Zarqawi tape authentic, says Fisk

"I think individuals like Zarqawi or bin Laden don't actually matter. It's a bit like, you know, after you make a nuclear bomb, you go around arresting all the nuclear scientists and putting them in prison. It doesn't do any good. The nuclear bomb exists. Al-Qaeda exists."

Gee, I think this is tripe. This is a terrible analogy. He seems to be talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Bin Laden and Al Zarkawi are wild men, sponsored by governments intent on undermining the US, fostering disruption and at worst these men (and who knows who else) are embarked on a mission to destroy the non-Muslim part of the world. How many nuclear scientists set off bombs on their own? Come on, Fisk, lousy analogy.

He winds up the interview with faulting the West on moral grounds--we are not just etc. I don't think maintaining an economy is at all equivalent with killing people. That is simple common sense.

Last I read, Al Zarkawi was a leader, and the leaders in Al Qaeda/ similar organizations separate themselves hierarchically and plan terrorist attacks, allowing undeerlings to do the scut work. So the heads have to be cut off (metaphorically), even if more heads follow. This is a simple military tactic. If he was in the video, it was a terror publicity tactic. More reason to bring him to justice.

I don't think Fisk knows how to distance his beliefs from his observations. This confuses him.

Ah yes. It's the good Mr Fisk.

“We've had these extraordinary figures in the Middle East, like Nasser, for example, in Egypt in 1956 and people whom we are encouraged to loathe, encouraged to hate and who, ultimately, are just figureheads, who in the end are people who we just are encouraged to loathe, encouraged to hate. People who, at the end of the day, are not per se people who we need to worry about,…”

I think what he’s trying to express here is that its not the likes of Zarqawi we need to worry about per se. It’s obviously Muslims more generally. And that Zarqawi is just a scapegoat which permits us to ignore the much larger threat stemming from the Islamic ummah as a whole.

“You know, the issue is, are we in fact creating these creatures for ourselves to hate or are they creating themselves?”

I think Mr, Fisk is here raising a very important ontological question regarding himself. It is admittedly an interesting question. Would Mr Fisk cease to exist altogether if he didn’t hate himself? Is he himself merely a creation of his very own self-hatred or does he have some independent ontological existence? Hmmm…

“But I also think that they register in the Arab world, in the Muslim world, they register a line that says, in effect, there is injustice in the Muslim world and I am speaking about that injustice and as long as we, the West, go along with that injustice, so these people will have a claim on the ideas and the minds of the people who listen to them.”

I think what he is implying here is that just as we ourselves in the west give ontological reality to those we choose to hate, the Muslims give ontological reality to us by choosing to hate US. So if we simply refuse to “go along” with their bizarre ideas of our “injustice”, we will essentially cease to exist and hence cease to be a cause of their imaginary feelings of injustice. In other words, the Muslims are totally inventing the concept of us as demons for their own psychological reasons. They manufacture notions of injustice to justify that hatred, that demonization. I think that what Mr. Fisk is trying to suggest here is we should completely ignore those manufactured claims so as to deprive Zarqawi of the psychological hold he has on his followers.

I wouldn't put Fisk up as a validator for anything. He is famous for reporting at times, and from places, where he simply wasn't, and stories from fellow English journalists about some of his most egregious fabrications are quite something. He is a fellow-traveller, mainly of Arabs and Muslims, but of a kind of free-floating variety. He doesn't really like any of the leaders; I don't think he really likes or cares about any of the Arabs. He hates Israel, and hates America, and I'm not sure which of the latter two he hates more. He has a few stories he tells over and over -- one always involves his father, and his father's service in World War I. Others are about Sabra and Chatila (where he constitently gets the facts established by the Kagan Report wrong), and any other atrocity or pseudo-atrocity or fabricated atrocity he can use to beat the Israelis with.

Oh, Islam? You mean, as in Qur'an and Hadith and Sira? They never come up. Fisk has been reporting on the Middle East, on Muslims and Muslim desires, day after day for decades. He's never mentioned a single passage in the Qur'an, not a single Hadith. The Banu Qurayza? Asma bint Marwan? The Khaybar Oasis? Little Aisha and how her story led to virtualy the first law passed by the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Fisk hasn't a clue. Nothing. He's worthless.

Ah, that's the 'I am frightfully decent' English chappie who lives in Beirut. To survive in this place our fearless Robert has to show he is a Hater of Jews...Which like John Simpson now Director of World Affairs at BBC, he is most happy to spew Anti-Israel propaganda. Very possibly, like Simpson, they both guzzle at the
Saudi slush fund trough.
By the way what happened to Zarqawi's missing leg
as reported by American Intelligence-fella either had limb restored by miracle or had never lost it??

Morgane-

An evil Zionist Doctor obviously put a stolen Iraqi leg on Zarqawi to confuse the West.

And an imbecilic Dr. of Aromatherapy put a rancid cauliflower in Mr. Fisk's cranium to mislead him into presuming he had a brain.

