The World of Robert Fisk
An Examination of Prejudice
A review essay
by David Orton
The Great War For Civilization: The Conquest Of The
Middle East
revised edition, by Robert Fisk, Harper
Perennial, London, New York,
Toronto and Sydney, 2006, 1368 pages, paperback,
ISBN: 13 978 1 84115 008 6.
“War is primarily not about victory or defeat but
about death and the infliction of death.
It represents the total failure of the human
spirit.” p. xix.
“Europeans are used to free if sometimes bitter
debates on the Middle East, where the
old canard of ‘anti-Semitism’ flung at anyone who
dares to criticize Israel has largely
lost its power. There are, as I always say, plenty
of real anti-Semites in the world whom
we must fight without inventing more in order to
smother all serious discourse on Israel
and the Arabs.” pp.1083-1084.
Introduction
Robert Fisk
came to speak on June 9th, 2006 on the subject matter of his book, with
its mocking
title, The Great
War For
Civilization: The Conquest Of The Middle East, at a packed
community meeting of several hundred people,
organized by the
Pictou Antigonish Regional Library
in the town of Stellarton, about half an hour by car
from where
I live in Nova Scotia. Copies of his
book in hardcover were available at the Stellarton
meeting,
but I waited until it was available in
paperback before purchasing a copy. This revised
edition
includes material up until July 2006. After
reading the book, I decided to write this review, as
Robert Fisk
makes a significant contribution to
our understanding of the actual state of affairs in
the
Middle East.
This is a grand, educational,
daring, depressing and exciting book to read. For Robert Fisk, a
journalist and foreign correspondent (he does not
like the term “war correspondent”) has as her or
his job “to tell the truth” (p. 35) and “‘to monitor
the centers of power.’” (p. xxiii) What seems to
personally drive Fisk is “how to correct history”
(p. 1286). Part of this, for Fisk, is in understanding
past historical decisions made by Western states
which have deadly implications for today in the
Middle East. (The Middle East is hard to define
precisely, but it is a geographical region where
Africa, Europe and Asia come together, and where the
predominant linguistic, cultural and religious
community is Arabic-speaking.)
It is clear to me, after reading
this book, that where the oppressors and their supporters go to
some lengths to try to control the definitions of
reality that are publicly propagated, the oppressed,
and those who want to contest prevailing definitions
of reality, tend to see Fisk as a very informed
neutral, and therefore, in some sense, an ally.
Perhaps this might be a reason why he is still alive,
although with some hearing loss from past Iraqi
gunfire, after an extensive journalistic gadfly life
spent in war zones! We need to read this book to see
why we in the Western countries (for example,
the United States, Britain, France and now Canada),
are so wrong in “our” current foreign policies
towards the Middle East. We need to read it to see
how it has come about, that some discourses on
the Middle East are considered legitimate, while
other, contending, viewpoints have little articulation
or official legitimacy, and how this can change over
time.
The title of this book “The Great War For Civilization”
comes from one of the campaign medals
of the First World War, awarded to his father, Bill
Fisk. The father was a junior British officer in that
war. Bill Fisk influenced his son not only with a
love of history and books, but also with trench
combat memories of the First World War. Like any
other subject to which Robert Fisk gives his
critical attention, he is not one-dimensional in the
evaluation of his father. Fisk points out his dad was
a bully, what we would call a control freak, and a
racist, and he gives examples of this behaviour.
Yet his father also refused to command a firing
squad to execute a fellow soldier at the front.
This is a large text of over 1300
pages, with twenty-four separate chapters. There are ten maps,
which help the reader in orientating to the
particular geography of the issues being covered. The text
has quite an extensive “Select Bibliography” (pp.
1287-1298) for those readers “who want to
follow up the story of Palestine, Israel, the
Armenian Holocaust, Saddam’s regime, the Iranian
revolution and its eight-year war with Iraq, the
Algerian conflict past and present, and the history of
the modern Middle East - if indeed there is a
‘modern’ Middle East.” (p. 1287) What I found very
helpful was the short “Chronology” (pp. 1331-1334)
starting with the Prophet Mohamed’s birth in
570 and including crucial historical events which
have helped shape the Middle East as the dominant
Islamic region that we understand today. Some
examples: 1915 saw the “start of the Armenian
Holocaust murder of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman
Turks”, still being denied by the Turkish
State today; the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between
Britain and France “to share Syria, Jordan,
Iraq and most of the Arabian peninsula”; the 1917
British Balfour Declaration for “‘the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for
the Jewish people’” which led in 1948 to the
creation of the State of Israel, meaning “750,000
Palestinian Arabs ejected from their land”; and
the crucial but still unfulfilled 1968 UN Security
Council Resolution 242, which “demands
withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territory
in return for security of all states in the region.”
