Robert Fisk: America's morality has been distorted by 11 September 'It's as if all the lessons of history, in Afghanistan and the Middle East, have been tossed into a bin' 07 March 2002 Internal links Israeli attacks intensify Gaza shattered by ferocious land, sea and air strikes We risk charges of war crimes, Peres tells Cabinet In Afghan fields, the poppies blow. Yes, even as the Americans are moving deeper into the Afghan trap, the warlords and gangsters running much of the western-supported Afghan government are ensuring a bumper new crop of heroin for the world's markets. The UN have warned of this, of course, but nothing is being done. The "war against terror" comes first. The broken roads and highways of Afghanistan are now ribbons of anarchy and brigandage and murder across the country. The pathetic little force of peace-keepers in Kabul cannot control all of the capital, let alone the rest of the country. The Interim President, Hamid Karzai, can scarcely control the street outside his office. But the "war against terror" comes first. Locked into their "war against terror" – and now discovering that their enemies want to fight them – the Americans remain equally indolent when confronted by the infinitely more dangerous conflict 2,000 miles to the west of Kabul, in the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Nablus, Jenin and Gaza. When the Israeli army goes on a shooting spree in the refugee camps and kills 16 Palestinians, among them two children, the US calls for "restraint". When a Palestinian suicide bomber murders a crowd of Israelis in Jerusalem, including two babies and a 10-year old, the US boldly blames Yasser Arafat for not "stopping terrorism" by locking up the bad guys. And Ariel Sharon? Why, he's busy destroying the police stations and prisons to make sure Mr Arafat can't do what he's been ordered to do. And when Mr Sharon actually announces that Israel must "inflict greater losses" – in other words, kill more Palestinians – Washington is silent. Maybe it's not indolence. Maybe the Bush administration actually believes that the man held "personally responsible" by an Israeli commission of inquiry for the murder of 1,700 Palestinian civilians in Beirut in 1982 really is fighting America's "war on terror". Maybe America's moral compass has become so skewed by the crimes against humanity on 11 September that President Bush simply no longer cares what Mr Sharon does. It's as if all the lessons of history – in Afghanistan as well as the Middle East – have been tossed into a bin. Take ex-President Clinton. He arrives in Israel and what does he do? He blames Mr Arafat. And what does his preposterous wife say when she does the same thing? "Yasser Arafat bears the responsibility for the violence that has occurred; it rests on his shoulders ..." She says that her role as a US Senator is "to support the Israeli people". Really? What's wrong with supporting innocent Palestinians as well? Wrong religion? Back-to-front writing? Wrong eye colour? So a war against colonial occupation has been transformed into an offshoot of the "war on terror", the language of this war ever more infantile. We now have to learn by rote the following words: tit-for-tat, cycle-of-violence, axis of evil, bunker-buster, daisy-cutter ... Is there no end to this childishness? No, there is not. For the latest little killer is the word "transfer" or "resettlement". As in "the simple answer... would be to create a vast separation from Israel, resettling the Palestinians in Jordan, where 80 per cent of the population is Palestinian." This comes from an article published in USA Today. In Israel itself, an opinion poll asks Israelis how many of them would support "transfer" – of Arabs out of their homes, of course, not Jewish settlers off Arab land – as a solution to the war. This is incredible. "Transfer" is ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansing is a war crime. If American newspapers are prepared to print such an option and if Israelis are asked to give their opinion on it, what is Mr Milosevic doing in The Hague? The moral collapse is already underway. Take the watering down of the US government's latest report on human rights. In 2000, it said that Egypt's hopelessly unfair military courts "do not ensure civilian defendants due process before an independent tribunal". In the 2001 report, however, that sentence has been censored out. It has to be, of course, because Mr Bush is now setting up his own military courts to try his prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without due process. And while the Americans are distorting the nature of the war between Israel and the Palestinians, they are lying about Afghanistan. General Tommy Franks, the head of the US Central Command, refers in the following words to the mistaken killing of 16 innocent Afghans at Hazar Qadam: "I will not characterise it as a failure of any type." Sorry? Either General Franks – who on Tuesday managed to refer to his newly killed soldiers as dying "in Vietnam" – didn't read the facts or he is a very disreputable man. His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, refuses to use the word "mistake" or even "investigation" after thousands of innocent Afghans died under US bombs because the word "sometimes has the implication of more formality or a disciplinary action". When Washington's top military men are so dishonest, is it any surprise that Israeli tanks can open fire on refugee camps without any serious response from the US or blast cars carrying children because they want to kill their father? It is surely time that Europe became involved. It is surely time that the EU held a summit about these terrible conflicts and involved itself directly. We should be expanding the peace force in Kabul to remove the weapons of Afghanistan and let America move into the swamp of semi- occupation and guerrilla warfare if that is what it wishes. We should be asking Israel to repay the €17.29m (£10.5m) of European taxpayers' money that has been destroyed by the Israeli army in its vandalisation of EU-funded Palestinian infrastructure. Since the Americans won't talk to Yasser Arafat, we should take over from them. If Washington is too slovenly to halt this terrible war between Arab and Israeli, we must try to do so. We're asked to fund America's bankrupt policies with our euros. So now it's time to demand that we have a say in them. Instead of that, Downing Street, which over Christmas castigated those journalists who predicted chaos and blood in Afghanistan – myself included, I'm glad to say – feeds Mr Bush's fantasies by supporting yet another war with Iraq. I'm beginning to suspect that 11 September is turning into a curse far greater than the original bloodbath of that day, that America's absorption with that terrible event is in danger of distorting our morality. Is the anarchy of Afghanistan and the continuing slaughter in the Middle East really to be the memorial for the thousands who died on 11 September?
