THEO VAN GOGH NEW: Emily Dische-Becker, the FAZ, the Hizbullah, and the truth
If I, as a journalist, want to reveal juicy facts about a person that were previously unknown to the public, I must have contacted that person beforehand and confronted him or her with these facts. This is one of the most elementary principles of my profession. To refrain from doing so is an absolute no-no. The temptation may be great not to complicate the supposedly already crystal-clear scoop by making an unpleasant phone call – but it is imperative to resist it. Not only for reasons of fairness. Also in one’s own interest. Then I know more and can defend myself better if things get nasty afterwards. After all, I don’t want to have to be ashamed of what I’ve written.
The week before last, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung landed such a scoop in the context of the abominable anti-Semitism scandal at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel: The writer Emily Dische-Becker, who is currently being dragged through the newspapers (€) as Documenta’s alleged “anti-Semitism advisor”, had a dubious past, FAZ staff reporter Lena Bopp revealed. According to her, Dische-Becker had worked as recently as 2015 for a Lebanese newspaper in Beirut that supported Hizbullah, the terrorist organisation committed to the destruction of Israel. “Connected to Hizbullah” (Der Hizbullah verbunden) was the headline (meanwhile the online version toned it down a bit to “Writing close to Hizbullah”, Schreiben in Hizbullah-Nähe). Wow! Close to BDS, that’s what many had assumed about those left-wing critics of Israel anyway. But a terror organization like Hizbullah!
None of this is true, it seems. Emily Dische-Becker, as she immediately clarified on Twitter, had co-authored a single article in Beirut for the Al-Akhbar newspaper in 2006, at the time the only left-wing, independent newspaper in Lebanon. From 2010 to 2012, she worked part-time for the newspaper’s English-language internet portal – which was editorially independent of the Arabic-language newspaper – as a researcher for Wikileaks, for which Al-Akhbar was the partner for the Arab region. It was only in 2011 that a new editor-in-chief took office and, after the uprising in Syria against Assad, turned the paper into a Hizbullah mouthpiece. This had been preceded by a fierce internal editorial conflict over the fact that the paper was becoming increasingly partisan and uncritical of Hizbullah and Assad. As a result, Dische-Becker quit and left Beirut in 2012 altogether, disappointed by the splintering of the Lebanese left into Assad opponents and supporters.
Emily Dische-Becker, who, by the way, is Jewish herself (which Lena Bopp was “of course” aware of, according to FAZ, but failed to mention in her article), has explained this to me in detail on the phone, and the key parts of this version of events seems to me to be well documented by affidavits from the Al-Akhbar editorial staff at the time. Had FAZ staffer Lena Bopp asked Emily Dische-Becker for a comment, she would have found this out, too. She hasn’t.
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