Back home

Well, briefly on Monday, before flying off to Madrid (the patchwork of brown and yellow surrounding it looks even more of a desert than usual) and on to the West coast of Spain and heavy rain Tuesday.

Apart from comment on New Orleans (as previously posted), France Inter is full of stuff about Chirac's medical condition, which seems to have become public on Sunday. This has evoked memories of the medical bulletins that Mitterand introduced in 1981, which turned out to be composed of fictions, or contrevérités. This sounds a bit politer than the mensonges which is usually used about the Iraq war. 

From a quick glance through the usual weblogs I picked out A Study in Distortion: David Clark in the Guardian (by Shalom Lappin). This goes through the old ground of the peace efforts at Camp David in July 2000 and at Taba  January 2001, then the post-mortems in The New York Review of Books, August and September 2001. What is interesting though is what has become 'a staple of disinformation in much of the discussion in the British press of the events leading up to the intifada':

It is entirely unsurprising that fringe groups with intense ideological commitments will engage in propaganda and agitprop journalism, happily distorting the facts to promote their cause. It is in no sense acceptable that senior political figures and mainstream journalists, who purport to base their arguments on a serious consideration of the available evidence and a balanced view of the complex situation they are addressing, should indulge in this sort of fabrication and distortion.

David Clark, if I recall correctly, was an adviser to the late Robin Cook. The 'consensus view in the Guardian and much of the British press', that Shalom Lappin refers to, incorporates its simplistic anti-zionism with opposition to the Iraq war and a general anti-American outlook.