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a film by John Pilger

John Richard Pilger (born October 9, 1939) is a multi-award-winning Australian-born journalist and documentary filmmaker from Sydney, primarily based in London.

Pilger was born in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney. He attended Sydney Boys High School and founded a student newspaper there, the Messenger. He acquired his first job in journalism as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun in 1958, later moving to The Daily Telegraph. Pilger left Australia to work for the Daily Mirror in Britain in the early 1960s and has since been based in that country.

Pilger acted as a war correspondent during conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Biafra. His reputation steadily emerged through both his documentary films and the books he has written. One of his first documentary films, Year Zero, is credited with bringing to world attention for the first time the atrocities being committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. A number of his later documentaries have similarly focused upon what he alleges are human rights abuses perpetrated on civilian populations from the Israeli-occupied territories, to Indonesian East Timor and Iraq under UN sanctions.

In 1987 Pilger was involved with the left-wing tabloid News on Sunday which launched to great fanfare and went bankrupt eight weeks later. He had been appointed the editor-in-chief, but walked out before the first issue, having fallen out with the editor and the paper's backers.

Pilger has won many journalism and human rights awards, including Britain's prestigious Journalist of the Year award twice, and he has a number of honorary doctorates. He has a son Sam (born in 1973) and a daughter Zoe (born 1984).

Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger has been a trenchant critic of the foreign policy of many Western countries. He is particularly opposed to many aspects of United States foreign policy, which he regards as being driven by a largely imperialist agenda.

Pilger is a strong critic of the institutions and economic forces that structure 'mainstream' journalism. In an address at Columbia University on 14 April 2006, he said:

“ During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. 'I have to tell you,' said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don’t have that. What’s the secret? How do you do it?'”

He is particularly scornful of pro-Iraq war commentators on the liberal left, or 'liberal interventionists', such as Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch.

In addition to criticizing the policies of United States President George W. Bush, Pilger has also taken aim at former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom he believes to be just as culpable as President Bush for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In his column published in New Statesman on 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that took place the same month to Blair, whose decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that he maintains precipitated those bombings.

In the same column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. He also asserted that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield.

Pilger is a supporter of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. In May 2007 he co-signed and put forward a letter supporting the refusal of the government of Venezuela to renew the broadcasting licence of Venezuela's largest television network Radio Caracas Televisión, as they openly supported a 2002 coup attempt against the democratically elected government. Pilger and other signatories suggest that if the BBC or ITV used their news broadcasts to publicly support a coup against the British government, they would suffer similar consequences. Other groups, such as Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, have described the RCTV decision as an effort to stifle freedom of expression.

Pilger has written articles about the depopulation of Diego Garcia by the United Kingdom during the 1970s. He has strongly criticised Tony Blair for not making any real response to the 2000 High Court ruling that the British expulsion of the island's natives to Mauritius in order to make way for a US Air Force base had been illegal.

Pilger is known for his polemical style, which has attracted both praise and criticism. Harold Pinter has said of his work: "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is . . . I salute him.".

Auberon Waugh, on the other hand, coined the verb "to pilger", meaning "to present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion".[citation needed] In reply to this, Noam Chomsky stated that the reason why journalists have invented the terms 'to pilger' and 'pilgerise' is because, when faced with the uncomfortable facts about the consequences of U.S foreign policy that Pilger presents, "ridicule [is] the only response they are capable of".

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Gerard Henderson is one of Pilger's most vocal critics and has accused him in effect of being a conspiracy theorist.

John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed."

Watch the Pilger's "Palestine Is Stil The Issue" documentary by opening the following link and you'll see that we actualy know much about the crimes of others and almost nothing about our own crimes.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=palestine is still the issue#