Documentary you will never see

wv wrote:

Will we ever see the film ‘the Lobby’:https://popularresistance.org/will-we-ever-see-al-jazeeras-investigation-into-the-israel-lobby/

Excerpt:

“…
…..Almost every journalist I’ve met in the Middle East has encountered similar problems. When I worked for the The Times, I alerted the then editor, Charles Douglas-Home, to evidence that Israeli officers had secretly buried at least seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners – done to death in an interrogation centre – at night in a Sidon graveyard in 1983. He wanted me to spend as many weeks as necessary to find out if the story was true. Then, months later, when witnesses emerged with evidence of the burial, including the gravedigger – the bodies still had their hands tied behind their back with nylon rope when they were brought to him – I called my editor. My witnesses were being “visited” by armed members of the Israeli Shin Beth intelligence agency, I told him, and I was being trailed around Sidon by Israeli-registered vehicles. It was time to run the story.

To my shock, Douglas-Home – an editor who otherwise loyally stood by me in every Middle East dispute over my work – replied that he wasn’t sure “how we’re justified in running a story like this so long after the event”. In other words, we had to be sure of our facts on such an important story – but by taking the time to do just that, the story was now out of date.

After much argument – during which I suggested to the Israelis that they might like to institute a military inquiry into the deaths if they wanted to avoid a scandal (they said, mysteriously, that it was already under way, although I doubted this) – the story ran. A deputy editor, I was told, had tried to cut the report by two-thirds. He was overruled. Then the story ran. In full.

So, old story, new story. I’ve appeared many times on Al Jazeera. And never been told to mince my words. Nor would I. But a lot of us are waiting to see Swisher’s new documentary. If we don’t, we’ll know what to think of Al Jazeera.”

It’s almost a common place of history: The oppressed become oppressors when the power dynamic is reversed.

Reading again about early Christianity and the Roman empire, it’s pretty stunning to consider just how quickly Christians turned into vicious, violent and all too often sadistic oppressors of pagans, more than reversing the previous dynamic — actually, many times over.

Also just finished rereading a very good biography of one of my favorite writers of the 20th century, Bruno Schulz, a magical Polish/Jewish author who was killed by the Gestapo in 1942. Thinking about the Nazi terror, the Holocaust, the profoundly tragic loss of life, of art, music, literature, of culture in general. So many of Schulz’s friends and relatives died in pogroms or the Final Solution as well.

Fast forward to the Israeli occupation, its wars, etc. etc. . . . and they’ve become oppressors in their own right.

On an individual level, yes, humans can and do remember what we’ve gone through and make sure not to even come close to doing that to others. It becomes part of who we are. But in the aggregate, when that power dynamic changes . . . . it’s just amazing how quickly we can forget.