11 September 2021
Marwan Dalal
Jonathan Freedland and David Ignatius are two journalists and novelists that embody the contemptable Anglo – American political center. Their journalism is repetitive of the two countries’ similar popular culture replete with cynicism about their governments’ intentional politics of destruction in foreign affairs.
A variant of New York Times’s Thomas Friedman’s war cheerleading, the two authors underscore Western values clichés while remaining silent about the actual purpose and conduct of their governments. Instigating chaos and destruction could be ironically noted in their subtext, but never as an act of transparent democratic revelation. They comfortably locate themselves in their countries’ militaries and intelligence services failing to be challenged by the obvious demonstrated in Hollywood films and other genres of mass culture. Freedland also narrates his family’s faith geopolitically during troubling times for another country, the State of Israel.
Reading them requires a constant effort to acknowledge the actuality and nature of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Difficult challenge. As if they are glad about the untold true story while reporting or commenting on foreign affairs. They may arouse repulsiveness for some. But the ordinary Anglo-American reader has probably been numbingly accustomed to their performing writing. It has been comforting to see the genuine politics of destruction being exposed by a similar reporter Alastair Campbell who interviewed the three journalists’ political idol Tony Blair in May 2017. Vivid anomalous psychopathy where the only governing ideology and motive is the office, in its comedian sense, while acting during global problems and difficulties.
AC: We got accused of lying the whole time when we didn’t. But Trump lies all the time.
TB: Alastair, I’ve got enough issues. When you’re me you have to choose the issues, you want to get into.[1]
Both Freedland and Ignatius write novels described as thrillers. Writing under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, the BBC and the Guardian reporter Freedland has sought to narrate a heroic Jewish character closer to the United States and Israel, rather than in Britain. Given the timing of his initial novels published during mounting visibility of Israel’s brutal policies against the Palestinians and Freedland’s personal emotions towards the foreign country there seems to be a clear attempt to fictionally counter the growing awareness in Britain about Israel’s nature.[2] Freedland is troubled by his Anglo – Jewish identity and has yet to find the appropriate balance between both. He should continue soul searching in his home country. His longing to capture the agenda of America’s Council on Foreign Relations in his novels is peculiar and should be analyzed following the journalist’s psyche rather than as a result of historical developments in international politics.
The British commentator was almost courageous enough to challenge the accepted narrative on the perpetrators of the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, until Israel got in the way or simply instigated his rare and mild contestation to the American story. This country, Israel, should not be a central issue for progressives or others, Freedland preached. After all, it is not Israel’s history in the region, however incomplete and distorted by Freedland, that is problematic:
Last Tuesday's hijackers and the people who inspire them are not opposed to the post-1967 occupation: they are opposed to Israel's very existence, which they regard as an alien Jewish incursion into what should be Muslim lands.[3]
Freedland’s identification with the British establishment and its intelligence agencies, or “her majesty the Queen”, is complete and disturbing which denies him the self-proclaimed status of preacher to progressives. The reporter has objectively and approvingly explained the British approach to lack of transparency and accountability for the country’s intelligence agencies, compared with the limited congressional oversight in the United States.[4]The scope of international legality is beyond the reach of the British government, Freedland insists.
David Ignatius is the CIA’s man in the Washington Post. No need for members of Congress to leak him information. He covers the agency, among other issues he writes about, and generates sympathetic novels about the organization. No conflict of interest or any transparency issues arise from his dual performance. Needless to say, the abhorrent shadowy work of the CIA which forms part of the American republic’s self-identification and is common knowledge politically, academically, culturally, and athletically is never reported about either in Ignatius’s journalism or in his industrial literary production. The author’s irony, though, could reveal the tricky and deadly operations of the CIA. Few days after the 11 September 2001 attacks Ignatius implied that it was directed to exert pressure on American politicians to secure additional funding for the Pentagon, its varying intelligence agencies, and the CIA while nostalgically defending the CIA’s Middle East destructive operations.[5]
Ignatius’s propaganda does not even attempt to contest the mainstream war narration levelled by his veteran colleague Bob Woodward. What Woodward writes about is a given for Ignatius. The question is how to frame an appropriate tale about it often blaming others for America’s faults. He does not disguise his approach, brilliantly or otherwise. Ignatius is content on telling little as well as considerable lies.
