Fisk married fellow anti-Israel
journalist
Lara Marlowe
in 1994.
I have an entire page about her as well.
They later divorced in 2006.
Fisk died in 2020.
At his death he was praised by the Irish Taoiseach
and President
(both of whom are hostile to Israel and support boycotting Israel).
In Ireland, Fisk was the establishment.
1990s
Fisk's predictions of doom during the build-up to the
Gulf War in 1990-91.
Apparently if you fight to defend your allies in the Middle East against your enemies,
that will only make your enemies stronger.
This is from
US action may generate uncontrollable fall-out,
Robert Fisk, The Irish Times, 29 Sept 1990.
Note the highlighted quote is not from Fisk.
It is from Saddam Hussein in 1975.
For more of Fisk in 1990-91 see
From the Embassy, George Dempsey, 2004, pp.175-178.
"Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace".
That's how The Independent titled an
interview with Osama Bin Laden
by Robert Fisk in Sudan in 1993.
What genius insight.
Yes, these people really understand jihad and Islam and the Middle East alright.
Fisk is shocked that Western countries want to kill enemy leaders in war:
"Yet another Arab - another leader, however vengeful and ruthless - had been assassinated. The Americans want to kill Osama bin Laden. They want to kill Mullah Omar. They killed Saddam's two sons. The Israelis repeatedly threaten to murder Yasser Arafat. It's getting to be a habit."
And then, because we killed Heydrich,
we "cannot complain" if they kill Churchill, or something:
"Anyone who advocates violence is now on a death list. So who can be surprised if the rules are broken by the other side?
... If, or when, our own political leaders are gunned down or blown up, we shall vilify the killers and argue a new stage in "terrorism" has been reached. We shall forget that we are now encouraging this all-out assassination spree."
Karsh says Fisk dwells with obsessive detail on the crimes, real or alleged, of Israel and the West.
"One episode dwelled upon in painstaking detail is the 1994 murder of 29 Palestinians in Hebron by the Jewish zealot Baruch Goldstein. What others at the time saw as the act of a deranged individual emerges in his account as a terrorist attack instigated by Israel itself."
Fisk also covers in detail the Jenin clashes in April 2002,
which was just ordinary urban combat.
"Dedicating four full pages to events in Jenin, where 38 Palestinian combatants and 14 civilians were killed during heavy fighting (fighting that also took the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers), Fisk struggles to find the correct terms for the alleged horrors:
"How big does a massacre have to be before it qualifies as a genocide?""
Fisk lacks the same focus on Arab crimes:
"On Planet Fisk, there are bad guys and there are victims, and the victims - the Arabs - can do no wrong, at least none for which they are ultimately responsible. Thus, one comes away from his current book hardly realizing that Lebanon was under a repressive Syrian occupation for most of the 30 years that Fisk has made his home there.
...
The curious effect of this effort to absolve Middle Easterners of any blame or responsibility for their region's problems, or their own deeds, is to make Fisk guilty of the sin for which he endlessly berates the West; he patronizes his subjects in the worst tradition of the "white man's burden.""
Fisk was not a journalist, in the sense of just reporting facts.
He was an activist.
You cannot trust him.
See this one short
extract
from The Great War For Civilisation.
Fisk
says Menachem Begin called Palestinians "two-legged beasts".
No reference.
No full quote.
If you fact-check Fisk
you will discover it is a
fake quote.
The "crocodiles" quote is also a fake quote.
The "cancerous manifestation" quote is also a fake quote.
As explained in this detailed fisking.
And even in just two paragraphs, there are politics to make you sick.
Fisk defends the butcher Arafat
while Arafat was killing 1,000 Jews in his barbaric intifada.
Arafat was a racist killer of defenceless Jews on buses and in cafes and shops.
But all Fisk sees is an Arab under attack, "haunted" by ill health, and who needs to be defended.
Fisk is piously appalled at Israelis who call the Jew killing monster a "scorpion", and compare him to Bin Laden,
as if there is something wrong with that.
Even two paragraphs of Fisk's horrible politics is enough for a lifetime.
Robert Fisk is all politics, all narrative, and dodgy facts curated to serve his politics.