What also hit me in reading this
book were the unspeakable cruelties inflicted by the respective
combatants on each other, often done from a
religious justification, where the enemies are
considered infidels (of the wrong religion) or
apostates, but also done in the furthering of a secular
ideology or in the attempt to spread so-called
Western values. Racism can also be a factor as when
Arabs are called “Arabushim” in the Hebrew language,
as Fisk notes. (p. 562) The cruelty and the
use of any kind of weaponry, including cluster
bombs, cancer-causing depleted uranium bombs and
shells, setting oil wells on fire, ‘routine’ suicide
bombings, video executions, torture, ‘routine’
sensory deprivation and rape, the killing of
civilians, etc. although not the same, do seem related in
some way to belief in the absolute certainty of a
set of ideas, a kind of fanaticism, whether secular
or religious. Western countries are not immune to
this, as Fisk shows us. The armed conflicts can
end up barbarizing the combatants and those
societies which dispatch them.
My own concern – as someone
focused on ecological questions and pleased that, at long last, at
least in some countries, including Canada, “the
environment” seems to be now a priority concern
for an increasing number of citizens – is that
growing conflicts or potential conflicts in the Middle
East can temporarily derail all this. It is a very
worrying situation. We do not want to be led by our
noses by so-called leaders who shout interventionist
slogans. This was done in the past by Western
nations and, as we have seen in Iraq and now
Afghanistan (is Iran next?), it continues today. Robert
Fisk shows us that the “bad guys” change, but not
this dominant theme of intervention in the name
of some allegedly higher goal.
Ecologically, what happens in the
oil-rich Middle East, concerns not only the citizens of that region
and the non-human life forms which require their
habitats for sustenance. It also concerns those of us
who live outside the region – in North America and
Europe (as well as Japan and increasingly China)
– and how we will live our lives in the short term,
with our extravagant oil-based consumption
lifestyles. (Fisk points out that “Almost all the
oil of the Middle East lies beneath lands where Shia
Muslims live,” [p. 197] including in predominantly
Sunni Saudi Arabia.) These “Western” lifestyles
are facing the onset of peak oil, peak natural gas
and massive climate change, as well as the
disruption of inputs of Middle Eastern oil to the
West with the ever-escalating turmoil in the region.
DISCUSSION
“‘War taught
us about why people in the West who say they believe in freedom and
human
rights were
ready to relegate these ideas to the background during our war. This
was a
major lesson
for us. When Saddam invaded us, you were pretty silent, you didn’t
shout like
you did when
Saddam invaded Kuwait ten years later. But you were full of talk about
human
rights when he
went to Kuwait. The crimes of Saddam were much more publicized then.’”
- Tehran
University philosophy student who fought in the eight-year Iraq-Iran
war, p. 353
I have come to feel increasingly,
that the media in North America too often seem to act as non-
critical conduits for government information on
matters Middle Eastern. (For my initial response to
the events of September 11th, 2001, see the document
“My Path to Left Biocentrism: Part VI -
The Impact of September
11th: Fundamentalism and
Earth Spirituality”.
