{"id":1478,"date":"2014-10-16T16:56:10","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T14:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=1478"},"modified":"2017-11-21T12:22:41","modified_gmt":"2017-11-21T10:22:41","slug":"now-monbiot-is-smearing-the-bbc-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2014-10-16\/now-monbiot-is-smearing-the-bbc-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Now Monbiot is smearing the BBC too"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I criticised Guardian columnist George Monbiot for lavishing\u00a0the term “genocide denier” on anyone who disagrees with him about the events in Rwanda 20 years ago. I described<\/a> Monbiot\u00a0as a “McCarthy of the left”, after he waged a campaign of vilification of\u00a0prominent dissident intellectuals Ed Herman and David Peterson for seeking to\u00a0critically\u00a0re-examine the west’s\u00a0official narrative about Rwanda \u2013 that the Hutu majority alone\u00a0committed a genocide against the Tutsi minority \u2013\u00a0and questioning whether\u00a0Rwanda’s current Tutsi president, Paul Kagame, and his RPF forces were\u00a0not also deeply complicit in the slaughter.<\/p>\n

Monbiot’s witch-hunt has also targeted\u00a0others on the left, such as Noam Chomsky, who supported Herman and Peterson’s right to engage in the critical study of what they call the “politics of genocide”.<\/p>\n

Monbiot’s efforts to silence these critical voices on the left was thrown a\u00a0curveball\u00a0this month when the BBC, one of the biggest\u00a0enforcers of official narratives, broadcast a programme, Rwanda’s Untold Story<\/a>, raising many of\u00a0the\u00a0same questions as Herman and Peterson. What would Monbiot do?<\/p>\n

Well, I have to give him credit: he is consistent.\u00a0He has joined\u00a0other journalists, academics and activists deeply committed to\u00a0the official Rwanda narrative in accusing the BBC and its\u00a0programme-makers of genocide denial too. In fact, in their letter to the BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, they accuse the BBC team\u00a0of genocide denial no less than 10 times!<\/p>\n

For those who wish to follow the details of this correspondence, the letter from Monbiot et al can be found here<\/a>. A\u00a0reply from David Peterson is available here<\/a>. And there are\u00a0a further letters to Hall from Theogene Rudasingwa<\/a>, who was once\u00a0in Kagame’s inner circle, and from Christopher Black<\/a>, the barrister for\u00a0Augustin Ndindiliyimana, a Hutu general acquitted of genocide crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal\u00a0for Rwanda.<\/p>\n

In this increasingly polarised debate, I recommend reading\u00a0Justin Podur’s interventions. He is a journalist with a deep interest in African politics who has been following both sides of the argument closely. He does not agree with\u00a0all of\u00a0Herman and Peterson’s conclusions but, importantly, he argues\u00a0that the official narrative about Rwanda is inadequate and that it is vital\u00a0to create space for\u00a0a respectful debate about what really happened. That stands in stark contrast to Monbiot’s position, and illustrates my reasons for calling his campaign against Herman, Peterson, Chomsky and others McCarthyite.<\/p>\n

On his blog, Podur makes the essential\u00a0point that, despite the repeated smear from Monbiot and his allies in their letter to Hall,\u00a0the BBC documentary does not deny Rwanda’s\u00a0genocide: it simply makes the case that Kagame’s role in the genocide, entirely overlooked in the official narrative, needs reassessing and that his current regime, solidly backed by western powers, should be held to account for committing mass murder in neighbouring Congo and for its totalitarian rule\u00a0inside Rwanda.<\/p>\n

By creating a sacred narrative about Rwanda’s\u00a0genocide, the BBC documentary suggests, Kagame has provided himself\u00a0with\u00a0the\u00a0cover needed to continue with his rule of terror.<\/p>\n

Podur quotes from Monbiot et al’s letter: “Denial… ensures the crime continues. It incites new killing. It denies the dignity of the deceased and mocks those who survived.”<\/p>\n

Podur\u00a0concludes:<\/p>\n

And yet, the letter writers [including Monbiot] do all of those things. If the victims of the RPF don’t count, as they do not seem to to these writers, then what is this except denial? All of the victims in Central Africa – of the defeated Rwandan government, of the RPF, of the RPF’s proxies and of their opponents – all deserve to be acknowledged, not denied. The BBC documentary deserved better than shoddy arguments and mudslinging. Kagame is still in power, and the only function of this letter is to provide him with cover. Rather than a letter about ‘genocide denial’, the authors would have been more honest to write a manifesto of unconditional support for Rwanda’s dictator.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

http:\/\/podur.org\/node\/1088<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I criticised Guardian columnist George Monbiot for lavishing\u00a0the term “genocide denier” on anyone who disagrees with him about the events in Rwanda 20 years ago. I described Monbiot\u00a0as a “McCarthy of the left”, after he waged a campaign of vilification of\u00a0prominent dissident intellectuals Ed Herman and David Peterson for seeking to\u00a0critically\u00a0re-examine the west’s\u00a0official narrative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,61,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-1478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-bbc","8":"tag-george-monbiot","9":"tag-media-criticism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2850,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478\/revisions\/2850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}