So, according to his logic, I "bestialize" Zarqawi by seeing his internet-posted video beheading of captured, tied up, blind-folded and out-numbered [hapless, idealistic civilian] Nick Berg?

Not only an illiterate comment, but quite deranged.

Fisk sounds like a new verb meaning: "to pseudo-intellectually scour out all sense from a subject".

E.G.: He fisked the topic until it became complete idiocy.

By his reasoning, we should do nothing about any killers, because they are only symptoms of something deeper.

And, perhaps, if we understood that "deeper something", we might not want to stop them from killing, but would want to kill ourselves instead.

Fisk off, buster.

You need to add some liquid plumber to your clamato cocktail.

'..he has lived in the region for 35 years...'

Why? What keeps him there?

"Bin Laden and Al Zarkawi are wild men"

Mr. Hamalach
this is in fact a dangerous belief. You all have your opinions here, as did Mr. Fisk, but please do take a look at some of the facts from the Harmony database of Al-Qaeda documents as examined by some students at West Point:

http://www.ctc.usma.edu/aq/Harmony%20and%20Disharmony%20--%20CTC.pdf

The trouble is that Robert "I-never-met-an-Arab-I-did-not-like" Fisk sets the tone for his whole newspaper, and, through their common publisher, for the much more important DAILY MIRROR, which is read by some three million mostly Labour voters, and that has, of late, been so viciously anti-Bush and anti-American as to make the Daily Kos blush. Millions of people believe his lies implicitly; whereas, on the other side, Melanie Phillips has trouble getting even her own newspaper, the DAILY MAIL, to accept the facts she presents. For instance, no earlier than yesterday, the Mail's leading opinion piece said that Tony Blair "had taken the country to war on the back of a tide of lies", which must have made Ms.Phillips, after all the effort she had put into demolishing that particular piece of consensus, just put her head in her hands and moan. And the Daily Mail is supposed to be a conservative newspaper and the voice of the silent majority.

The only use of Robert Fisk is that it is useful to know how the enemy thinks. His viewpoint and opinions on any event are no different from those of the Arab in the street. As a searcher-out of stories, that is as a member of his own profession, he is execrable. A few weeks ago I spoke of a fellow extreme left wing hack, John Pilger (who is also connected with the DAILY MIRROR); the difference is that Pilger, however he may misrepresent the facts, actually goes out and finds them, and in so doing does the truth a service. Fisk is nothing but a liar with a license to lie.

Does he not know the Qur'an, the Sirah, the Hadith? After 35 years spent not only with Arabs but thinking like an Arab - don't you believe it, Hugh. He is just avoiding mention of a painful argument. His whole drive is to present Arabs as unfortunate victims of evil distant powers; any discussion of the inherent aggression, racism, sexism and brutality of Islam would damage his viewpoint. Hence they have to be kept very strictly in the background. In this, at least, he is smarter than the average Arab, who, being naive of the moral opinions of others, genuinely believes that a discussion of Muhammed and his writings and character would bring Westerners on his side, instead of horrifying them. Fisk still is enough in touch with the Western sense of values to know that this is a loser; hence he keeps silent. And, of course, the mere fact that he is aware enough of Western sensitivities to manipulate them, makes him worse than the poor creatures who truly know no better, for whom stand those memorable words - Forgive them, Lord, for they do not know what they are doing. Fisk knows enough to know what he is doing; the demons that drive him lead him to rebel against the better in favour of the worse, and to do so by the continuous use of lies and SUPPRESSIO VERI. He is damning his own soul, and endangering his native country in the process.

Dear Paolo,

Read his own words, he is barely literate and scarcely capable of stringing a sentence together under interview conditions, and certainly not an intellectual as we would understand it.

This really is the point at which, for us, he has been given enough rope and he has hanged himself.

Fisk, Fisk, FISK. His name will now live in infamy. All credibility gone, nothing more than a laughing-stock - a bogeyman to scare children with. Finally, his lies are revealed in his person. God, how I have prayed for this!

Dominic.

Hugh is right:

"...Fisk hasn't a clue. Nothing. He's worthless..."

Absolutely. Fisk is the type that would seriously document ghost-stories from castle Dreer or report on sightings of the Loch Ness monster...

Unfortunately he is 'reporting from the ME...'

He writes crap on thousands of pages and spouts nonsense on TV.

Why does he have the privilege?

Dear sheik yer'mami,

You mean the Loch Ness Monster isn't real!

You'll be telling me next that Santa Claus doesn't exist - nor the elves.

Good job I don't believe everything that I read.

Dominic.

An interview like that would be more useful if there was someone like Robert Spencer there to debate Fisk. Not a fair contest I know, but it would be interesting.