Fisk declares here that he is not a regular journalist and he does not do regular journalism.
He does activism for one side.
Which is fine if you agree with him.
But not so impressive if you think he has picked the wrong side.
Fisk's narrative on Israel gets in the way of his facts:
Extract from
Page 40
(a 2002 essay)
in the collection
The Age of the Warrior
(2008)
by
Robert Fisk.
This claims that Ariel Sharon was found
"personally responsible" for the
Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982.
Fisk has in fact claimed this is a number of places.
But it is false.
Fisk on Sharon v. Fisk on Arafat
Ariel Sharon: Peacemaker, hero... and butcher,
Robert Fisk,
The Independent,
12 Jan 2014,
after the death of Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.
Ariel Sharon
was a democratically elected Prime Minister,
and a war leader who
helped save the Jews of Israel from genocide in 1967 and 1973.
Fisk is disgusted by Sharon:
"How speedily did toady journalists in Washington and New York patch up this brutal man's image."
Instead of a biography of Sharon's amazing life, he puts up a few sneers, smears and at least one big lie (about Sabra and Shatila).
It seems clear that he never met him.
Yasser Arafat Dies: The Old Man Who Dreamt Of Just One Square Metre Of Land,
Robert Fisk, The Independent, 12 Nov 2004,
after the death of Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat.
Yasser Arafat
was a petty tyrant who oppressed his own people,
and a racist terrorist who butchered Jews.
Fisk's reaction to his death
is far more sympathetic than his reaction to Sharon.
He portrays a noble fighter who sadly failed and maybe was corrupted.
It is clear that Fisk met him many times.
Fisk portrays the evil old Jew killer as a dreamer:
"Arafat was a dreamer, a popular characteristic for Palestinians who had only dreams to give them hope. Even in the early days, if compromise was required of him, he could talk to Israelis, even hint at acceptance of the partition of Palestine. "I will live on one square metre of my land," he would say."
As somebody above said in 2014:
"How speedily did toady journalists patch up this brutal man's image."
In fact, the invasion was easy.
The Taliban regime
fell in weeks, with almost no American deaths.
The message was sent. "Attack us and your regime ends". The goal was accomplished.
The problem in Afghanistan was nation building.
Trying to build a better country for the Afghan people.
That was the problem.
That led to 3,500 allied dead
over 20 years, for limited success.
Because the people are not ready.
Their culture is too broken.
By the way, Vietnam had
58,000 US dead
over 20 years.
Its goal was worthy too. To save Vietnam from the communists.
The Afghan invasion was not costly. Nation building was. Though only 1/15 as costly as Vietnam.
Do you want the facts ... or Fisk's version?
by Eoghan Harris, November 25, 2001,
on Fisk's predictions of doom about the Afghan invasion.
"Fisk has now been wrong about three wars in a row.
In the Gulf War he told us the Republican Guard would give the Americans a hard time: in fact, they folded.
In the Kosovo War he said American bombing would not work: today Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for war crimes.
And Fisk has been wrong about the Afghan War from first to last."
Can you oppose nation building?
Can you oppose nation building and still have decent ideas? Yes you can.
If people like Fisk accepted the appalling nature of regimes like the Taliban and Saddam,
and had no problem toppling them,
but opposed nation building on the grounds that the people aren't ready, and have to do it themselves,
I would respect them.
But instead what you get from people like Fisk is a mass of moral confusion
- that toppling dictators is wrong
- that nation building is morally wrong
- that the liberated subjects have a right to be angry with the "occupation"
- and so on.
I cannot respect such a position.
I cannot respect people like Fisk.
I do not know what they believe in.
Fisk identifies with the thugs who beat up Fisk
In 2001, Robert Fisk was attacked and beaten up by jihadi Afghans close to the Afghan-Pakistan border.
He responded with sympathy to his own assault!
He is sympathetic to the attack of these jihadi maniacs on him:
"And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border,
I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."
He would have attacked the people who destroyed the Taliban?
What is wrong with him?
"Many of these Afghans, so we were to learn, were outraged by what they had seen on television
...
