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24 September 2024

Pankaj expertly links the mainstream media’s systematic silencing of criticism of Israel with the rise of racism in India, Canada and elsewhere in the West in this interview to The Breach.

Globe and Mail censored criticism of Israel by award-winning Indian author

Pankaj Mishra’s lecture tracked two decades of media cheerleading for western wars, but its criticisms of Israel were edited out by newspaper

by Martin Lukacs

|Sep 16 2024

When Pankaj Mishra’s article for The Globe and Mail was returned to him with every mention of Israel edited out, he was not surprised.

The well-known Indian author, who is in Toronto to deliver a lecture and receive the Weston International Award for his non-fiction writing, told The Breach that the incident “is part of a continuum of such attempts that I’ve personally encountered to suppress and stifle criticism of Israel.”

Winners of the $75,000 award, launched last year, customarily have an excerpt from their lecture published in The Globe and Mail.

But when Mishra submitted his text, which blasts the “unapologetically mendacious coverage of Gaza in the Western media,” he received it back with every single mention of Israel cut out. In total, The Breach counted 17 examples.

“It was presented as an edit that was, essentially, going to focus on the main points of my talk,” he said. “But I couldn’t help seeing that even when I was talking about Israel in the part of the lecture which they wanted to publish, there too the references to Israel were taken out.”

“I’m very strongly inclined to believe that this was a political decision to not carry criticism of Israel,” said Mishra, who pulled the excerpt after receiving the proposed edits.

The Globe and Mail did not reply to a request for comment by time of publication.

Ironically, some of the newspaper’s proposed cuts related to Mishra’s descriptions of past experiences having his writing on Israel stifled.

“My own sporadic attempts to tackle the subject in the past made me aware of an insidious Western regimen of repressions and prohibitions,” he wrote in one line that was cut.

His lecture, which is taking place at the Royal Ontario Museum, delivers a sweeping critique of the media’s complicity in decades of western-backed wars, from the “War on Terror” to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which has claimed at least 41,000 Palestinian lives.

Mishra, who is based in London, UK and Mashobra, India, regularly writes for The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He has written two novels and eight books of nonfiction, including Age of Anger, From the Ruins of Empire, and Bland Fanatics.

In an interview with The Breach before he delivered his lecture on Monday, Mishra discussed how his encounter with The Globe and Mail—“a very minor episode in a long list of atrocities both literal and intellectual”—was reflective of a broader crisis of western journalism and intellectual culture.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Breach: You say you weren’t surprised by The Globe and Mail’s efforts to excise critical commentary about Israel. Why?

Pankaj Mishra: I think The Globe and Mail’s decision is one of the many such decisions that I’ve faced over the years. It’s not at all shocking to people of non-Western ancestry. We have faced a consistent regime of censorship and suppression. Not just Palestinians, not just Arabs, you talk to even some of the most successful writers of non-Western ancestry, and each one of them will tell you many, many stories about editors saying “We can’t do this. Can you change that? Can you rephrase that?”

That extends to direct criticism of Western politicians or Western writers or Western journalists. Among the other things that I say in the lecture, I name people who have been responsible for normalizing torture, such as Michael Ignatieff. I think it’s not just criticisms of Israel that The Globe and Mail took out, but also where I directly named individuals and institutions, like The Atlantic, which were responsible for the degeneration of the public sphere long before Trump arrived. It’s a real mistake to think it’s all started with Trump. This has been happening for some time now. Before he started ranting against Haitian immigrants, you had people publishing articles normalizing torture in The New York Times Magazine. 

My career more or less coincides with the beginning of the war on terror, and I’m now in my mid-50s, and I’ve seen this happen the last two and a half decades, and have taken away some very bleak lessons from it.

That certainly fits with the evasions and erasures on Palestine that The Breach has been documenting in Canada’s establishment media over the last year.

Since I was given this prize and I got in touch with my Canadian friends, I’ve been shocked to discover how the atmosphere of repression is dominant here, and has been for some time. I’ve just come to realize that this is a much broader problem. It’s not confined to the U.S. and the U.K. and Germany and France. This is all tied to the larger question that I try to raise in my talk: what is going on with the mainstream Western media?

To what extent can it afford to lose its credibility, its legitimacy, and leave the space wide open for demagogues like Elon Musk or digital media to peddle its conspiracy theories and its fictions? We’re talking about a degree of self harm.

Young people now who are looking at these news outlets and thinking: “What is going on here with these traditional, legacy media outlets?” They will be asking these questions and turning away from these outlets. It affects me personally, because I’ve made my career in these particular institutions, in these periodicals. I would definitely want them to flourish. I’m not coming at them from the outside and saying they should all be destroyed.

