Fateful Triangle

Peace for Galilee500Party of the Soviet Union,” abetted by an alliance with the powerful andnefarious organization Wafa (the official PLO news agency). “Theoutburst last summer of a campaign which is not simply one ofintimidation or of disinformation, but which has steadily assumed thedimension of an actual broad-scale mass psychological war, gives rise toserious concern,” the director-general explains. 257 The phrase “mediapogrom” thus understates the scale of the aggression against Israel inthe summer of 1982; it was a “psychological war.” *Now we can understand why the American and world press andtelevision gave such an incredibly distorted picture of the war, one sounfair to Israel. How could one expect simple western journalists toresist the skillfully coordinated machinations of Wafa and the CP newsservices, or even to be aware of the dark forces that were controlling andmanipulating them. Recall the New Republic exposé of how UPI was“snookered by a pro” (the Soviet news agency) when it gave a watereddown version of the vacuum bomb story that was presented in detail inthe mainstream Israeli press, sure proof of the anti-Israel bias of theU.S. media, as editor Martin Peretz triumphantly proclaimed (seesection 4.7).The director-general of the Department of Information relies heavilyon an amusing book by Annie Kriegel, which appeared in Paris in thefall of 1982. He identifies Kriegel (whom he mistakes to be a man) as“a professor of sociology and an internationally known specialist onCommunist affairs.” He does not add that she is a long-time functionary*Compare the discussion of the alleged success of North Vietnamesepropaganda in “exploiting” the “vulnerability” of American opinion in the NewRepublic review of Braestrup’s study (see p. 486*), an interpretation favored bya number of people who were seriously frightened by the partial breakdown ofideological controls in the 1960s.Classics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky