Democrats, terrorists and hypocrites
January 3rd, 2008While I was researching this week’s piece on the upcoming Bush visit to the Middle East, something caught my eye in the White House’s December 18th press briefing about it. Dana Perino, the spokeswoman, was asked whether Bush would meet with Hamas, and answered:
“I think the President wants to deal with the elected leader of all the Palestinians, which is Abu Mazen and Prime Minister Fayyad. So he is going to focus on talking with them. Hamas is a terrorist organization. He is not going to be talking with them.”
Now, all the reporters in the room knew that Hamas was also elected by the Palestinians, and that Fayyad was not elected at all but appointed by Abu Mazen to head an emergency government whose legal legitimacy is questionable at best. Nobody challenged her.
Still, Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and that’s a good enough reason not to talk to it, right? Except that a lot of the Palestinian security men guarding Bush on his visit to Ramallah have also been active in Fatah’s military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which has carried out more attacks from the West Bank than Hamas has; and the al-Aqsa men who killed two Israeli soldiers near Hebron last week were themselves on the PA security forces’ payroll. What’s more, this fluidity between the Brigades and the official PA forces has been common knowledge for years (even I’ve written about it). In short, “terrorist”, like “democrat”, is an extraordinarily flexible term in the Washington dictionary.
That nobody corrected Perino isn’t surprising. Press conferences are not for getting into arguments — there’s no point. The journalists are there to hear the official position, and at best pick up on whether it’s changed since the last time. If the official position is that Hamas are terrorists and Abu Mazen and Fayyad are democrats, that’s just another way of saying that Hamas are our enemies and Abu Mazen and Fayyad are our friends.
This loose use of labels is nothing new, of course: yesterday’s strategic ally is today’s evil dictator (Saddam) and yesterday’s freedom fighter is today’s terrorist (Bin Laden). The trouble is that as journalists we’re so used to this doublespeak that we don’t even notice it any more, so we just shovel it on to the general public — and usually we don’t have the time or the space to explain, to those who follow events less closely than we do, that the people we’re quoting are talking out of their backsides.