Fisking Robert
The Great War for Civilisation, Robert Fisk, Fourth Estate, London 2005, NZ$40.
By John O'Neill
No other journalist has been paid such compliments and received so many awards from his peers as Robert Fisk for his 30 years of reporting the Middle East. His detractors serve only to enhance the essence of his work by the process of fisking which seizes on a line of questionable accuracy and by mocking it seeks to destroy the edifice he has constructed.
Fisking is easy: 'King Hussein's stallion rears on her hind legs behind his coffin'. Or the bathetic question following a horror village massacre in Algeria: 'What sort of man would throw a bomb into a birdcage?'
Fisk covers the historical background very simply:
This book threatened me as none other. I have lived a long and optimistic life comforted by a belief that humanity moves forward, slowly and with halting steps, to a more kindly occupation of this planet. Fisk destroys such faith with evenhanded accounts of barbarities perpetrated in the lands which produced our greatest religions by all who lived and entered there. Whether the tortures and slaughters were face-to-face and personal or by computer-driven weapons of mass dismemberment from 30.000 feet, the effect of the narration is to provoke the lingering question: 'Are we all mad?'. It takes a lot of thoughtful focussing on the occasional flashes of generosity and courage which leaven the book to begin to restore optimism. At least for me, it will happen.
Robert deserves a fisking in at least one respect: his fixation on his father and the consequent determination to drag Bill Fisk into the history with links that are tenuous to the point of invisibility. Bill Fisk was an odd man, rigid, hard, cruel in the way of many family men of his generation. He served in France in the closing years of the First World War with no great distinction other than refusing to command a firing-squad on a convicted Australian soldier/murderer. Much of Robert's chapter on his father should have been edited. His title for this book is taken from one of his father's war medals: a mistake. The subtitle: 'The Conquest of the Middle East' is far more relevant and powerful.
His mother, Peggy, whom he loved, merits only a few paragraphs but these explain a lot. When Robert first confronted the fact of mortality as a child, he asked why bother with all that homework when we all had to die. Peggy replied: 'By the time you grow up, they may have found a cure for that'. This may well be the source of the eternal optimism that drives her son to live the life he has chosen.
Fisking Robert is not just the lighthearted ribbing of a great man and his work. When it is deadly serious it is least effective. Efraim Karsh is not happy with Fisk's account of the mass-murder by Baruch Goldstein of Muslim Palestinians at prayer at Abrahams Rock in 1994. The facts are that Goldstein, in his Israeli army reserve officer's uniform, used his army-issue automatic rifle to kill 29 and wound more than 100 pilgrims and was then beaten to death by the survivors.
Fisk says that Baruch and the 'incident' were condemned with much less vigour than if he were a Palestinian 'terrorist'. Goldstein was an 'American import'. Goldstein ' killed to prevent a massacre'.
The consequent deaths of 25 enraged Palestinians and 9 Israeli soldiers were not added to the figures for the carnage. The name of the game, according to Fisk, was distancing Israel. Karsh takes this absolution one step further by declaring Goldstein 'deranged'. Which causes me to wonder why his tomb pronounces him a saint and holy martyr and is a place of pilgrimage and veneration. Much less does it explain how a deranged man became a qualified medical doctor and officer of the Israeli army. Fisking, then, is an unstable weapon which sometimes backfires on the fisker.
The history of the Middle East over the last hundred years makes sour and terrible but essential reading, particularly the nurture by Britain and USA of the Israeli cuckoo in the nest of Arabs. To have it told in the first person by an eye-witness is the only hope of peace: peace through understanding that every Western intervention brought betrayal, humiliation and suffering.
And why the interventions? After the destruction of Iraq by sequential sanctions, bombings, invasion and occupation, which government offices were singled out for protection from the looters? The Ministry of Oil.
The question I am left with is: who will silence Fisk? In fundamentalist American/British/Israeli logic he is not 'with us'. Therefore he must be 'against us' and ruthless measures may legitimately be taken to save 'democracy' and 'our way of life'. I really fear an assassin's bullet on the veranda of his home in Beirut or an accident on his many journeys. It will be in vain and counter-productive in the manner of many such 'interventions' but what can we do? To read him is the only gift we can bring. I really must also remember his motto: "journalists do not take gifts from prime ministers!"
Scoop interviews Robert Fisk here.
By John O'Neill
No other journalist has been paid such compliments and received so many awards from his peers as Robert Fisk for his 30 years of reporting the Middle East. His detractors serve only to enhance the essence of his work by the process of fisking which seizes on a line of questionable accuracy and by mocking it seeks to destroy the edifice he has constructed.
