The nightmare of Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for the American network CBS, began during the festivities for the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir Square.
The media industry had despatched its correspondents for a set purpose: to report on the clichè of a libertarian, euphoric, democratic and popular “Arab street”. That is what they were sent to see.
Logan, a famous American journalist born in South Africa, was there doing her job, with two small children awaiting her at home. Lara was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob of Egyptian men for twenty minutes, while the aggressors were shouting “Jew! Jew!”.
Immediately, the machine began to blame that blonde, immodest, “warmonger” and unscrupulous female who dared to find herself separated from her camera crew among thousands of indigenous Arabs. The National Public Radio had to remove many comments it received against Logan, a former model married to a Texan contractor.
About 82 percent of Egyptians support the stoning of “adulterers”. Logan was attacked in name of religious extremism, dragged away and beaten in the name of radical antisemitism, even though she is not Jewish.
Yet, the foreign newspapers and televisions avoided publicizing all the vicious anti-Semitic and anti-American slogans against Logan.
The media’s treatment of Logan’s case tells us a great deal about the nature of today’s media propaganda. The faces taken from the camera of those who sexually assaulted and brutalized Lara were immediately blacked out from the CNN videos. Those who did that are the same journalists that during the Egyptian riots never showed the blood libelling parodies of Mubarak with a yarmulke, with the star of David and a “Jewish nose”. Being called Jewish is the worst insult possible in Egypt.
One of the first, terrible images of the Intifada was the lynching of two Israeli reservists who, on an October day in 2000, went the wrong way and ended up in Ramallah, where they were apprehended by Yasser Arafat’s men. A frenzied crowd of Palestinians gathered at the police station, shouting, as was done in a European pogrom: “Give them to us! We want them! If you don’t give them to us, we’ll come get them!”
The two soldiers were tortured and torn to pieces; one young Palestinian broke a window and hacked at the bodies with a shard of glass. Palestinians appeared at the windows waving their bloodsoaked hands ecstatically to the crowd outside, showing everyone the blood of the Jews. Then they burned the bodies in the town square, as was done in the time of the Inquisition.
There were dozens of reporters on the scene that day as the Palestinian police-led mob dismembered the Israelis. But only one camera crew – from Italy’s privately owned television network – risked their lives to film the event.
After Mediaset’s footage was published all over the world, Riccardo Cristiano, a reporter for RAI television, Italy’s state-owned television, published an incredible apology for Mediaset's showing the truth. It appeared in the PA’s official daily Al-Hayat al-Jadida. Cristiano wrote, “We (Rai) emphasize to all of you that the events did not happen this way, because we always respect… the journalistic procedures with which the Palestinian Authority works in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work”.
Once journalists were known as a principled, fearless breed of men. Today, from Ramallah to Cairo, many journalists work as cravens, afraid that doors will close to them if they dare to tell the truth, reporting in line with preconceived ideas without letting the events unfolding before their eyes open them to the truth.
Doing PR for the enemies of freedom and human decency.