A villager [said] they had seen the videotape of CIA officers "Mike" and "Dave" threatening death to a kneeling prisoner at Mazar."
They are outraged by rough words to a captured jihadist.
But they are not outraged by the Taliban's long oppression and butchery, or the 9/11 attacks.
And Fisk thinks these are reasonable people!
He had a glimpse of enlightenment, but he pulled back:
"Did I catch the word "kaffir" - infidel? Perhaps I was was wrong."
He sticks to his belief that they are motivated by geopolitics
rather than religion.
He says his attackers are not responsible for their actions:
"there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so
but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us - of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war".
Because Muslims would never be violent if left alone by the West.
The Pathology Of Robert Fisk
by Andrew Sullivan, Dec 2001 (back when he was good), reacts to Fisk and his embrace of his beating.
Fisk actually believed this, even as he himself was being beaten.
As Allied forces storm into Iraq,
Fisk
laughs at the idea that the allies are winning the war.
"So far, the Anglo-American armies are handing their propaganda to the Iraqis on a plate.
First, on Saturday, we were told ... that Umm Qasr, the tiny Iraqi seaport on the Gulf,
had "fallen".
...
Then we were told ... that Nassariyah had been captured.
Then its "embedded " correspondent informed us - and here my old journalistic suspicions were alerted - that it had been "secured".
...
All in all, then, this has not been a great weekend for Messers Bush and Blair.
...
One of our own Tornadoes is shot down by the Americans
...
and we haven't even totally captured the first town over the border from Kuwait.
...
this weekend, the quick and easy war, the conflict of "shock-and-awe"
...
doesn't seem so realistic. Things are going wrong. We are not telling the truth.
And the Iraqis are riding high on it all."
The Monster of Baghdad is Now the Hero of Arabia,
Robert Fisk, 1 April 2003,
laughs at the allied effort:
"So it's a "truly remarkable achievement", is it?
... Even the "siege of Baghdad" - a city that is 30 miles wide and might
need a quarter of a million men to surround it - is fading from the diary.
...
I have a suspicion that what's gone wrong has nothing to do with plans.
Indeed, I suspect there is no real overall plan."
Iraqi Army's Defenses Seem Impenetrable,
Robert Fisk, 2 April 2003:
"Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi army is prepared to defend its capital should
take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself,
could the Americans batter their way through these defences?"
The allies captured Baghdad one week later, on 9 Apr 2003.
And yet still for the next 17 years this man appeared constantly on Irish media,
and was praised by all the Irish establishment as an authority on the Middle East.
Doesn't it matter
that he was wrong?
Surely it counts for
something?
The dangers of Fisking
(and here)
by David Pryce-Jones, November 2003, describes Fisk as an enemy of the Iraqi people
posing as their champion:
"Perverting American purposes and practices in Iraq, fisking helps to bring about the doom that it anticipates with such glee and relish.
... The Iraqis are his real victims. One of the oldest of imperial lessons is that the missionary does the natives no favours."
The prose of Robert Fisk
by Norman Geras, July 5, 2004,
on Fisk's hideous writing about Saddam Hussein at his trial.
Fisk tries to humanise the gasser of villages and
butcher of families:
"Bags beneath his eyes, beard greying, finger-jabbing with anger, Saddam was still the same fox
.....
Scornful he was, defeated he was not.
.....
One looked into those big, tired, moist eyes and wondered if he understood pain and grief and sin in the way we mere mortals think we do."
Not for the first time one asks: What is wrong with Robert Fisk?
Mirawdeli attacks Fisk for saying the Madrid bombings
were "revenge" for Iraq.
"He forgets that 11 September happened before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which thankfully led to the destruction of two greatest evil regimes in todays world with whom Robert Fisk and Independent, it seems, were quite happy to live and deal!"
He attacks Fisk for not understanding the evil of the regimes that have been deposed:
"Was it an act of injustice to topple Saddam? Hasnt Robert Fisk been in Iraq and seen for himself over 300 mass graves containing over 300,000 bodies of old and young men and women and children, shot or buried-alive? Was the Taliban an example of just Islamic law and government and did the US and Britain do injustice by destroying the regime?
