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.