Robert Fisk is possibly the greatest British journalists of the last 50 years, if not ever - a man who probably understands the Middle East and the Muslim world better than some of the people who were born there; I don't say than people who "better than people who live there" because Fisk does live there, in Beirut, although his itinerary takes him all over the place.
One thing that earns him respect even amongst those who hate him is his ability to anger all sections of his audience, by telling them things that he believes they don't want to hear. As Fisk found out in an Ottawa banquet hall a few weeks ago, it isn't always that they don't want to hear, but that they aren't free to nod agreement.
Ironic, isn't it? The same warmongers who point at Muslim "hypocrisy" in complaining about human rights abuses by Western powers are, in fact, the reason why many of them won't turn their rhetoric against the barbarism and despotism of Syrian, Egyptian, Libyan, and other governments. The security establishment - which we have hyped up due to fantastical and irrational fears - colludes with the most vile regimes in the Muslim world in suppressing any kind of meaningful reform. Oh, and Egypt, here's $13B for "defense" against your own citizens.
Many of us who are critical of Western imperialism in the Muslim world (and everywhere else, for that matter) don't, however, have such vulnerabilities back home - either because "back home" is nowhere more exotic than Winnipeg, or because our particular "back home" isn't as uniformly bad as some people assume. For those of us in that position, we don't have a problem explaining why the reign of the ibn Saud has been in every way a stain on the face of the Muslim world, and how happy we will be when that name is erased from the pages of history, and never replaced with its ilk again.
If it seems like we don't spend much of our ammo on Muslim governments, it's because our ammo is limited, and the barbarity of such places is not, for us, a point of contention. The majority of those participating in this debate are in agreement that everyone deserves a fair trial, that rape is a crime, and that torture is not a legitimate way to obtain information. There's no point in having a debate where most of the participants completely agree.
At least, we're all in agreement about it when Arab dictatorships are doing it. There are some here who think that sort of behaviour on the part of our own governments should be encouraged.
4 comments:
I've always enjoyed Fisk's writing, both because the personal touch he adds make a great narrative, and because he never hesitates to criticize governments.
However, I'm always concerned when his detractors point out his factual inaccuracies -- for example, this review from the Guardian (a Fisk-friendy audience, I would think) lists a lot of errors: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1644959,00.html.
While his rhetoric and storytelling are fantastic, I'm skeptical of his facts.
I agree, although I think in some cases the reviewer is nitpicking a bit over typos. Some of the errors have serious implications, but I'm not sure they really undermine Fisk's arguments. He probably knows that Christ was born in Bethlehem, not Jerusalem. I'm sure that if Fisk published revised edition, it would still hold together - it IS nearly 1,300 pages, after all.
I've had the occasional problem with Fisk's columns (factually and semantically), but less so than with any other commentator.
You've read the book, haven't you? What did you think?
I purchased the book for a 3,000km bus ride and 2 months of living the bush, and it was very useful for that purpose. As for those errors, it's not that they're significant in themselves, but they just make me sketpical.
I liked the book a lot because I learned a lot about the Middle East (I'd say I didn't even know half of the wars he covered existed before I read the book), and I thought the personal narrative was fantastic. At times, though, I did find his politics a little over the top, and his chapters on Israel-Palestine were unreadably one-sided. The man clearly loves the underdog; so do I, but less categorically, I guess.
The problem is that the situation is unreadably one-sided. From my reading of him, Fisk isn't naively enamoured with the Palestinian "freedom fighters" - he knows there are snakes in every corner, he just sees that some of them are far more powerful and menacing than others.
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