I had previously known of Fisk by
his “unembedded” reputation, and as someone with an
extensive knowledge of the Middle East. He has been
based in Beirut, Lebanon, since 1976, as
an independent journalist. He writes for the British
newspaper The Independent. I
have thought
of his writings as uncompromising, but fair,
critical, and giving informed reports on Middle Eastern
issues. Fisk was also linked in my own mind with
people of the stature of Noam Chomsky,
Norman Finkelstein, John Pilger and the late Edward
Said. These are among the too rare voices
that have important things to say about the Middle
East. I recently read Edward Said’s Out
Of
Place: A Memoir. Said, a
Palestinian-Arab-Christian-American, perhaps like Fisk, does not
appear to be oriented ecologically, but the
following quotation, as a moral compass, seems to
encompass both of these authors concerning the
Middle East:
“I have always felt the priority of intellectual,
rather than national or tribal consciousness, no
matter how solitary that made one.” (Said, p. 280)
Reading Fisk can help fill out
positions that one has come to believe, but until now has lacked
the actual data to substantiate, as in the data he
gives about the Armenian genocide; the details of the
involvement of the West in supporting Iraq and
Saddam Hussein in the eight-year war against Iran
(where Saddam many times used poison gas), with its
one million and a half dead, but with the
Iranians suffering the most, according to Fisk; the
deadly impact of the UN sanctions against Iraq
for almost 13 years, particularly on the children;
and the unspeakable cruelties inflicted on each
other by Islamic and government forces in the
Algerian civil war, which took place after the French
had been defeated and when the then government would
not accept that the Islamists could gain
political power through elections, etc.
Fisk has interviewed Osama bin
Laden several times, the first time being in 1993 in the Sudan.
The author has a contempt for those “journalists who
wear military costumes and don helmets and
play soldiers.” (p. 81) For Fisk, this is also a
matter of personal survival, for the now familiar
embedded journalist is not seen as independent by
the various combatants and can become a
potential military target, endangering all
journalists. In Canada, those journalists who report from
Afghanistan seem to have no qualms about being
embedded with the Canadian military, riding
along on combat missions and returning to a
fortified “base” at night. The scripts coming from
Afghanistan reporters carry a “made in Canada” set
of assumptions. On the home front, every
Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan automatically
becomes a “hero” in media coverage, so
language becomes debased. I have yet to hear or read
from a Canadian journalist writing on
Afghanistan, that the past communist government in
that country, as Fisk points out, wanted,
“a modern educational system in which girls as well
as boys would go to school, at which
young women did not have to wear the veil, in which
science and literature would be taught
alongside Islam. Twenty-one years later, an American
president would ostentatiously claim
that these were among his own objectives in
Afghanistan.” (p. 69)
I found out from this book that
when the American embassy in Teheran was seized by the
Khomeini government, the shredded secret US
diplomatic papers were reconstructed and put
together by Iranian students in very painstaking
work, and which took six years to complete.
There were 2,300 documents, and they were eventually
published by the Iranian government
in 85 volumes and made widely available. A gold mine
of sensitive and revealing information
was available for all to see. One of the many
incriminating documents brought back to life
showed how Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and
Savak, the Shah of Iran’s secret service,
had closely collaborated since the late 1950s. (pp.
155-157)
The Personal Price of Dissension
To look at the root causes of the
situation in the Middle East, or to try to understand and
explain what is behind the so-called “war on
terror”, is to invite smearing of the investigative
journalist as being “pro” this or that or, horror of
horrors, as being anti-Semitic. Some of the
examples of the price of dissension paid by Fisk:
- “Those of us who reported the human
suffering caused by Israeli air raids on Beirut in 1982
were libeled as anti-Semitic.” (p. 765)
- “When I first wrote about the Armenian
massacres in 1993, the Turks denounced my article -
as they have countless books and
investigations before and since - as a lie. Turkish readers
wrote to my editor to demand my
dismissal from The Independent.”
(p. 414)
- Fisk at one time worked for The Times as Middle East
correspondent, but he had to
eventually resign, when his stories
became edited for political reasons, when Rupert Murdoch
took over the paper as its owner. (pp.
331-334)
- In the words of Fisk, concerning the response of
the British government to his reporting of the
child cancer cases in Iraq, due to the
use of depleted uranium bombs and shells: “Official
Western government reaction to the
growing signs of DU contamination was pitiful. When I
first reported from Iraq’s child cancer
wards in February and March 1998, the British
government went to great lengths to
discredit what I wrote.” (See pp. 904-913 for the
evidence.)
Palestine and Israel
Fisk tells us why the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 came into being. He shows that there were
conflicting British promises made during the First
World War “of independence for the Arab states,
and of support for a Jewish national home in
Palestine.” (p. 448) Britain needed the Arabs to fight
the Turks, but also needed political and scientific
Jewish support at the time of the First World War.