I want the legacy outlets to adjust their vision to this new world that we are all living in—now a heavily politicized world—but they seem incapable of learning from their blunders. The War on Terror was the first such major intellectual atrocity, with much of the media egging on and cheerleading a war on Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, 20 years later, trying to draw a veil of silence over the atrocities in Gaza. Two episodes of suppression, of propaganda by omission or obfuscation. It should be deeply concerning to everyone who cares about the life of the mind, intellectual freedom, and the overall health of democratic society.

Some of the cuts by The Globe and Mail in Pankaj Mishra’s text

“Even the liquidation of Gaza, which unlike many atrocities, has been live streamed by both its perpetrators and victims, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the main organs of the Western media.”

“Certainly, the Western account of Israel’s recent ‘self-defense’ yet again exposes the radical incongruity between what is said by mainstream journalists in the West and what the rest of us see happening in the world.”

“Today, the war on terror is more widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. It is still not fully grasped as a massive intellectual fiasco: a doomed attempt by the media as well as the political class to forge reality itself. And partly because this disaster was unpunished—editors and writers pushing false narratives, and cheerleading violence, remained entrenched, and even received promotions—it is being reprised today in the Western coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.”

“The conviction that ‘diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print’ is verified as, while showering Israel with lethal weapons and munitions, American diplomats preside, with the help of a compliant press, over a charade of ‘negotiations’ to buy Israel more time to pursue land grabs and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“One could read millions of words on the merits of Western democracy and liberalism and the evils of Eastern totalitarianism by such celebrated writers of Anglo-America as Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, Martin Amis, Thomas Friedman, Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum,without encountering a paragraph on the consequences of slavery, imperialism and decolonization in Asia and Africa. The liberal internationalists barely manifested any awareness that America’s own democracy had been secured by mass bondage, colonial dispossession and wars of aggression.”(crossed out parts were cut by The Globe and Mail)

“One could read millions of words on the merits of Western democracy and liberalism and the evils of Eastern totalitarianism by such celebrated writers of Anglo-America as Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, Martin Amis, Thomas Friedman, Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum,without encountering a paragraph on the consequences of slavery, imperialism and decolonization in Asia and Africa. The liberal internationalists barely manifested any awareness that America’s own democracy had been secured by mass bondage, colonial dispossession and wars of aggression.”(crossed out parts were cut by The Globe and Mail)

You wrote a powerful essay in the London Review of Books in March entitled “The Shoah After Gaza,” about the deep misgivings that certain Jewish writers, all of them Holocaust survivors, eventually developed about the uncritical support they had initially leant to Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

We have these two major clashing historical narratives today, and they are unfortunately antagonistic. One is the narrative of the Shoah, broadly speaking, in which Israel really is at the centre, and the mass murder of Jews is invoked as a justification for what Israel does or what Israel has done over the years.

Obviously, a lot of Western countries were either directly responsible for the killing of Jews or were complicit in it in different ways, such as the European collaborators of Nazi Germany, all the people who refuse to give shelter to Jewish refugees, even after the Holocaust—including Canada, of course. They try to deal with that horrible past of theirs by extending unconditional support to Israel and invoking, yet again, the Shoah narrative.

I think that narrative is increasingly challenged by the narrative of decolonization, and Israel finds itself accused of being a settler-colonial state, perpetuating the racist violence against non-white peoples that Western empires and Western colonialist states were once accused of.

I think this is a very dangerous situation where a sort of permanent polarization—emotional, psychological, political—is happening because these narratives cannot be reconciled. On the one hand, Israel is the exceptional nation which is allowed to get away with a lot of things that no nation is allowed to get away with because of this moral sanction it receives from Western powers.

Then there is the very legitimate protest of the Palestinians and the global majority, that the days of militant colonialism and expansionism finished a long time ago, and that Israel is an anachronistic colonial power and a racist power enforcing apartheid. This is something I wanted to explore and see whether there are ways to reconcile these. Because it seems to me that in many ways, world history has split into these two main opposed narratives.

The writers whose work you engaged with in that essay warned of the damage that would be inflicted on the memory of the Holocaust by its instrumentalization. Its extreme weaponization by the Israeli state and its defenders over the last year, beyond I’ve anything I’ve ever seen, is another kind of intellectual and psychic self harm.

It really is very painful, because I think what’s not really being sufficiently understood is the very sinister and dangerous global conflation of Jews with Israel. You have large numbers of Jews living outside of Israel in perfect amity with their surrounding populations. But I think the idea has gone around—and I get asked these very disturbing questions in places like India—that every Jewish person in the world is somehow responsible for the State of Israel and should be answerable for it, in the way we used to ask those questions of Muslims after 9/11. That they should be held responsible for what some bunch of fanatics did on that day, I find that incredibly disturbing. Simultaneously, there isn’t enough pushback from Jewish organizations or various Jewish institutions to this idea and to distance themselves from an explicitly far-right regime in Israel, essentially a government of ethnic cleansers.

