Globe and Mail censored criticism of Israel by award-winning Indian author 

Pankaj Mishra’s lecture tracked two decades of media cheerleading for western wars, but its criticisms of Israel were edited out by newspaper

When Pankaj Mishra’s article for The Globe and Mail was returned to him with every mention of Israel edited out, he was not surprised.

The well-known Indian author, who is in Toronto to deliver a lecture and receive the Weston International Award for his non-fiction writing, told The Breach that the incident “is part of a continuum of such attempts that I’ve personally encountered to suppress and stifle criticism of Israel.”

Winners of the $75,000 award, launched last year, customarily have an excerpt from their lecture published in The Globe and Mail.

But when Mishra submitted his text, which blasts the “unapologetically mendacious coverage of Gaza in the Western media,” he received it back with every single mention of Israel cut out. In total, The Breach counted 17 examples.

“It was presented as an edit that was, essentially, going to focus on the main points of my talk,” he said. “But I couldn’t help seeing that even when I was talking about Israel in the part of the lecture which they wanted to publish, there too the references to Israel were taken out.”

“I’m very strongly inclined to believe that this was a political decision to not carry criticism of Israel,” said Mishra, who pulled the excerpt after receiving the proposed edits.

The Globe and Mail did not reply to a request for comment by time of publication.

Ironically, some of the newspaper’s proposed cuts related to Mishra’s descriptions of past experiences having his writing on Israel stifled.

“My own sporadic attempts to tackle the subject in the past made me aware of an insidious Western regimen of repressions and prohibitions,” he wrote in one line that was cut. 

His lecture, which is taking place at the Royal Ontario Museum, delivers a sweeping critique of the media’s complicity in decades of western-backed wars, from the “War on Terror” to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which has claimed at least 41,000 Palestinian lives.

Mishra, who is based in London, UK and Mashobra, India, regularly writes for The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He has written two novels and eight books of nonfiction, including Age of Anger, From the Ruins of Empire, and Bland Fanatics.

In an interview with The Breach before he delivered his lecture on Monday, Mishra discussed how his encounter with The Globe and Mail—“a very minor episode in a long list of atrocities both literal and intellectual”—was reflective of a broader crisis of western journalism and intellectual culture.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Breach: You say you weren’t surprised by The Globe and Mail’s efforts to excise critical commentary about Israel. Why?

Pankaj Mishra: I think The Globe and Mail’s decision is one of the many such decisions that I’ve faced over the years. It’s not at all shocking to people of non-Western ancestry. We have faced a consistent regime of censorship and suppression. Not just Palestinians, not just Arabs, you talk to even some of the most successful writers of non-Western ancestry, and each one of them will tell you many, many stories about editors saying “We can’t do this. Can you change that? Can you rephrase that?”

That extends to direct criticism of Western politicians or Western writers or Western journalists. Among the other things that I say in the lecture, I name people who have been responsible for normalizing torture, such as Michael Ignatieff. I think it’s not just criticisms of Israel that The Globe and Mail took out, but also where I directly named individuals and institutions, like The Atlantic, which were responsible for the degeneration of the public sphere long before Trump arrived. It’s a real mistake to think it’s all started with Trump. This has been happening for some time now. Before he started ranting against Haitian immigrants, you had people publishing articles normalizing torture in The New York Times Magazine. 

My career more or less coincides with the beginning of the war on terror, and I’m now in my mid-50s, and I’ve seen this happen the last two and a half decades, and have taken away some very bleak lessons from it. 

That certainly fits with the evasions and erasures on Palestine that The Breach has been documenting in Canada’s establishment media over the last year.

Since I was given this prize and I got in touch with my Canadian friends, I’ve been shocked to discover how the atmosphere of repression is dominant here, and has been for some time. I’ve just come to realize that this is a much broader problem. It’s not confined to the U.S. and the U.K. and Germany and France. This is all tied to the larger question that I try to raise in my talk: what is going on with the mainstream Western media?

To what extent can it afford to lose its credibility, its legitimacy, and leave the space wide open for demagogues like Elon Musk or digital media to peddle its conspiracy theories and its fictions? We’re talking about a degree of self harm.

Young people now who are looking at these news outlets and thinking: “What is going on here with these traditional, legacy media outlets?” They will be asking these questions and turning away from these outlets. It affects me personally, because I’ve made my career in these particular institutions, in these periodicals. I would definitely want them to flourish. I’m not coming at them from the outside and saying they should all be destroyed. 

I want the legacy outlets to adjust their vision to this new world that we are all living in—now a heavily politicized world—but they seem incapable of learning from their blunders. The War on Terror was the first such major intellectual atrocity, with much of the media egging on and cheerleading a war on Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, 20 years later, trying to draw a veil of silence over the atrocities in Gaza. Two episodes of suppression, of propaganda by omission or obfuscation. It should be deeply concerning to everyone who cares about the life of the mind, intellectual freedom, and the overall health of democratic society.

Some of the cuts by The Globe and Mail in Pankaj Mishra’s text

“Even the liquidation of Gaza, which unlike many atrocities, has been live streamed by both its perpetrators and victims, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the main organs of the Western media.”

“Certainly, the Western account of Israel’s recent ‘self-defense’ yet again exposes the radical incongruity between what is said by mainstream journalists in the West and what the rest of us see happening in the world.”

“Today, the war on terror is more widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. It is still not fully grasped as a massive intellectual fiasco: a doomed attempt by the media as well as the political class to forge reality itself. And partly because this disaster was unpunished—editors and writers pushing false narratives, and cheerleading violence, remained entrenched, and even received promotions—it is being reprised today in the Western coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.”

“The conviction that ‘diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print’ is verified as, while showering Israel with lethal weapons and munitions, American diplomats preside, with the help of a compliant press, over a charade of ‘negotiations’ to buy Israel more time to pursue land grabs and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“One could read millions of words on the merits of Western democracy and liberalism and the evils of Eastern totalitarianism by such celebrated writers of Anglo-America as Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, Martin Amis, Thomas Friedman, Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum,without encountering a paragraph on the consequences of slavery, imperialism and decolonization in Asia and Africa. The liberal internationalists barely manifested any awareness that America’s own democracy had been secured by mass bondage, colonial dispossession and wars of aggression.”(crossed out parts were cut by The Globe and Mail)

“One could read millions of words on the merits of Western democracy and liberalism and the evils of Eastern totalitarianism by such celebrated writers of Anglo-America as Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, Martin Amis, Thomas Friedman, Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum,without encountering a paragraph on the consequences of slavery, imperialism and decolonization in Asia and Africa. The liberal internationalists barely manifested any awareness that America’s own democracy had been secured by mass bondage, colonial dispossession and wars of aggression.”(crossed out parts were cut by The Globe and Mail)

You wrote a powerful essay in the London Review of Books in March entitled “The Shoah After Gaza,” about the deep misgivings that certain Jewish writers, all of them Holocaust survivors, eventually developed about the uncritical support they had initially leant to Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

We have these two major clashing historical narratives today, and they are unfortunately antagonistic. One is the narrative of the Shoah, broadly speaking, in which Israel really is at the centre, and the mass murder of Jews is invoked as a justification for what Israel does or what Israel has done over the years.

Courtesy The Breach.