Taipei Times, Taiwan
Feb 15 2009

`Bob of Arabia’ explores the ills of our troubled times

In a timely collection of essays, veteran reporter Robert Fisk of the
`Independent’ casts an unsparing look at the people and institutions
who define our reality

By J. Michael Cole
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Feb 15, 2009, Page 14

How does one review a book by a man who has spent the past three
decades reporting on the world’s bloodiest conflicts, who has
interviewed Osama bin Laden and who, by Air France calculations,
travels more frequently than any Air France crew member? Robert Fisk’s
journalistic resume is impressive, from the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan to Israel’s own invasion of Lebanon, Iran after the
overthrow of the Shah to the US-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the
killing fields of Algeria, Syria, the Occupied Territories and other
trouble spots in the Arab world.

The sum total of his death-defying forays into the Middle East is
contained in his excellent Pity the Nation, which covers the Lebanese
civil war, and The Great War for Civilization, a monumental,
1,300-plus page catalogue of man’s inhumanity to man which, Fisk tells
us, will eventually be followed by a second volume.

The Age of the Warrior departs from the blood-soaked pages of his
previous books and offers more personal insights into Fisk the man. In
it we find the ponderings, through a decade or so of editorials he
wrote for the Independent, of a man who probably has seen more dead
bodies than any reporter alive today. The 116 entries can be read as
hiatuses, `a foreign correspondent’s thoughts amid war, a corner of
the journalist’s brain that usually goes unrecorded,’ recorded here
for our benefit.

Some entries, such as `The forgotten art of handwriting’ or `The cat
who ate missile wire for breakfast’ ‘ a true story, by the way ‘ are
light in tone, but underlying the whole volume is the same anger we
have come to expect from Fisk in the face of injustice, double
standards and Western complicity in the suffering that finds such
fertile ground throughout the Middle East.

As in his reporting, Fisk spares no one, and his cast of characters is
a rogues’ gallery of the architects of catastrophe ‘ former US
president George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, former British prime
minister Tony `Kut al-Amara’ Blair, Jack Straw, Ariel Sharon and other
symbols of the West at its worst. Equally targeted are `our’
dictators, ally-turned-foe Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Pervez
Musharraf, Yasser Arafat, Hafez al-Assad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muamar
Qadaffi and King Abdullah of Jordan. His skewering of these
individuals will be nothing new to anyone who has followed Fisk’s
reporting over the past three decades or has waded through his immense
The Great War for Civilization. But here Fisk, aware of the failings
and limitations of his own profession, takes a step back and turns to
equally important subjects such as our collective forgetting of
history and how movies have come to define reality.

Especially useful is the section `Words, words, words,’ a modern-day
version of George Orwell’s famous essay Politics and the English
language, in which Fisk confronts the insidious manipulation of
language (starting from his own training as a journalist) that
characterizes most reporting ‘ especially when it comes to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here Fisk draws our attention to the
catchwords, euphemisms and `hygienic metaphors’ used to distort
reality, how illegal Jewish settlements become `Jewish neighborhoods,’
occupied land becomes `disputed,’ Palestinian attacks invariably
`terrorist’ while Israeli `retaliation’ is self-defense,’ killed
civilians become `collateral damage’ and Palestinians who blow
themselves to bits while making a bomb as dying from `work accidents.’
And so on, language that once again reared its ugly head during
Israel’s 22-day pounding of Gaza in December and January.

Later, Fisk explains why journalists should not be forced to testify
at war crimes tribunals, at least not until courts abandon their
double standards and become equally intent on trying war criminals in
the Middle East, the perpetrators of Sabra and Chatila, Hama and the
countless other massacres that have written the history of the region
in blood. Until then, journalists testifying in court or providing
evidence would risk being complicit in that system of double
standards, he argues.

Fisk, who makes Lebanon his home, has often been accused by Western
media and various Israeli groups of sympathizing too much with
Muslims, criticism that has bordered on accusations he suffers from
Stockholm syndrome ‘ especially after he was attacked by Afghan
refugees in Pakistan on Dec. 10, 2001, whose anger at Westerners he
said could be rationalized. Such accusations, however, are nonsense,
and anyone who has paid attention to his long career will know that
Fisk sides with justice, which in our world often means siding with
those who ended up on the wrong side of history. In fact, his
detractors (Zionists and others) will find in this volume many
instances of Fisk at his most unsparing in his criticism of Holocaust
revisionists or individuals, such as Maurice Papon, Marshal Philippe
Petain and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had
a hand in it. He is equally implacable in his call for recognition of
the Armenian Genocide and his criticism of the Turkish government,
which to this day continues to deny it took place.

History conveniently distorted or altogether effaced by opinion makers
and governments, Fisk argues, is a dangerous instrument that, over
time, will come back to haunt us, as it did on Sept. 11, 2001. Though
Fisk clearly calls the attacks a `crime against humanity,’ he insists
that they did not occur in isolation, that they were a result of our
actions in the Middle East. There is no doubt, he argues, that the
London bombings of July 7, 2005, would not have happened had the UK
not participated in the invasion of Iraq. And yet, to this day, an
unrepentant Blair (a favorite villain of Fisk) and a complicit media
claim there was no connection between the two events, as will those
who continue to argue, against all evidence, that 9/11 was the result
of Muslim `hatred’ for Western democracy, that it had nothing do to
with racism, support for or indifference to the Apartheid-like
conditions Israel imposes on Palestinians, catastrophic sanctions
against Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, support
for Saddam as he used poison gas against Iran and support for
repressive regimes that are allies in the `war on terrorism.’

There is much, much more to Fisk’s rich volume, which, as with his
other publications, should come with the warning `danger, no light
subjects therein.’ But then again, what should we expect from a book
that concludes on such a note: `I wake each morning in Beirut and hear
the wind in the palm trees outside my bedroom window and ask myself
what we all ask ourselves these days ‘ or should ask ourselves: what
horror waits for us today?’

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