You’ve been a persistent, prescient critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The long arm of Hindu supremacism has reached here in Canada. Last year, we witnessed the assassination of a Canadian Sikh activist. Targetted harassment of critics is widespread. Hindu supremacists, increasingly active in the country, are adopting the language of anti-racism and multiculturalism as a cover for their reactionary politics, in ways reminiscent of organized apologists for Israel.

I would be more specific and say that Hindu nationalism today very carefully and deliberately approximates the potent language of Israel, and that it is creating a memory culture around the partition of India and around the narrative of victimization of Hindus by Muslims, because it has realized how successful the Israeli narrative is in provoking support from Western countries and also insulating the country from criticism.

Modi is very deliberately trying to create a culture of memory, a culture of organized remembrance, whether it’s deciding to observe partition as sort of Horrors day, as he calls it, and various other kinds of attempts to commemorate that event and various other events. Essentially, they’re all connected to this narrative of how Hindus were humiliated, murdered, and forcibly converted to Islam over centuries.

Along with that, this kind of siege victim mentality, this militant expansionism. There was a piece in Jewish Currents a few months back about how Hindu American activists have borrowed very clearly from the language of pro-Israeli Americans, and use that to delegitimize any criticism of the Hindu nationalist government, saying essentially that these people are anti-Hindu. So anti-Hinduism is the new antisemitism.

You have a book on the politics of anger. We have a master manipulator of mass disaffection in Canada in Pierre Poilievre, who’s the leader of the Conservative Party. He’s presented himself as a kind of challenger of the elite, though his biggest supporters, much like elsewhere in the world when it comes to right wing faux populists, are the ultra-rich and corporate titans. What’s your sense of the way in which he is an expression of a broader global dynamic?

I think the right is on the ascendant, and using and deploying and borrowing more and more from the arsenal of the far-right. I think there’s a heightening of political rhetoric. I would say it’s become more overtly white supremacist. Even in societies that claim to be immigrant societies—certainly the United States and maybe to a lesser extent Canada, which is  nevertheless a society created by immigrants. This is something that is now in this mode of ethnonationalism. It’s white supremacism in the West. It’s Hindu nationalism in India.

At a time when there are no clear cut solutions to the deep economic crises generated by a deeply unequal economic system of capitalism, I think one thing that all politicians of the right and the centre right are converging on is how to define the national communities—how to define the internal and external enemy, how to channel people’s anger—which is deeply rooted in the kind of injustices and humiliations they suffer on a daily basis: in their workplace, in their homes, deeply unequal systems in which they have to operate. How to channel all that anger and frustration against some of the most vulnerable people in those societies, and that includes minorities and immigrants.

You see that happening all around the world, and it’s not an accident. I think it testifies to a global impasse. You’ve basically arrived at the end of a horrible experiment that has gone wrong—capitalist globalization—that has generated extreme levels of inequality and immiserated large populations, and yet it’s unstoppable. There is no political will to address its severe inequalities, its injustices, so all politicians now do is essentially seek power through the most unethical and unscrupulous means for four or five years, then they are replaced by another bunch of unscrupulous people.

Talking of political principle and scruple, in our public life almost seems like a utopian fantasy. We just have a bunch of incredibly unscrupulous people who want to protect their power. Unfortunately, there are a lot of journalists who help them do precisely that, because they also want to protect themselves in their positions.

At places like the CBC, hosts of major shows are forced to apologize even for uttering the word “Palestine.”

It’s grown to pathetic and comical proportions, really, the attempt to kind of completely suppress the agency of Israel. You can talk about polio, but you won’t mention Israel’s role in that. You can talk about a ceasefire, but even the prime ministers of the UK and France and Germany put out a statement that talks about Hamas and Iran, but doesn’t even mention Israel. Truly extraordinary and brazen.

That brazenness is a sign of weakness, which is something to be heartened by? There has been an incredible convulsion of awakening, especially among young people, where the blinders are falling away, and people are clocking into these systemic distortions of the media like never before.

In my lecture I mention young writers and their efforts to push back against this kind of propaganda and to create their own kind of outlets. Essentially, I think they really are the only hope for us right now. I have absolutely no faith in people in senior editorial positions in Western mainstream media. None whatsoever. I don’t think they can change or that they can reform their institutions. Quite the contrary—I think as long as they are there, these institutions will get more corrupted and more compromised.