Blaming the West

...This was not a safe place for a Westerner...

...to fight the Soviet-backed regime and, that mission completed, left to its own devices...

...The West abetted the former and provided the latter...

...And in a dispatch to his newspaper he wrote that "if I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdulla, I would have done just what they did...

...The author sees his own angry antiwar journalism as an emulation of his father's humane if impotent (someone else commanded the firing squad) protest against the meaningless brutality of World War I. The horrors Fisk's father inflicted on his family have clearly become conflated in the son's mind with the horrors of that original Great War for Civilisation...

...As with other nefarious Middle Eastern figures, Fisk can hardly defend bin Laden...

...Hamas and the other factions that refuse to renounce violence against Israel represent the true interests of the Palestinians...

...Tactics learned from the French, who meted out the same treatment to the Algerian rebels of the 1950s...

...The Oslo Accords, the source of the current "road map" strategy pursued under the direction of the West, sold out Palestinian interests, according to Fisk, and Arafat betrayed his people by agreeing to them...

...For Fisk, who apparently knows nothing of Jewish history or the Zionist movement, Israel is the last manifestation of Western colonialism, and its unjust displacement of the Palestinian people lies at the heart of Arab and Muslim grievances against the West...

...he was the only child of a middle-aged World War I veteran...

...lay behind" the "terrible act" of 9/11, "how hated America has become," and how the number of innocent Iraqis who died because of UN economic sanctions far exceeded the victims of 9/11...

...The enormities perpetrated by the Taliban in Afghanistan...

...FISK's view of the Middle East, then, is deeply racist...

...Or any other Westerner I could find...

...Fisk cannot possibly deny the crimes of homegrown Middle Eastern murderers, nor does he try...

...Strikingly, allusions to his father's War not only abound, but the West's record in the Middle East is viewed through the narrow lens of that conflict and the peace settlement that followed—both, in Fisk's opinion, horrendous mistakes...

...The chapters in this book on the Iran-Iraq war and on the tragedy of the Armenians are especially outstanding...

...Hating his father yet unable fully to repudiate him, the son seizes on the only act Bill Fisk performed by that can be admired—refusing to carry out a death sentence against a court-martialed Australian soldier...

...Fisk felt only guilt: "What had I done9 I kept asking myself...

...But Fisk aspires to something more...

...Though not yet a household name in the United States, his massive, often maddening volume could make him one...

...Recounted with great emotional intensity to give roots to his passionate concern for the underdog, it illuminates much more...

...I would have attacked Robert Fisk...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Co-editor, "American Jewish Year Book...

...He simply lays the blame for their acts ofbrutality at the door of the West...

...After fighting back and clawing his way to safety, however...

...Not for him the conventional notion that a correspondent should report and leave the interpreting to the reader or editorial writer...

...Osama bin Laden, who has publicly called Fisk his favorite Western reporter because he is the only one who is "neutral," has summoned him to various hideouts for interviews three times—in 1993, '96 and '97...

...Fisk makes a big book bigger by including considerable autobiographical material...

...He sees the journalist as a muckraker—taking sides, exposing the lies of governments, excoriating evildoers— in the hope that an aroused public will force changes...

...I had been hurting and punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country—among others—was killing...

...As Westerners the Jews are perpetrators, not victims, and therefore apparently do not merit his humanitarian concern...

...Fisk was the London Times' Middle East correspondent from 1976until 1988, when Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the paper inducedhim to seek a more ideologically congenial employer...

...There are remarkably few references in this book to the subsequent World War that ended with the defeat of Nazism, Fascism and Japanese imperialism—the War that saved Western civilization, demonstrated the need for a Jewish state, and set the stage for the events in the Middle East Fisk discusses...

...Let it be said at once that Fisk is a gifted writer, able to make you feel present on the battlefield, invested in the lives of those being written about, and eager to turn the page to see how things come out...

...But other assertions scattered throughout the book suggest the authorthinks justice would only be served if all Palestinian refugees and their descendants were permitted to "return" to their homes in what is now Israel proper...

...Born in 1946, when many returning World War II veterans were starting their families, Fisk did not fit into this mold...

...Despite Fisk's cynicism, the U.S.-led attempt to spread democracy to the Arab Middle East may indeed go down in history as the Great War for Civilisation...

...A reaction to the American-backed regime of the Shah that preceded it...

...Badly injured, his glasses broken, blood dripping from his wounds, Fisk realized for the first time that "Someone hated me enough to hurt me...

...At times Fisk, echoing Israel's far Left, calls for pushing the Jewish state back to its 1967 borders and creating a Palestinian state on the rest of the old British mandate territory...

...The bloodthirsty tyranny of Iran's Islamic republic...

...He describes his father, Bill Fisk, as a racist and a bully, who abused both his wife and his son, and who maintained a lifelong obsession with the global conflict in which he served...

...The fanatical group was originally propped up by the U.S...

...This would, of course, effectively destroy the Jewish state and cancel the 1917 Balfour Declaration that gave Zionism international legitimacy—a document Fisk believes cheated the Arabs of Palestine...

...On one of the father's medals that conflict was called "The Great War for Civilisation," a phrase Fisk sarcastically appropriates for the title of this book...

...Two other men who, Fisk tells us, "helped me in the direct knowledge that this book was being written" were PLO leader Yasir Arafat and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, both enemies of Fisk's ultimate bête noire, Israel...

...He has since been covering the same region for the Left-leaning Independent...

...The encounter and its aftermath, recorded in The Great liar for Civilisation, Fisk's new book, illustrate why he is a polarizing figure in Britain...

...Clever and all-powerful people of the West, including Israel, control events, and even when their motives are ostensibly benign, bear responsibility for anything that goes wrong...

...And after 30 years of interviewing everyone of any importance in the Middle East, plus multitudes of ordinary people, Fisk has no doubt who is to blame for the region's problems: the West, primarily the United States, which he charges bends Great Britain and the rest of Europe to its will...

...Within the U.S., his special villain is a "pro-Israel lobby" that he contends controls foreign policy and manipulates a craven media...

...Fisk never actually comes out and tells the reader what he would like to see happen to the Jewish state that was set up, after all, under international law by the UN...

...Instead, he troubles to "explain" how "historical injustices...

...The Algerian government's cancellation of an election likely to be won by the Islamic opposition, followed by harsh suppression of the Islamists...

...But in a remarkable display of moral fastidiousness, Fisk decides that "a man held responsible for the greatest international crime against humanity in the Western world" should not be "dignified with an entry" in the book's Acknowledgments, despite the fact that "he knew I was writing this book and clearly spoke in that knowledge...

...Indeed, this country "built on someone else's land" has hoodwinked the world into calling justified acts of Palestinian resistance "terrorism," while whitewashing its own acts of real terror...

...The cry of "kqffir" (infidel) went up, and the rocks started flying...

...While driving to the city of Kandahar, where he wanted to cover the U.S.-led invasion of Talibancontrolled Afghanistan, his jeep broke down in the tiny border village of Kila Abdulla, Pakistan...

...Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran and his use of poison gas...

...associate director of research, the American Jewish Committee ON December 8.2001, British journalist Robert Fisk got stoned—literally—in the line of duty...

...Arabs and Muslims, in contrast, may never be held responsible for what they do, since they are capable only of reacting, not taking the initiative...

...What would become of the Jews of a liberated "Palestine" is a subject that he does not address...