And what just cause do the terrorists have apart from being fanatic bloodthirsty fanatics obsessed with Jihad and imposing sharia on everyone and every society if they can and by so doing imposing the law of jungle and system of darkness of humanity?"
Mirawdeli understands what jihadists are. Fisk, not so much.
This is a more interesting article than normal by Fisk, where in 2007 he notices the shocking butchery of the Iraqi insurgents.
He does not make the error of some leftists of actual supporting the Iraqi insurgents.
Rather he complains that Arabs do not protest Arab-on-Arab violence.
In among his usual attacks on the West and Israel, he has a good point:
"When the Hama massacre occurred, neighbouring Arab states were silent. ... Just as the imams and scholars of Islam were silent when the Algerians began to slaughter each other in a welter of head-chopping and security force executions in the 1990s.
Just as they are silent now over the mutual killings in Iraq.
...
where are the sheikhs of Al-Azhar and the great Arabian kingdoms when the Iraqi dead are fished out of the Tigris and cut down in their thousands in Baghdad, Kerbala, Baquba? They, too, are silent.
Not a word of criticism. Not a hint of concern.
...
But when does Arab blood become less sacred? Why, when it is shed by Arabs. It's not just a failure of self-criticism in the Arab world. In a landscape ruled by monsters whom we in the West have long supported, criticism of any kind is a dodgy undertaking. But can there not be one small sermon of reprobation for what Iraqi Muslims are doing to Iraqi Muslims?"
Good for him.
However, one could argue that Fisk's entire career is based on an excessive focus on violence
by westerners, instead of violence by non-westerners.
See transcript:
"This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.
... And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan, as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk.
The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral.
So are the pretenders of freedom at the White House and the channels controlled by them able to run an interview with him? So that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?
If you were to avoid these reasons, you will have taken the correct path that will lead America to the security that it was in before September 11th."
Al Qaeda operative and spokesman
Adam Gadahn
praises Robert Fisk in a private letter within Al Qaeda, Jan 2011.
In a
public video in Aug 2006.
Adam Gadahn publicly praised Fisk:
"As for those who have expressed their respect and admiration for Islam, and acknowledged that it is the truth, and demonstrated their support and sympathy for the Muslims and their causes, like George Galloway, Robert Fisk, and countless others .."
He then invites Fisk to convert to Islam.
Fisk lived for years in Syria-controlled Lebanon.
He could live safely in Lebanon because he never said much
to upset
Hezbollah
or
Assad's Syria
(or not enough to outweigh all the things they liked).
He knew that if he criticised the West and Israel,
Hezbollah and Syria
would be happy with him, and
nothing would happen to him.
But if he criticised Hezbollah or Syria (or supported Israel),
he might not be able to live safely in Lebanon.
He mocks the idea that Hezbollah
has a large number of missiles pointed at Israel:
"Take the article in The New York Times
... which last month announced that the Syrian-supported Hizbollah resistance in Lebanon
had 10,000 missiles that could fly to Tel Aviv and
"leave in their wake devastation more terrible than anything Israel has ever known".
The missiles are a myth - I travel the roads of southern Lebanon every two weeks
and there are no such missiles, as the UN force there will confirm"
Luckily, Israel does not just take the word of people who hate it.
In 2006, Hizbollah
attacked Israel with 4,000
of these missiles
whose existence Robert Fisk was unaware of.
In 2011, the Syrian civil war began.
Assad butchered hundreds of thousands to stay in power.
As the war went on,
Fisk's coverage of Syria
was widely accused of being sympathetic to the Assad regime.
Idrees Ahmad, December 3, 2016,
puts the case against Fisk's coverage of the Syrian war:
"For the past four years Fisk has reported from Syria embedded with the regime. The regime herds him to the places it wants him to see and the people it wants him to interrogate-and Fisk appears to yield to the controlling arms of his handlers with the somnambulant innocence of a debutante. On more than a few occasions he has echoed the regime line without demur."
Sam Hamad, August 11, 2016:
"At every major point of the war, Fisk has trumpeted Assad regime and Russian propaganda."
Many critics of Israel ended up disgusted with Fisk over Syria.