F D Khan, may i make a suggestion? For every negative post you make, would you make a positive one? Actually, this goes for everyone.
Good Point Space Ghost! I just wish there was more positives to talk about in some areas' world events, ignoring it with a smiley facade will not turn the wheels of change. I believe controversy creates innovation, which creates change. And I just posted under the "Who do you Resemble" thread my picture and I look DAMN serious...!
Hmmm, new allies since September 11th: Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan Georgia Yemen Pakistan India Old allies supporting US action: UK, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Spain, Japan and a host of others. Allies supporting action against Iraq: UK, and I believe more to come. Leftist journalists talking out of their asses: Too many to count. Allies imposing new sanctions on Israel: Uh, zero.
Take everything you read by Fisk w/ a grain of salt. His anti-American proclivities are well documented. This is the same guy who, after being beaten & robbed by a mob in Pakistan, wrote a column saying something to the effect of "I understand why they hate America, and if I were them I'd attack any Westerner I saw".
HayesStreet, I'm not sure we should trust anyone on that list of new allies, except for maybe India. Yemen and Pakistan definitely should be viewed with a cautious eye.
Sure, but my point is that while there are plenty of left leaning journalists screaming about how we're alienating everyone, there is a long list of countries that are moving in cooperation with the US.
Well, his credibility is shot! No one with anti-American proclivities could possibly be right about anything!
You have to know who to listen to. I've read enough of his work to realize that he provides distorted facts, propoganda, leftist anti-action buzzwords (like the "Afghan trap" we heard so much about before the war, and the ensuing "quagmire" that was sure to result from it) and little else. Just as I don't listen to Limbaugh or read Buchannan, I don't read Fisk (or pay attention to Sontag or Chomsky) because they bring nothing substantive to the discussion.
Just a little info on Robert Fisk. Robert Fisk is Britain’s most highly decorated foreign correspondent. He has received the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times, most recently in 1995 and 1996. His specialty is the Middle East, where he has spent the last twenty-three years. Currently the Beirut correspondent for the London Independent, Fisk has covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war, and the conflict in Algeria. He is the author of Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Atheneum, 1990), and his reporting from Lebanon has brought him international attention. He was the one who broke the story about the Israeli shelling of the U.N. compound in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996.
A little more 'information' about Robert Fisk. As if writing for the 'Independent' doesn't tell you what you need to know. The guy is a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden for crying out loud. Robert Fisk's Orwellian Newspeak For more than two decades, journalist Robert Fisk has used his correspondent card to proudly become a crusader for Arab and Palestinian causes. Back in the 1970s Fisk began reporting from Beirut for the London Times. His dispatches in 1982 from the Palestinian side of Beirut were full of purple prose describing Palestinian women as "Madonnas" of renaissance artists or "El Greco" characters with "beseeching eyes and hands." Fisk's identification with the Palestinians only grew after shrapnel from the fighting hit near his apartment. When Palestinian fighters fled Beirut, Fisk sadly wrote of his "friend's" humiliation, embarrassment and "uncontrollable... weeping." Now, 25 years later, Fisk is sending daily dispatches from Palestinian territories for the British Independent. In one recent article entitled, "How pointless checkpoints humiliate the lions of Palestine, sending them on the road to vengeance" (April 14), Fisk sat in a column of Arab cars waiting to pass through an Israeli checkpoint. Fisk charges Israel with "bestializing" the Palestinian people. He describes the humiliation of Arab men whom he identifies as "lions and eagles," who are whipped into obedient "donkeys." Finally, he writes -- in the first person -- "Now it was our turn [to go through the checkpoint]... cockroaches ready to be crushed." http://honestreporting.com/critiques/2001/27_fisk.asp To these familiar elements of factual recklessness and cinematic manipulation, Fisk adds a striking focus on himself as personal witness and commentator. Reminding viewers continuously of his long tenure in Lebanon he claims a deeper insight into the nation, but his films are a testimony to the abandonment of objectivity and an unalloyed advocacy of Arab attitudes towards Israel and the West. On the rise of Islamic radicalism in Lebanon, for example, he says, "I've watched a friendly Muslim population turn to hate the West...It all started with Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That year changed Lebanon forever." Lebanon's slide into religious polarization and political anarchy did not, of course, start in 1982, but twelve years earlier, in 1970, when the failed PLO attempt to overthrow Jordan's King Hussein triggered a flood of Palestinians from Jordan into Lebanon. The influx of PLO fighters and the establishment of a PLO mini-state in Lebanon accelerated the unraveling of the fragile relationship of Lebanon's Muslim and Christian groups. By 1975 tensions between Christians, Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Palestinians had erupted into genuine civil war. Not a word of this appears in Fisk's "documentaries" though the reporter notes his arrival in Lebanon in 1976, undoubtedly to cover that war. Historian David Pryce-Jones has written of Fisk's uniformly anti-Western positions and intrusive self-dramatizing: The reporter "habitually places himself not at all on the edge of his story but at the centre of his story, not really reporting on others but on himself." In the case of "Beirut to Bosnia" reporting on himself meant a ruthless promotion of his personal hostility toward Israel in films that were propaganda tracts, not documentaries. Andrea Levin is National President of CAMERA Copyright © 1994 by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
