Experimental listening
| 18:15 UK time, Monday, 4 September 2006
As you may have read elsewhere on this blog, my colleague Adrian Brown wrote about the World Tonight's staging of a war crimes trial over the recent conflict in Lebanon last Friday. Both the Israelis and Hezbollah had been accused of breaking humanitarian law by senior UN officials and the respected pressure group, Human Rights Watch.
We asked our listeners to be the jury and send us their verdict, and we announced the verdict last Friday; a little more than half say the Israeli Defence Force committed war crimes and just under half say Hezbollah are also guilty. But the debate goes on and the e-mails are still coming in - though the proportions have not altered substantially.
Unlike some other online debates we did not ask for a simple guilty/not guilty vote as we wanted to get a sense of the thinking that led our listeners to reach their verdicts, which make really interesting reading.
It was an experiment, and although we, the ´óÏó´«Ã½, were not making the cases - we left that to the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth - we did get some criticism for it. But the level and quality of the defence mounted on the programme and the e-mails we have received since, I think, made it - on balance - a successful experiment.
Comments
To be frank, I am appalled by the savage onslaught by the Israeli Airforce against Lebanese civilians, involving the deaths of about 1,000 people and destruction of homes and infrastructure. This is inexcusable! I am also disgusted by the Hezbullah fighters for firing rockets at Israeli civilians, killing a number of innocent people. I am dismayed by the pitiful response by our own Government to this loss of life. We must not give Israel a blank cheque to kill/destroy as they wish.
I am not anti Israel, but I do think they have behaved badly towards the Palestians in annexing their lands. They have been condemned in the UN for this but have shown no remorse for their behaviour. Why should they, while USA/UK support them? This needs to be put right soonest. When the Islam/Arab world notes that we are being more fair in our observations, many current Muslim extremists may become more moderate. We will then have fewer extremists to worry about! Should we continue to follow USA blindly, the situation will rapidly deteriorate with disasterous consequences for all.
Did it need a result?
The trial format is an excellent tool, but couldnt you just leave the audience to make up their own minds passively, without having to come up with some kind result one way or the other?
The people who email in are never going to be representative, so what ever result you get is likely to be skewed. I dont see what value is added by trying to get a result.
The braver thing would be to end the trial without a verdict and trust the intelligence of the listener to make it's own mind up.
It's surprising that you don't have a big middle ground that says "a plague on both your houses;" your split is pretty much a "partisan" split between those who believe Israel has a right to exist and those who want to see it destroyed.
What you are seeing is the result of your own biased coverage throughout the war.
It's remarkable, and disgusting, that more than half think that Hizballah, which launched rockets laden with ball bearings at hospitals in the middle of cities, and which warned all of one ethnic group to leave Haifa so that another could be slaughtered, is "not guilty of war crimes," while Israel, which made an attempt to get the civilians out (automatically phoning 2/3 of south Lebanon over and over again saying "leave! we're coming!"), is.
But then, your coverage through the war was consistently slanted. So the ignorance of your listeners is not a surprise.
Unless, of course, your listeners actually bought the legalistic and rhetorical arguments of Mr. Quigley, and don't think that a non-governmental group can commit a war crime... . In that case, suppose that certain Serbian Serb gangsters make this argument when confronted with charges that they committed war crimes against Muslims in Bosnia.
Nasrallah and his entire command structure are unrepentant war criminals who should be tried and imprisoned for what they have done -- not only to Israel, but to Lebanon itself.
How do you cope with organised activist campaigns (such as the pro-Israel lobby group giyus) attempting to distort the results?
Just seen this thanks to one of the (excellent) blogs exposing (anti-Israel) bias at the ´óÏó´«Ã½.
This is absolutely shameful.
But then you would say that wouldn't you?!It was a farce from beginning to end.