Too late, they saw what he was all along:
Fabricator and fraudster, Oz Katerji, Dec 2020.
On Fisk in Syria:
"His approach of embedding with the regime, relying on regime minders and uncritically repeating whatever falsehoods he was spoon-fed by the mukhabarat became his modus operandi."
Robert Fisk: A Conscience Adrift, Ronnie Chatah, 15 Nov 2020.
"In the end, Robert chose rigidity over complexity and empathy: a calcified worldview that no longer matched our current chapter of history. The West was always wrong. Israel remains our gravest threat. And only those fighting both deserved his empathy."
Robert Fisk, 15 April 2003,
says Hezbollah has no missiles.
In July-August 2006, Hezbollah fired 4,000 missiles at Israel.
Fisk is angry with those who .. offended Islam.
"So another internet clever-clogs sets the Middle East on fire ... outrageous Muslim revenge thus "proving" the racist claims of the trash peddlers that Islam is a violent religion."
Em, yes.
You're close to the truth.
But shouldn't that read:
"outrageous Muslim revenge thus proving the claims that Islam is a violent religion."
Fisk seems to want all criticism of Islam stopped.
Apparently this will help, rather than prevent, Islamic reform.
"there is room for a serious discussion among Muslims about, for example, a re-interpretation of the Koran; but Western provocation - and western, alas, it is - closes down such a narrative."
Fisk explains that the cause of the attack is European colonialism, in Algeria, in 1954-1962.
Not jihad, silly.
The second, the very second, I heard it was Charlie Hebdo, I thought "Islam" and "jihad". But Fisk thought otherwise:
"Algeria. Long before the identity of the murder suspects was revealed by the French police - even before I heard the names of Cherif and Said Kouachi - I muttered the word "Algeria" to myself."
He is proud of the fact he got the wrong end of the stick!
On 9/11:
"When 9/11 happened I was on a plane, on an aircraft phone, and my immediate thought was 'this is what happens when history bites you'.
... the fact remains that if you cause trouble in the Middle East it will come back to haunt you."
On Charlie Hebdo:
"If you bomb Syria or Iraq, you will pay the price. It's inevitable. And, if after that you then go and mock the religion of the people who have died in such numbers, well then some people are going to be very angry."
Robert Fisk, 13 Sept 2012,
is angry at those who blaspheme against the religion of Islam
and criticise the Prophet Muhammad.
They should know not to do it, he says.
Fisking
"Fisking"
took off as a word with the rise of blogs.
The word means to forensically dissect some ridiculous article, such as one written by Robert Fisk,
and reply to its points one by one.
"Fisking" was widely used by blogs on the right, but never took off on the left, which resented the term.
See the old
Fisking
article on Wikipedia in Apr 2015, which got deleted by leftists.
Robert Fisk was beloved by the Irish establishment.
He told Irish people what they wanted to hear about the Middle East - that the West and Israel are to blame.
When he died in Oct 2020, he received these tributes from the
Irish President
Michael D. Higgins
and the Irish Taoiseach
Micheal Martin
(both of whom support boycotting Israel).
Hostility to the West and Israel is not "edgy" in Ireland. It is the establishment.
"Tensions Rise In Middle East As One Side Wants To Kill Jews And The Other Side Are Jews Who Don't Want To Die And Neither Will Compromise".
The Babylon Bee
explains the Israel conflict.
Not a bad explanation, actually.
I love the way Benjamin Netanyahu is described as
a "you can't murder Jews" extremist.
This single "funny because true" article is worth more than the entire lifetime of words by
Fisk on Israel.
"There is no connection between Islam and "terror".
But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror"."
- Robert Fisk's
useless, worthless analysis of the Islamic jihad that goes on
in almost every Islamic country,
and almost every country, Western or non-Western,
with a significant Muslim population,
and has waxed and waned, but never ended,
for 1,400 years.
Fisk understands nothing.
The cause of Islamic terror is not "occupation".
Only a child could think that.
The cause of Islamic terror is the ideology of jihad.
"[Robert Fisk] is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral."
- Osama Bin Laden, Oct 2004.