014. And yet, in a different context when they're fighting Turkey, they were seen and described as, quote, murderers with highlights.

Now the PKK or Kurdistan Workers Party is labelled a terrorist organization by Turkey and many Western governments for its resistance to Turkey and against what the PKK would describe as Turkish attempts to ethnically cleanse their communities. So this serves to show, I think, you know, just how arbitrary and political the language is. That's a very good summary. And indeed, this is the issue. We say what suits us. The people who are fighting against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan were freedom fighters.

My father included, they were the Mujahideen. And then the same Mujahideen who were fighting the U.S. was labeled as terrorists. So it's like, it depends who is fighting who in that context. And so there is no agree definition. We've been speaking of double standards. And something we've heard from sources who grew up in Iraq or surrounding countries is that local communities who have witnessed U.S. shillings and civilian killings, often consider U.S. activity in those regions to be

terrorist. Is that something you have heard or come across? And what does that say to listeners who may have never encountered those testimonies? Completely. I agree. I think the U.S., what the U.S. has done in Iraq and as well as Afghanistan, they have terrorized people. I've lost loved one. My loved one was killed by the U.S. forces. So I saw and I still see the U.S. actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere as a terrorist activity and terrorist involvement because you can't have it both ways. You can't say, you know, we're here to help and support you, but those who makes a stand against our terrorists. So it doesn't make sense. If the U.S. were handing over Afghanistan to the Taliban and kind of legitimizing them and giving them mandate through negotiations and treating them as a government inviting, they should have done this 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, money about the Afghan civilians.

will still be safe. The Afghans were taken out of a cage and then put back in a cage 20 years later. So it's like if you don't experience freedom, you wouldn't know how it feels like and how it tastes like. So although I appreciate the fact we had opportunities,

but it was underpinned by the occupation. So when people say about the British, in by Loke, we have built railways and we have built this and that, yes, you might have done some good that was for your own good, that was for your own cells, but that does not justify,

the end does not justify the mean. And empire is a bad thing, this idea that we are superior, we have to teach you how to be civilized. In the same way, the US has done a lot of good in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that doesn't mean anything to me because the way it was done. I think that's all we have time for. Thank you so much for joining us today.

You've given us, oh my God, so much to think about. And although it's been heavy topic, it's been a pleasure having you. Thank you for doing what you do, guys. And it's nice to see you. Can you tell listeners where they can follow you and whether you have anything to plug? Yeah, people can follow me on Instagram and Twitter. It's Gulwali Pasarlai, and I would love for people to read my book

to get a full context of, you know, Afghanistan refugees and why I came and how I came, what happened here. So the lightless guy has a lot more information. I encourage people to be critical thinkers as we hear. You know, we can't really be objective all the time. We can be subjective. Our own upbringing, our surrounding environment makes us who we are. But ultimately, we all capable of showing kindness in humanity.

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