A meme in the making

In a new BBC documentary, the Palestinian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister - and if you can't believe Palestinian officials, who can you believe? - say President Bush told them that God asked him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan:

President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

The "moral and religious obligation" quote sounds legit, but the "mission from God" stuff sounds like the left's most entrenched stereotypes about Dubya - which is why this story, which Bush can never adequately disprove, will be accepted as God's own truth on the left side of the blogosphere. And not just the blogosphere - already, The Independent is accepting the Mazen/Shaath version of events as established fact.

What did Bush say to the Palestinians? I dunno, but in 2003 - when this story was first broken by Ha'aretz - a Religious Studies Professor writing for the far-left site CommonDreams.com noted that the remarks were translated several times over:

"According to Abbas, Bush said: 'God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.'"

Before you jump to any conclusions, remember that you are reading a translation of a translation of a translation. Mahmoud Abas does not speak English. Bush does not speak Arabic. If Bush said these words, or something like them, Abas heard them from a translator. Then Abas repeated them, as he remembered them a couple of weeks later, in Arabic. Some unknown person wrote down what he thought he heard Abas say. Then Regular, or someone at Ha'aretz, translated them back into English-or perhaps first into Hebrew and then into English.

(This is CommonDreams.com, so it should be noted that the Professor assumes the comments, or something very much like them, were indeed made by the President.)

My own theory? I think Bush said something like the "moral and religious obligation" quote, and it was more or less translated and interpreted as "God told me to" - which sounds very much like what a politician in the Middle East would indeed say. (Laurence Simon and Judith Weiss agree.) And guess what? It doesn't matter one bit, because for the "reality-based community", the way Abu Mazen recounts the story is simply so good it must be true.

(via Tim Blair)

Correction: I changed the last sentence of this post to make more sense.

Update: Scott Burgess has more, including a photo of the front page of today's Independent. Even the most jaded Indy-watchers will be astonished.

According to the Guardian, the BBC itself is backing away from this story - not because the story is complete bunk, mind you, but because of Rupert Murdoch or something:

BBC programme editors turned lukewarm on a claim by a BBC2 programme that George Bush believed God told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan after a strong denial by the White House.

Just 24 hours after accusations that the corporation's news coverage was backing away from risk-taking, some of the BBC's key outlets decided not to run an exclusive story unearthed by BBC2 about the US president.
[...]
The lukewarm response by other BBC outlets to a BBC News exclusive in the wake of a denial by the US government is likely to dismay the new head of television news, Peter Horrocks.

Just a few days ago he urged staff not to be afraid of being first with stories, as long as they were factually accurate.

It is perhaps inevitable that suspicions may be raised about any cautious reception to BBC stories that do not present Mr Bush in the best light following Rupert Murdoch's comments that Tony Blair had told him BBC World's coverage of Hurricane Katrina was "just full of hate for America and gloating about our troubles".

Posted by damian at October 7, 2005 09:04 AM | TrackBack