Honestreporting.com hehehe NOw talk about bias. Go to the site. click on related sites you get: realted sites You see that it is a bogus "honest reporting site" basically set up to attack any news reporting they don't think is supportive enough of Israel. The whole thing, is full of articles accusing CNN, MSNBC, The NewYork Times, the BBC, The Minneapolis Tribune or any other source of being biased against Israel. It lists the email address and has a sample letter to fire off to complain to any publication or reporter who isn't sufficiently pro Israel. Hayes, are you just trying to add fuel to the fire for those who say the US media is biased in favor of Israel? I must say it was an education in how hard some people work at insuring that Americans only get a one sided picture of the conflict. Is it any wonder they feel compelled to do a special hatchet job on Robert Fisk, whose peers have awarded him numerous prizes for journalism?
His peers at the Guardian or the Independent? Glynch, everyone has their slant. Honestreporting does have a pro-Israel slant. So what. Fisk is vehemently anti-Israel and anti-US. That is the point. You present him as someone who is recognized for his 'objective' reporting which is simply false. There is nothing objective about his reporting. Saying 'hehehe' does not make him objective, nor his prose newsworthy. I never said, 'hey, honestreporting is the true unbiased site on the internet.' That honestreporting has a particular slant doesn't mean that its indictment of Fisk is any less true. And the second half of the post is not from honestreporting. Its a second indictment of Fisk from a different source.
I feel that every individual irregardless of the news source will have some bias. What I try to do is take in as much as possible and sort it out myself. I just feel that Israel is being incredibly brutal towars a group of people it is occupying. Because of US Economic, military and unilateral political support, we may further enrage people and alienate ourselves economically and socially from parts of the world that we should be doing business with. Everything is based on economics, the reason the US is still around versus the USSR is the capitalist system that allowed us to flourish and use those funds for the best, most sophisticated military equipment. We are responsible for/ a party to Israel's actions simply because we are funding them. We give more money to that little country with a few million people than we do to any country in the world. I think its sad that as soon as some signs of a peace accord is brought about by the Saudi's, Ariel Sharon decides to invade the Occupied Territories, which he knows will spark more violence and end the peace process. I just feel its Ariel Sharon's dream to have the Palestinian "animals" as he call them, "transferred" to Jordan or Syria and annex the Occupied territories once they have been cleaned errr..cleansed.
F.D. Khan The "Right of Return" is something that most Israelis seem to be against and it keeps coming up in every Palestinian and now the Saudi proposal. Do they expect Israel to change its mind on that issue or is it a way to prevent a final peace from being accomplished? Mango
Very True Mango, and as we all know "might is right" But I just find it Ironic that the same people that speak of the injustice of the original Diaspora of the Jewish People thousands of years age, yet are subjecting a people to diaspora of there own. How will this "diaspora" of Palestinians be reflected on in Historical terms a thousand years from now?? I know that isn't answering the question, but I think it creates a new one. I believe Israel has a right to exist, be in peace, and thrive; I just feel that no country has a right to brutally occupy a group of people. The right of self-determination is one of the principles that we founded America on, now who are we to dictate that another group of people shouldn't have it?
F.D. Khan, don't you realize that Sharon and Israel are all for peace, too-- and the right to nationhood for the Palestinians? They just can't take any steps toward peace if there are some Palestinians who will attack Israelis or be suicide bombers. They just simply want the violence to stop. Until then, the Israelis will continue to create new setlements and lots of bypass roads to connect the settlements on the land they are so willing to give up once the violence stops. What else can the Israelis do? Why are you against ending the violence? You seem like a reasonable guy. What is so wrong with ending violence?
Comments By Israeli Head's of State Relating to Palestinians and their regard for their US Allies 1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001 2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000 3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982. 4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988 5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983. 6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Meir, March 8, 1969. 7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969 8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972. 9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121. 9a. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget." 10. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983. 11. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001.