(p. 449) So there was early British support for an
national state for Jews, but in a Palestine that was
predominantly Arab. As Fisk also notes, “Balfour,
let us remember, made no mention of how much
of Palestine an Israeli state could have.” (p. 463)
Fisk goes on to say:
“UN Resolution 181 of 1947, while it called for the
partition of Palestine - which the Arabs rejected -
laid down borders that Israel ignored once it had
expanded its territory after the 1948 war.” (p. 472)
Israeli spokespersons will often
comment how the Oslo Accord of 1993 was a great deal for the
Palestinians under Arafat’s leadership, whereas Fisk
gives the actual data to show that what Arafat
signed on to was a sell-out, and what this author
calls a “fatally flawed” and “blundering deal.” For
Fisk, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in essence:
“The world’s last colonial conflict in which the
colonizers were supported by the United States.”
(p. 629)
Overall his book shows the
progressive whittling down of land for the Palestinians by the Israeli
state, and that Oslo was a continuation of this. As
Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist who writes for the
Ha’aretz
newspaper (praised by Fisk as a newspaper that is “liberal,
free-thinking”) put it:
“‘The central contradiction of the state of Israel -
democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is
our exposed nerve.’” (p. 558) I have often
wondered why criticism of Israeli state policies, which I
read in Ha’aretz,
is not seen in the media in Canada.
Israel portrays itself as
“victim”, not aggressor, against the Palestinians and, as others have
pointed
out, uses the Nazi holocaust as “THE HOLOCAUST” to
deflect criticism of the state of Israel.
Unique suffering has come to mean a sense of unique
entitlement for Israel. This is how Norman
Finkelstein has expressed it in his daring book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the
Exploitation of Jewish Suffering:
“The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable
ideological weapon. Through its deployment one
of the world’s most formidable military powers, with
a horrendous human rights record, has cast
itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful
ethnic group in the United States has likewise
acquired victim status.” (Finkelstein, p. 3)
Media coverage in North America
normally totally reflects the views of the Israeli state in conflicts
with the Palestinians or with other states in the
region. The most recent example being the 2006 Israeli
invasion of Lebanon, described by Canada’s Prime
Minister as an Israeli “measured response.” Those
who express dissenting views to the prevailing
Israeli state orthodoxy can routinely expect to be
publicly hammered by spokespersons for organizations
in Canada like the Canadian Jewish Congress
and B’nai Brith, who have come to see themselves as
representatives and watchdogs for Israeli state
interests abroad. According to Fisk, in the US, the
American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, “is the
most powerful Israeli lobby group.” (p. 528)
It seems to me that the way that
the state of Israel conducts itself towards the Palestinians comes
across as extremely arrogant and uncaring, and this
itself contributes towards the growth of anti-
Semitism. This arrogance has squandered the
worldwide goodwill, which so many non-Jews had
towards Jews because of the Nazi extermination
policies in the Second World War. Israel, by its
practices, has no real interest in a viable
two-state solution in the Middle East. Israel wants total
control of the Palestinians, as we see in its
everyday practices, if we truly care to look. Its main
interest seems to be in further acquiring
Palestinian lands and making life as miserable as possible
for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank,
presumably hoping they will move out of Palestine.
But the Israeli mailed fist means also that, on the
Palestinian side, any willingness to compromise,
which is ultimately needed by both sides, vanishes.
As Fisk notes:
“More and more among Palestinians I hear the words
that so frighten Israelis: that they must have
‘all’ of Palestine, not just the lands taken by
Israel in 1967.” (pp. 592-593)
There is another pertinent
quotation from Fisk:
“Once an occupied people have lost their fear of
death, the occupier is doomed. Once a man or
woman stops being afraid, they cannot be made to
fear again.” (p. 592)
One of the strengths of this book
is that Fisk brings out that Arabs have a strong sense of history
and that past events and Western betrayals are
remembered.
A puzzle
Personally, I also hoped by
reading Fisk that I could come to understand a long-standing puzzle.
It goes all the way back, in my own case, to when I
was at graduate school in New York City
(the New School), during the time of the 1967 Six
Day War, when Israel occupied Gaza, the
West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai. The
puzzle is, why it was so impossible to have a
critical discussion about Israel with many Jewish
friends. These Jewish friends who also shared
with me a general Left or progressive social justice
sentiment, and, since my involvement with the
ecology movement in the late 70s, a support for deep
ecology or ecocentrism. (As an
undergraduate student, thinking about going into
social work, I spent two summers in Quebec in the
60s working as a summer camp councillor with B’nai
Brith and the Hebrew Y, along with one
summer with a Protestant camp.)
