Asharq Alawsat is great. Read their wonderful review (by Amir Taheri, one of my favorite journalists) of the mammoth of a failure book by Robert Fisk The Great War for Civilization: the Conquest of the Middle East (Knopf, 2005). They come to some of the same conclusions that I have about it, and light it on fire with the written word in a similar spirit to the way I did in a previous post.
It would take a book as long to challenge Fisk’s numerous sensational charges against the “Anglo-Saxons”. But a look at two such charges would show that Fisk’s seething anger might have affected his objectivity as a reporter and amateur historian.
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The trouble is that Fisk’s doglike determination seems to be selective. While magnifying every real or imagined crime committed by the “Anglo-Saxons” he never took time to expose the illegal prisons and torture chambers maintained by Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, where he has lived for 30 years, or the sources of arms and funds for the Lebanese Hezballah.
A whole chapter is devoted to the story of how Fisk, taking a piece of shrapnel from a missile fired by the Israelis in southern Lebanon, travels to Europe and America to prove that the weapon had been manufactured in the United States. But he shows absolutely no interest in the provenance of the Katyushas fired by Hezballah. He is a crusader for a cause, not a reporter; having chosen his side his task is to help it win the information war.
Nor did Fisk ever bother to find out about liberal and democratic movements in the Arab world or to interview anyone other than officials or anti-Western figures. His claim that he is fighting for truth and justice makes him sound more like an advocate rather than a journalist.
This is also by far one of the most boring chapters in a massive book. I kept falling asleep reading it, which rarely happens when I am reading. He doesn't care about democracy unless it is in opposition to the West. Because the West evil. You know, because it came up with idea, and behaved like all other advanced societies do. So it inherently worse than all others, while Arabs and Persians are nice little innocent noble savages devoid of any sort of character flaws. You know those Persians were never imperialist, neither were the Arabs. Conquering other people lands at one time is different from another.
I love how Taheri takes on the notion that Fisk is some how sympathetic to Arabs and Muslims. Personally, I think he's just skitzo, but he really does sympathize with Arab nationalist/Iranian xenophobia quite a lot. Because it lets him show how evil the West is. But, here's Taheri's take:
Fisk describes the Irish as “the Palestinians of Europe” and relates how, when caught in a tight corner in the Middle East, he claims to be Irish.
Because he sympathises with “Arab grievances”, Fisk adopts virtually all the conspiracy theories concocted in teahouses from Baghdad to Cairo in the hope of blaming others for all that has gone wrong with the Arabs.
What he does not realise is that by portraying the Arabs as witless pawns in a game they do not understand, he is presenting a new version of the “White Man’s Burden” narrative.
In the original version the “natives”, including the Arabs, must be saved from their own ignorance. In Fisk’s ethnocentric version, the Arabs are helpless victims. In both versions the omnipotent “Imperialist West” can do whatever it pleases with peoples who are mere objects in their own history. In both cases an “us and them” dialectics is at work. This is why Fisk always says “this is what we did” as if the Arabs couldn’t even fix their own kuffiahs. One might wonder how the “Anglo-Saxon” powers that cannot fix the New York traffic jam or the London underground railway system have managed to shape the world, virtually alone, for over a century.
Fisk’s method allows little room for examining let alone understanding the complex forces that have shaped Arab reality, including Arab nationalism, pan-Islamism, the various anti-colonial movements, and more than half a century of Soviet influence.
Fisk’s profession of sympathy for the Arabs turns out to be a cover for disdain. The Arabs, he claims, have no notion of democracy and are in no way prepared to enter the modern world. The best course, therefore, is for “ us”, meaning the West, is to let “them” stew in their juice.
He writes: “ Most Arabs, faced with a reporter’s question would say the first thing that comes into their head for fear that they would appear ignorant if they do not.”
Fisk admires only three Arab figures: the fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden, the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, and the head of the Lebanese Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah. He states quite nonchalantly that bin Laden is a better representative of Arabs than any of the Arab kings and presidents, a claim that echoes claims by Arab-haters that all Arabs are terrorists.
It's the truth. Fisk's book is probably the most condecending piece of "literature" that I have ever read on the Middle East. It lacks any sort of moral clarity, any sort of objectivity, and any sort of pragmatism. Arabs are perpetual victims that ought to be let alone by this angry Englishman. There are some great works on similar topics by Englishmen, wonderful books. This ain't one of them though. Fisk's anti-Semitic and anti-Western sounds like a Ba`thi pamphlet and a Bin Laden tape on Aljazeera meshed together, yet it is dashed with a bit of white supremacy and irresponsible language that hardens one's heart toward him as an author.
Read the rest of Amir Taheri's review here and don't buy this Ba`thi's book. Don't boycott Denmark, boycott Robert Fisk!
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