Here in Australia, I'm currently listening to a talkback host telling the listeners that if Muslim clerics are forced to preach in english, as has been suggested today, then the same should apply to Greeks, Hindus, etc etc It's pathetic. Journo's here seem to insist on remaining uninformed and PC on the subject of Islam, and of course the words Sirah, Hadith, or dhimmi have never been used by an Australian journalist, commentator or politician.

Mr Spencer, please make an appearance on Lateline.

profitsbeard: "Fisk sounds like a new verb meaning"

Not sure whether you knew this but yes, the verb "to fisk" was apparently coined in relation to Robert Fisk:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking

Paulo
a great post about Fisk who has become a revisionist historian for the readers of the daily mirror and a sorce of indoctrination on Me affairs for the British media.
I salute Tony Jones , who is a leftist who has come to his senses.Great courage to stand up the old 'respected'propagandist. Perhaps Tony has endorsed the Euston manifesto! I also doubt fisk will accept more interviews from the ABC.
After the (non ) Jenin massacre, Fisk mouthed openly about the ISraeli attrocities alomg with Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian . later he was confronted about this on Irish TV and nearly attacked the Interviewer. In his view the fact that there was no massacre was irrelevant because i now realise that in his view it Should have happened.
his new book The Great War For Civilisations'is peppered with lies and ommisions yet will be accepted as History by his zomby folowers.
The Myths he has created for his arab and progresive paymasters are a nothing but subversive efforts to push for islamization of the western countries.
And of course he ignores the massacres of Israelis by Arabs such as during 1948 when 600 Jews including women and children were captured by Arab Forces.
the Jewish victims were dismembered, decapitated and photographed by their proud captors. In the Etzion settlements south of Jerusalem, three truckloads full of Jewish corpses were found sexually mutilated.
To Fisk such fact are subjudice along with the Massacres of Christian lebanese by the PLO.

"You know, the issue is, are we in fact creating these creatures for ourselves to hate or are they creating themselves?"
Creatures are by nature already created; they cannot be re-created by themselves or others. Obtain a brain, Mr Fisk.

Just found a site that describes Fisk's wondrous knowledge of ME affairs.
http://austinbay.net/blog/?m=20060202

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem

He is even less knowledgeable about the Koran!

Profitsbeard
Great Post!Had a hearty chuckle,admired your sparkling wit and can now return to boring chores...

Dear Hugh, I put this up with the original headline (perhaps I should have changed it), not as a serious authenticator of the tape, but simply to give our readers a laugh.

Tony Jones was marvelous.

Fisk is just another dhimmi, hating the West, blaiming the West, seeing nothing within Islam to cause the ME to be the economic and social basketcase it is. It's all the West's fault. So tired, so tripe, so irrelevant.

Paolo:

Fisk isn't simply a liar. He's Chicken Little.

Fisk's ego is so vast that a few months ago he postulated in an on-line journal that the reason that certain parts of the world just had an unusually mild winter (like my home city of Toronto, Canada) and others, like Lebanon, had unusual cold, was because of "war". Instead of looking to any authorities on climate to enquire what was going on, he makes a bald supposition to suit one of his natural biases -- of being "anti-war"*. As it happened, the strange weather was the result of a once-in-a-century fluke -- the Polar Vortex sat lower over Russia than normal giving parts of Russia, Pakistan, etc., record shattering lows while I only had to pick up a shovel four or five times this winter.

My apologies to all. I have actually started to remember who Robert Fisk is, something which was partially erased from memory when I decided not to read the Independent any more because of its distortions. Ho hum.

Liar or crazy? I'd have to go with liar, now that I remember who he is, because there are very few genuinely crazy people in the world.

Paolo:
"The only use of Robert Fisk is that it is useful to know how the enemy thinks."

I have to disagree here. Fisk thinks more like a university professor (Western type, or wannabe)than an Arab on the street. Fisk is full of vortices and black holes and pseudo-philsophical statements, "full of sound and fury signifying nothing", whereas the usual Arab on the street is much more direct.

Fisk is the textbook example of the self-hating westerner. He is such a perfect specimen in fact, that one might be forgiven for the desire to capture him and put him beneath a glass box, much as as scientists of a previous generation succumbed to the temptation to capture and pin down butterflys and other seemingly unique biological specimens. How does one say "western self-hating man" in Latin?

Homo...ego....odium...Fisk...?

Caroline: the closest I can get to it is INVIDENS SUI. Latin does not seem to have a word for "self-hater" - funny, that. Evidently it did not occur to Romans that, say, a Roman could hate Rome, or an Englishman England. Of course, there is PRODITOR - traitor.

Paolo": "Latin does not seem to have a word for "self-hater" - funny, that. Evidently it did not occur to Romans that, say, a Roman could hate Rome, or an Englishman England."

Then we have indeed spotted a new human subspecies, which is in need of taxonomic identification! In this case we need to add the subspecies name at the end to denote the peculiarly western variant:

Homo invidens sui Fiskus?

Well, maybe some botanist will happen along to help us out here. :-)