BEIRUT: “It’s great to be back here,” said veteran U.S. journalist Jim Clancy as he sipped a fresh carrot juice at a cafe in Downtown Beirut. Clancy, who worked with the American television channel CNN for over 30 years, spent years covering the civil war in Lebanon from a hotel in East Beirut, long since destroyed. “I came to Beirut in 1982, in the summer of 1982 when the Israelis were bombing West Beirut. It was full blown war,” he told The Daily Star. “The first time I went to West Beirut I drove over the airport runways to get in.”
Clancy has returned to Beirut in the intervening years, and has watched the city rebuild itself from the weed-choked rubble.
He left CNN in January after tweeting the term “Hasbara” to another user, Oren Kessler, who had questioned one of Clancy’s tweets about the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. The term Hasbara is used to refer to pro-Israeli messages which many consider to be propaganda. Soon after the tweet, he was flooded by messages calling him an anti-Semite, a bigot and a clown.
But Clancy said that he had previously had a hostile Twitter exchange about the Israeli occupation with Kessler, a political analyst and former Jerusalem Post reporter, and that the Hasbara remark “had nothing to do with Charlie Hebdo.”
Clancy, however, has but few regrets. “I don’t have to put up with this shit and I’m not going to. I’d had enough,” he said.
“Who likes trolls? I don’t?”
Clancy came back to Beirut to participate in a workshop for the May Chidiac foundation earlier this week, and a lecture at the Lebanese American University Friday afternoon.
Fielding a student’s question about bias in Western media after his talk Friday, Clancy said while propaganda and harassment come from all different parties, Israeli media minders are particularly organized and well-funded.
But even the deepest pockets cannot ensure a message will stick, he said. “Hasbara funding has increased for the Israeli lobby, but its propaganda efforts have failed. I mean the number of young people on campuses who now support the Palestinian cause has risen,” he told the audience.
A number of other American media personalities, including Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly have made the news of late for having falsified or exaggerated details of their conflict reporting. No such allegations have been leveled against Clancy, who has reported from conflict zones and far-flung corners of the world for decades.
“In my case I’d rather be Twitter-fried for telling the truth than held out for lying, saying I was somewhere I wasn’t or claiming I saw people murdered who weren’t,” Clancy told The Daily Star.
“I hate for journalists to make the news, but it happens. Television is show business,” he added.
Clancy believes, however, that one evening’s tweets cannot eclipse his 40-year career in journalism.
His career was dotted with stints in Beirut, both brief and extended, which he still considers his favorite place in the world.
When given a choice to cover politics at the White House or return to Beirut in 1983, Clancy said the decision was a simple one. “I ended up within about 1 minute deciding to come to Beirut, essentially because the people were compelling. They were worth risking your life for.”
“The war in Lebanon was my last experience where there was any respect for journalists. Both the Muslims and the Christians knew that we had to go to the other side, we had to cross over to get the other side of the story, and they actually valued us as journalists because we got the other side of the story,” he said, finishing his carrot juice.
“Today in every conflict ... everybody tries just to manipulate the media and tries to use you as a tool,” he said. “They want you to be a propagandist for their side.”
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