A Jihad Watch reader recently referred to the “award-winning journalist Robert Fisk.”
Robert Fisk has been, for many decades, a stalwart, and a fan, of the PLO. He has also been, for at least as long, someone who repeats every conceivable canard and bit of viciousness that can be found in Arab or other propaganda against Israel. He is also, according to many journalists who know him, someone who sometimes claims eyewitness knowledge of things he could not possibly have seen because he was nowhere around at the time.
As for being "award winning" -- so what? There are so many awards being handed out like confetti, that some of them, many of them, most of them, surely go to entirely unworthy recipients. These awards mean nothing. Sometimes, in some fields -- what are called hard sciences --and at the highest level, they may mean something. But there are so many equally, or even more deserving, than some of the recipients, that even there one must not be surprised to find a Nobel Prize winner who is not up to expectations. Or in some cases one may reasonably conclude that others of equal or of greater merit in the same field were somehow overlooked.
Fisk's meretriciousness, in dispatch after dispatch, is hardly to be believed. But it is, by some, believed. Of course, you won't find a thing about Islam in the work of Robert Fisk. Islam, and its effect on the minds of men, and on what they do, how they see the world -- that is not part of Fisk's reporting. So he has been putting on Hamlet without the Prince for his entire life. You learn nothing from Fisk, except about Robert Fisk. About Muslim men, in mental and emotional thrall to Islam, and history-haunted, he tells you nothing. That is, he gives you no understanding of the kind without which it is not possible to make sense either of Arabs or the history of the Middle East, or of the present Middle East. And that goes far beyond the war against Israel. It includes events in the Sudan, and what happens to the Berbers and the Kurds, and to the Christians in Lebanon. It also helps to explain the peculiar role of the Alawite dictatorship in Syria. For all of this, his supposed area of expertise, the indolent Fisk, who has never paid attention to the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam, has nothing to offer. Worthless.
Still, we should do what Robert Fisk wants, and get out of Iraq. Do just what Robert Fisk wants, and MoveOn.org, and all those Arab agitators everywhere. Yes, get out -- but get out on our terms, without waiting for the Iraqis to grandly tell us when we can go, and with an entirely new set of accompanyng measures that will reveal a colder, harder, altogether more disturbing (for them, for Muslims generally) view of the Jihad. Cut the jizyah to Egypt. Change your mind about those absurd, suicidal billions being offered the "Palestinian" Arabs who are the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel -- which was the main one going until OPEC oil money allowed the Arabs and Muslims to extend their reach worldwide, with mosques, madrasas, arms bought and arms produced. For Islam does not tell Muslims "take the Christian Holy Land, take the Jewish Eretz Israel" and "be satisfied." It says: participation in Jihad is a collective duty of all Muslims, and under certain circumstances it is an individual duty of Muslims, Jihad to spread Islam, Jihad to fight back against any and all obstacles put up to the spread of Islam. Europeans are discovering that when, without paying any attention to Islam, they allowed in millions of Muslim migrants, who now conduct Da'wa and have large families that are mostly, but not entirely, on the Infidel-financed doles of generous European welfare states. They introduced a classic fifth column into their midst. They fret, they hope, they avert their eyes, they talk with waning faith in the possibility of "integration." Yet that "integration" will merely supply the linguistic and cultural tools to produce cleverer Muslims, more Tariq Ramadans, rather than foreign-sounding and foreign-looking Hamzas. It was quite a plan, to pay for K.G.B.-like "spy villages" where Muslims will be supported to learn even better how to exploit the European system, how to appeal to European Infidels, how better to conduct Da'wa and other propaganda among them.
And then they throw up their hands and say -- but "what can we do?" And from that despairing conclusion, which apparently stops them cold, or most of them, they work backwards. They try to figure out "what they can do" to make Muslims happy, to pretend that everything is or can be made okay, because the tenets of Islam cannot possibly be what we now all realize they seem to be, and the history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims cannot possibly be what we now all realize it has been -- so let's just pretend.
It's a very good game. Some people do it with the problem of retirement, and puny or non-existent pensions. Some people do it with affairs of the heart. And some people – like Robert Fisk -- do it with other, much more menacing matters.
I had the pleasure of walking past one of those Islamic information stands that seem to appear for a couple of hours each Sunday in a nearby city.
Staffed by a couple of bearded devotees to Allah, they were handing out free Korans and Islamic DVDs (who's paying for this lot?).
Amongst the DVDs they were promoting, there was one by Robert Fisk.
Enough said.
Saith Hugh: "As for being "award winning" -- so what? There are so many awards being handed out like confetti, that some of them, many of them, most of them, surely go to entirely unworthy recipients. These awards mean nothing."
It is even worse in the elementary schools. My tot is so wise to this stickerfest that she throws away any award or prize.
Robert Fisk: The cult of the suicide bomber
"Khaled looked at me with a broad smile. He was almost laughing. .......... I told him that he should abandon all thoughts of being a suicide bomber – that he could influence more people in this world by becoming a journalist......"
