In our recent discussion about the resistance (which, to me, is a value-neutral word, encompassing both armed and unarmed actions against the occupation) in Iraq, I was puzzling over some Left Business Observers' odd insistence on putting the word "resistance" between quotation marks in their subject lines and messages -- e.g.:
>[lbo-talk] Iraqi communists on "resistance"
>Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
>Fri Feb 13 09:22:56 PST 2004
>
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>The Iraqi Communist Party has no future -- it not only fails to
>>lead street demonstrations to the occupation
>
>What does have a future? I really don't get your position here - do
>you admire the "resistance" because they can blow stuff up?
>
>Doug
It just occurred to me that Left Business Observers may be following the L.A. Times ban of the term "resistance fighters." :->
***** Thursday November 6, 8:36 AM L.A. Times bans 'resistance fighters' in Iraq news By Dan Whitcomb
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Los Angeles Times has ordered its reporters to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as "resistance fighters," saying the term romanticizes them and evokes World War II-era heroism.
The ban was issued by Melissa McCoy, a Times assistant managing editor, who told the staff in an e-mail circulated on Monday night that the phrase conveyed unintended meaning and asked them to instead use the terms "insurgents" or "guerrillas."
McCoy told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that the memo followed a discussion among top editors at the paper and was not sparked by reader complaints. The memo first surfaced on the Web site L.A. Observed (www.laobserved.com)
"(Times Managing Editor) Dean Baquet and I both individually had the same reaction when we saw the term used in the newspaper," McCoy said. "Both of us felt the phrase evoked a certain feeling, that there was a certain romanticism or heroism to the resistance."
McCoy said she considered "resistance fighters" an accurate description of Iraqis battling American troops, but it also evoked World War II -- specifically the French Resistance or Jews who fought against Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto.
"Really, it was something that just stopped us when we saw it, and it was really about the way most Americans have come to view the words," McCoy said.
McCoy said she was confident that the Times reporters who used the term had no intention of romanticizing the Iraqis who have killed more than 100 U.S. soldiers since Washington declared major combat over in May, and that the paper's Baghdad bureau had no objection to the policy change.
NOT COOL OR NEUTRAL
The policy change reflects the highly politicized atmosphere surrounding the war in Iraq, which has brought charges of biased reporting from all sides of the political spectrum.
McCoy said she did not know how many readers had made complaints about the use of the term.
"We are loath to proscribe the use of just about any word," she said. "But sometimes certain combinations of words send an unindented signal. You combine these two seemingly innocuous words and suddenly they have this unintended meaning."
Allan Siegal, assistant managing editor of the New York Times, told Reuters that he agreed with the decision made by his West Coast rivals.
"We don't have a policy but when you mentioned the phrase it sounded like romanticizing to me," Siegal said. "I don't think it's the kind of cool, neutral language we like to see."
But David Hoffman, foreign editor of the Washington Post, said his paper had used the phrase "resistance fighters" to describe Iraqi forces and had no objection to the term.
"They are resisting an American occupation so it's not inaccurate," Hoffman said. "We try to be as precise as possible and distinguish whether they are former Baath party, Fedayeen, outsiders, insiders. But that's not always possible."
According to a search of the Lexis-Nexis database, The Los Angeles Times has employed the term "resistance fighters" dozens of times in the past six months, including three references on Monday.
On Tuesday, the day after McCoy issued her memo, the paper used it in an editorial, which criticized the Bush administration for a lack of humility and candor over Iraq.
<http://in.news.yahoo.com/031106/137/29423.html> *****
>[lbo-talk] the much despised Tariq Ali on war's aftermath
>Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
>Sat Feb 14 12:57:15 PST 2004
>
>by whom is Tariq Ali despised? not me, not at all
About this topic of the resistance in Iraq, though, it appears that Doug, Seth, John Lacny, Mike Larkin, etc. have much more in common with Christopher Hitchens than Tariq Ali:
***** International Socialist Review Issue 33, January-February 2004 A conversation with Tariq Ali: Cracks in the empire Interviewed by David Barsamian
[David Barsamian]. . . IN YOUR book you call the resistance the maquis, which conjures up images of brave Frenchmen fighting the Nazi occupiers in the 1940s. There's been a bit of controversy at the Los Angeles Times about the term "resistance."
[Tariq Ali] THE MANAGEMENT of the Los Angeles Times has asked their journalists not to publish reports, which refer to the Iraqi resistance as the "resistance." They would prefer to use words like "insurgents," "guerrillas" or even "terrorists." This isn't going to work. They can change the name as much as they like. I noticed in a recent Los Angeles Times book review that Christopher Hitchens had the word "resistance" in inverted commas. You can't fool people all the time. What is going on is a classic resistance. It's much quicker than what happened in France. In France under Nazi occupation, it took a long time to get cracking. Then the U.S., the Office of Strategic Services and the British intelligence networks helped that resistance. They taught them how to blow up rail lines, kill occupying officers, throw hand grenades and so on. They were never called terrorists. They were called the maquis, the resistance. . . .
<http://www.isreview.org/issues/33/tariqali.shtml> *****
[A minor correction to Ali's remark: French resistance fighters _were_ called terrorists by Nazis and collaborators.]
***** Tariq Ali vs. Christopher Hitchens on the Occupation of Iraq: Postponed Liberation or Recolonisation?
. . . [Christopher Hitchens] I somewhat wish Tariq would not act as if he didn't know better when he describes those who don't like this as a resistance. There are members of the former regular force. They're not really guerrillas. These were people who were part of the security and police organs of the Ba'ath party augmented by some of the Bin Laden underworld. If these people are allowed to win or make any further progress, then all of the things that were predicted wrongly by the anti-war movement, such as mass exodus of refugee, humanitarian crisis, total social breakdown, ethnic and sectional civil war, and infanticide, all of those things will occur in Iraq, if this so-called resistance is not militarily defeated. Which I think, by the way, I'm not a military strategist, and I do know and I don't dispute, there are enormous reverses being experienced on this point, but I actually think that the American expedition is negligible in the defeats. . . .
<http://www.canadiandimension.mb.ca/extra/d1223ah.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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