Indeed, one of Ignatius’s novels adapted to a film in the post Afghanistan and Iraq invasions is titled Body of Lies (2007; 2008).[6] He neither confronts intelligence failures nor does the celebrated author address the illegality of the wars. Ignatius succinctly captures American war fetishism. He wholeheartedly identifies with the country’s quest to employ any mean necessary to engage in war while attempting to destroy obstacles that could stand in its way.
Ignatius should be studied in third world countries to understand what American foreign policy is actually about. In the Arab world, even those who critique American foreign policy have yet to grasp the magnitude of America’s destructiveness. Others shamelessly and ignorantly follow the official American vocabulary about human rights and democratization failing to understand the depth of illegality, impunity, cover up, and willful silence that dominate the American mode of governance. Anti-Americanism should not be a source of pride in the third world. It is a reasonable behavior.
Although the two articles by Freedland and Ignatius about the 11 September 2001 attacks that I referenced are revelatory, we should not expect them to be honest about the tragic events of that day.[7] “We didn’t start the fire” is their expected response. Watching Oliver Stone’s earth quacking film World Trade Center (2006) is sufficient to better understand the work of American security and political affairs. The film does not follow the conventional wisdom, popular more outside the United States, about what made that day transformative. It only shows a shadow of a plain not hitting the towers and seems to disregard the bombing at the Pentagon. Blaming explosions had been common in the United States (as well as abroad) prior and subsequent to the inception of the war on terror.
Jonathan Freedland
David Ignatius
* Telling Lies is also a 1997 song by David Bowie that captures the essence of this article.
[1] Blair also said “But what has happened in Syria in my view is a hideous blot on Western foreign policy”. Exceptional choice of words.
[2] See also Jonathan Freedland, “To Labour’s Anti-Semitism Saga, a Bitter Denouement”, New York Review of Books, 3 November 2020. Freedland’s mild tone in this article about anti-Semitism claims against Jeremy Corbyn that peaked during the 2019 elections campaign are contrary to his excitement shortly after the elections results: Jonathan Freedland, “This is a repudiation of Corbynism. Labour needs to ditch the politics of the sect”, The Guardian, 13 December 2019.
[3] Jonathan Freedland, “Blaming the Victims”, The Guardian, 19 September 2001.
[4] Jonathan Freedland, “Why Surveillance Doesn’t Matter”, New York Times, 8 November 2013; Jonathan Freedland, “The spooks will keep spying on us Brits: we clearly don’t care”, The Guardian, 6 November 2015.
[5] David Ignatius, “Penetrating Terrorist Networks”, Washington Post, 16 September 2001.
[6] For discussions on the concepts of Lying and Truth telling in Anglo American political and ethical philosophy which sophisticates the countries’ popular culture see Robert Boyers, “Observations on Lying & Liars”, 29 Salmagundi, pp.45-66 (1975); Joseph Kupfer, “The Moral Presumption Against Lying”, 36(1) Metaphysics (1982); Andrus Pork, “History, Lying, ad Moral Responsibility”, 29(3) History & Theory, pp.321-330 (1990); Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian, Secrets, Lies, and Democracy (Mass Market, 1995); Ronald Dworkin, Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe it”, 25(2) Philosophy & Public Affairs, pp.87-139 (1996); Glen Newey, “Political Lying: A Defence”, 11(2) Public Affairs Quarterly, pp.93-116 (1997); Jonathan Adler, “Lying, Deceiving, or Falsely Implicating”, 94(9) Journal of Philosophy, pp.435-452 (1997); John Vignaux Smyth, The Habit of Lying: Sacrificial Studies in Literature, Philosophy, and Fashion Theory (Duke University Press, 2002); Paul Falkner, “What is Wrong with Lying?” 75(3) Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, pp.535-557 (2007); Peg Birmingham, “A Lying World Order: Deception and the Rhetoric of Terror”, 16(2) The Good Society, pp.32-37 (2007); Joshua Cohen, “Truth and Public Reason”, 37(1) Philosophy and Public Reason, pp.2-42 (2009); Don Fallis, “What is Lying?” 106(1) Journal of Philosophy, pp.29-56 (2009); Jennifer Saul, “Just Go Ahead and Lie”, 72(1) Analysis, pp.3-9 (2012); Dallas G. Denery II, The Devil Wines: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2015); Yann Wermuth, “Nietzsche’s Notion of Lying”, 50(1) Journal of Nietzsche Studies, pp.149 – 169 (2019)(the discussion is not centred on Anglo American ethics and governance, but the journal is published in the United States).
[7] Tragedy is another central concept in the American political mythology. Domestically, it is associated with the hyperactivity of the FBI.
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