This guy is worse than a suicide bomber
"My child is an honor student at _______" bumper stickers - total joke.
Al Gore won the Nobel Prize. Ditto.
I would think the worst example is Yasser Arafat winning the Noble Peace Prize...Where's the logic?
I am someone who has actually read “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle-East.“
In some ways it is a good piece of work. In his thirty years of reporting from the Middle-East he managed to be at most of the scenes of conflict and upheaval. However, he simply refuses to hold Arabs and other non-Western peoples to account for their misdeeds, preferring to believe that all this conflict can be simply traced to the West. That surely is a reasonable conclusion? And by the West he means the USA, Israel of course and things like the settlement imposed by Western countries like Britain and France on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.
At times, this bias reaches a ludicrous level. Take this exert:
“ In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshwar. “ Why are you taking this kaffir into our mosque?” a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a kaffir. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it all go wrong?
I have always believed the rot started in Vietnam…”
This is classic Fisk. He manages to go from one anti-Western tirade, to another, without managing to notice that, in the middle he gives substantial evidence that there are other people in the world with prejudiced, totalitarian mindsets, people who are not Western. But he finds himself strangely reluctant to criticize them. Why? Does he take the approach that they must be patronized, that only the West can be criticized?
At times, this book creates the illusion that it is well-researched. I recall that elsewhere he tells you that the first sentence of the Koran is “ There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.”
This is the Shahadaah, the Islamic declaration of faith. Actually the opening is known as the Fatiha; something totally different. A howler on this scale shows how little Mr Fisk knows about Islam.
I am not the only one to notice Mr Fisk’s capacity for factual inaccuracy.
Take , Efraim Karsh , author of “Islamic Imperialism: a history,”
In his review of “The Great War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle-East,“ he states
” It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem. The Caliph Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, was murdered in the year 661, not in the 8th century. Emir Abdallah became king of Transjordan in 1946, not 1921, and both he and his younger brother, King Faisal I of Iraq, hailed not from a “Gulf tribe” but rather from the Hashemites on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, not 1962; Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed by the British authorities, not elected; Ayatollah Khomeini transferred his exile from Turkey to the holy Shiite city of Najaf not during Saddam Hussein’s rule but fourteen years before Saddam seized power. Security Council resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, not 1968; Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, not 1977, and was assassinated in October 1981, not 1979. Yitzhak Rabin was minister of defense, not prime minister, during the first Palestinian intifada, and al Qaeda was established not in 1998 but a decade earlier. And so on and so forth.”
Actually, I could go further. For instance, on page 1162 of my paperback Harper Perennial edition he states that Saladin was an Arab Warrior when actually he was Kurd. On page 525 he gives
references to the biblical passages invoked by those who believe that Israel has a divine right to exist. Perhaps he is implying that religious fundamentalism gives rise to fanaticism but it is noticeable that he does not refer to the “Sword Verses” of the Koran. At one point he refers to the Crusader sack of Beirut; Well, I have read several histories of the Crusades and can recall a Crusader sack of Constantinople and Jerusalem but never Beirut. When did this happen? Can anyone enlighten me here?
All in all, this book gives a comprehensive insight into how deluded some liberals can be when they assume they occupy some moral high ground.
"In his thirty years of reporting from the Middle-East he managed to be at most of the scenes of conflict and upheaval."
-- from a posting above
Not quite as often as Fisk makes out. Someone I know in England is acquainted with several journalists who have reported from the same places as Fisk, from Beirut to Afghanistan. He has told me -- unprompted -- that those other journalists insist that Fisk has been known to claim to be reporting from a place that either he has not been in, or was in, but at a different time from that he claims. There's a story there, but many of the journalists who know about Fisk are holding off on telling it.
Ah , the often raised issue – has Robert Fisk actually claimed to have reported from somewhere when it can be factually shown that he was somewhere else at the time/
Actually, he addresses this issue “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle-East.“
At some point, I should have made a note of the page number, he replies to those who make this claim.
Can anyone recall where he states his answer?
Personally, I think the most serious criticism is the level of factual inaccuracy and ideological bias his work contains, as I indicate above.
Other people think he claims to have been in places when he was not.
Take Sean Gannon, writing for FrontPage Mag
“Of course, corrections and clarifications have never been a feature of Fisk’s reporting on Israel. Most notoriously, he has never properly repudiated the false claims made in his April 2002 articles on the Battle of Jenin in which, despite being in California at the time, he described the “stench of death wafting out from the Palestinian city” and accused “Israel’s undisciplined soldiery” of “running amok,” massacring “hundreds” and concealing the evidence from the world.”
Read it all here
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=2124E243-7360-4A15-8222-A44879E625C4
celsius
you could have a lot of fun with those da'wa artists at their little literature stand, if you had a friend who was a professional stage magician expert at sleight of hand...I leave it to your imagination how one could 'sabotage' such propaganda materials.
Fisk is a great comic, but he is too dense to realize that.