Foul language

Veteran
Israeli journalist Amira Hass received a lifetime achievement award
last week in New York for her unrelenting coverage of the oppression of
Palestinians in Israel’s occupied territories. During her acceptance
speech to the International Women’s Media Foundation, Hass confessed
that she didn’t really have a lifetime of “achievement,” only a long
record of failure. “It is the failure to make the Israeli and the
international public use and accept correct terms and words,” she said,
adding that Orwellian Newspeak is flourishing in the Middle East. Hass
pointed, for example, to the frequently used term “peace process” which
hides the reality of continuing Israeli attacks on Palestinians. (The
recent Israeli military assault on Gaza killed about 1,400 Palestinians
while 13 Israelis died, four of them victims of Israeli fire.)

“The peace process terminology,” Hass said, “blurs the perception of
real processes that are going on: a special Israeli blend of military
occupation, colonialism, apartheid, Palestinian limited self-rule in
enclaves and a democracy for Jews.” She added that the official peace
language adopted by media conceals the long list of everyday
restrictions imposed on Palestinians—Gazan students, for example, are
prohibited from studying at a Palestinian university in the West Bank
only 70 kilometres away, while Palestinians over 18 in the West Bank
are not allowed to visit their parents in Gaza—unless the parents are
dying.

Hass’s reference to Newspeak recalled the language created by Big
Brother’s totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s novel 1984.
Orwell wrote that Newspeak was designed to suppress thought by
eliminating words that referred to concepts such as freedom, justice or
even rebellion. 1984 was obviously intended as satire, but
Orwell also wrote a 1946 essay about the grim state of ordinary
political language, which, he said, was “designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable.” Just think, for example, of the Bush
administration’s “enhanced interrogation” as a cover for torture or
Stephen Harper’s frequent references to Canada’s “mission” in
Afghanistan—a benign description of a bloody, protracted war. During
a visit to Kandahar in May, Harper declared “our mission is to leave
Afghanistan to its people as a viable country, a more peaceful country,
a country in control of its own destiny.” He bragged that his
government had supplied the best available tools for this
peace-building mission: military helicopters, transport planes and
tanks. Indeed. As the slogan in 1984 says: “War is peace.”

Yes, our politicians routinely resort to their own kinds of
Newspeak, some of it calculated to make them seem like real nice folks.
Even the ultra-right-wing Canadian hack David Frum seemed shocked when
he signed onto George W. Bush’s speechwriting team in 2001. In a book
about his work at the White House, Frum writes that Karen Hughes,
Bush’s chief spin doctor, imposed strict rules: “She barred the word
business,” Frum notes, “businesses were always to be called
’employers.’ The word parents was strictly forbidden: We were to
say ‘moms and dads’ instead. The phrase tax cuts was
unaccept-able—too drastic; instead we were to offer ‘tax relief,’
like a healing balm.”

Frum writes that Hughes disliked verbs because they conveyed action,
not feeling. If verbs had to be used, Hughes decreed they should be as
vague as possible. Verbs like “create,” “act” and “keep in mind” were
OK. “Above all things, she hated the word but, a word that
suggested harsh choices, conflict, even confrontation. A text for the
president must never read: ‘We have done much, but we must do more.’ It
should say instead, ‘We have done much, and we must do
more.'”

Often it’s hard for journalists to combat such warm and fuzzy
political language, with its frequent references to peace and
democracy. Amira Hass calls it “official language that encourages
people not to know.” She ended her speech by stressing again that her
own efforts to convey the stark realities of Palestinian oppression
were “a remarkable failure for a journalist.”

This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2009.