Fisking is easy: 'King Hussein's stallion rears on her hind legs behind his coffin'. Or the bathetic question following a horror village massacre in Algeria: 'What sort of man would throw a bomb into a birdcage?'
Fisk covers the historical background very simply:
After the Allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just 17 months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career - in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad - watching the peoples within those borders burn.'That has been his mission: to 'be there' for those who continue to suffer for the arrogance of honoured statesmen who served their country's interests by shameless huckstering such as the double-booking of Palestine to both Arabs and Jews.
This book threatened me as none other. I have lived a long and optimistic life comforted by a belief that humanity moves forward, slowly and with halting steps, to a more kindly occupation of this planet. Fisk destroys such faith with evenhanded accounts of barbarities perpetrated in the lands which produced our greatest religions by all who lived and entered there. Whether the tortures and slaughters were face-to-face and personal or by computer-driven weapons of mass dismemberment from 30.000 feet, the effect of the narration is to provoke the lingering question: 'Are we all mad?'. It takes a lot of thoughtful focussing on the occasional flashes of generosity and courage which leaven the book to begin to restore optimism. At least for me, it will happen.
Robert deserves a fisking in at least one respect: his fixation on his father and the consequent determination to drag Bill Fisk into the history with links that are tenuous to the point of invisibility. Bill Fisk was an odd man, rigid, hard, cruel in the way of many family men of his generation. He served in France in the closing years of the First World War with no great distinction other than refusing to command a firing-squad on a convicted Australian soldier/murderer. Much of Robert's chapter on his father should have been edited. His title for this book is taken from one of his father's war medals: a mistake. The subtitle: 'The Conquest of the Middle East' is far more relevant and powerful.
His mother, Peggy, whom he loved, merits only a few paragraphs but these explain a lot. When Robert first confronted the fact of mortality as a child, he asked why bother with all that homework when we all had to die. Peggy replied: 'By the time you grow up, they may have found a cure for that'. This may well be the source of the eternal optimism that drives her son to live the life he has chosen.
Fisking Robert is not just the lighthearted ribbing of a great man and his work. When it is deadly serious it is least effective. Efraim Karsh is not happy with Fisk's account of the mass-murder by Baruch Goldstein of Muslim Palestinians at prayer at Abrahams Rock in 1994. The facts are that Goldstein, in his Israeli army reserve officer's uniform, used his army-issue automatic rifle to kill 29 and wound more than 100 pilgrims and was then beaten to death by the survivors.
Fisk says that Baruch and the 'incident' were condemned with much less vigour than if he were a Palestinian 'terrorist'. Goldstein was an 'American import'. Goldstein ' killed to prevent a massacre'.
The consequent deaths of 25 enraged Palestinians and 9 Israeli soldiers were not added to the figures for the carnage. The name of the game, according to Fisk, was distancing Israel. Karsh takes this absolution one step further by declaring Goldstein 'deranged'. Which causes me to wonder why his tomb pronounces him a saint and holy martyr and is a place of pilgrimage and veneration. Much less does it explain how a deranged man became a qualified medical doctor and officer of the Israeli army. Fisking, then, is an unstable weapon which sometimes backfires on the fisker.
The history of the Middle East over the last hundred years makes sour and terrible but essential reading, particularly the nurture by Britain and USA of the Israeli cuckoo in the nest of Arabs. To have it told in the first person by an eye-witness is the only hope of peace: peace through understanding that every Western intervention brought betrayal, humiliation and suffering.
And why the interventions? After the destruction of Iraq by sequential sanctions, bombings, invasion and occupation, which government offices were singled out for protection from the looters? The Ministry of Oil.
The question I am left with is: who will silence Fisk? In fundamentalist American/British/Israeli logic he is not 'with us'. Therefore he must be 'against us' and ruthless measures may legitimately be taken to save 'democracy' and 'our way of life'. I really fear an assassin's bullet on the veranda of his home in Beirut or an accident on his many journeys. It will be in vain and counter-productive in the manner of many such 'interventions' but what can we do? To read him is the only gift we can bring. I really must also remember his motto: "journalists do not take gifts from prime ministers!"
Scoop interviews Robert Fisk here.
posted by Rob O'Neill at 10:14 AM
1 Comments:
Thanks for the thought-provoking review, John. They put some interesting questions to RF in the Scoop interview, although I haven't actually had a chance to listen to his answers yet.
I'm intrigued to know when you expect to be making use of his motto; as a hack, can I just say that I will accept gifts from anyone — even hand-me-downs intended for ethical refuseniks.
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