One could share an Earth-centered
eco-philosophy with left biocentric Jews and work together
on this basis but, if they were supporters of the
state of Israel, it was often not really possible to
exchange views on the Middle East – even though, as
left biocentrists, we are necessarily concerned
with social justice, which must include the Middle
East, but within an ecological context.
It was only much later than New
School days that I discovered that there were Orthodox Jews,
wearing long black coats and black hats, who
believed that the creation of the state of Israel was a
violation of Jewish law, as in the organization Jews
United Against Zionism. There are of course also
secular Jews, e.g. Chomsky and Finkelstein who are
critical of many Israeli state policies. More
recently, in 2005, I met Joel Kovel of The Enemy Of Nature fame, who
opposes Israeli state
policies from an anti-Zionist point of view. There
are also left biocentric secular Jews who have this
position.
I myself have come to believe in
working for a unitary secular state for Palestinians and Jews,
living side by side on a basis of true equality, in
a country called Palestine. Such a state must also
define itself culturally in a Middle Eastern context
and not see itself as a Western outpost. The
existing situation for Israelis and Palestinians
will never bring peace or security for either side,
because its roots are in land theft and occupation,
and ongoing colonial subjugation by the Israelis.
(From a deep ecology perspective, humans cannot
“own” land or other species. As Arne Naess,
the founder of deep ecology said, “The earth does
not belong to humans.”)
Main Issues in the Middle East
“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
these borders
burn.” - p. xxiii
These seem to be the major issues
in the Middle East from my reading of
The Great War
For Civilization:
- Borders – decided by dominant Western powers, and
ongoing attempts to influence or control the
borders and the politics of this region where the US
is the lead state in this regard;
- Oil – which Fisk notes was the reason for the
initial involvement of the US in the Middle East, but
this later piggybacked with “almost unquestioning”
support and funding for Israel (p. 409);
- Ecological issues – which are not really covered
by Fisk;
- Dictatorships among Muslim states – the
absence of democracy for the citizenry, and the
alliance of many dictatorial states with the West
for mutual self-interest purposes;
- Palestine-Israel relationships;
and
- Islamic fundamentalism – in its Sunni and Shiite
internal and external manifestations.
The unjust social conditions
which feed the rise of Islamic fundamentalism must be addressed.
The willingness of the fundamentalist Islamic side
to give their lives in battle, e.g. the suicide
bombers, which Western forces (including the
Israelis) are not willing to do. It is important to
acknowledge that there is a strong social justice
side to Islam (although it is not an Earth-
centered religion), for example the mandatory
tithing, known as the Zakat, for all Muslims. In
Palestine, as a practical example, Hamas is widely
acknowledged as running an extensive,
non-corrupt social service network of schools,
hospitals, relief agencies, etc. They have
built a significant social base through this work.
Islam also provides a religion-based critique
of Western materialism and morality.
Ecological Issues
Robert Fisk talks about the
ecological crimes of Saddam Hussein, as in setting the oil wells on fire
in the retreat from Kuwait – 640 producing oil wells
were set ablaze (p. 858); the draining and
destruction of the habitat of the Marsh or Swamp
Arabs in Southern Iraq; and the use by the US
and the British of depleted uranium and cluster
bombs in Iraq. Yet, strangely, ecology is not a
particular focus of The
Great War For Civilization. There is no chapter on ecological
issues or
even an entry in the Index under the heading
“ecology.” This is a human-centered text.
Oil, the life-blood of an
expansionary industrial capitalism, has been central to the involvement
of
Western powers in Middle Eastern politics. Fisk
shows, for example, how in Iran in 1953, the
British and the United States conspired to overthrow
the democratically elected Mohamed Mossadeq.
The control of Iran’s oilfields was a crucial
consideration in this. (“Democracy” is only okay, it
seems, if it brings Western-oriented parties and
leaders to power, as we see today with the refusal to
accept the election of Hamas in Palestine.) The
Iranian overthrow of Mossadeq was to prepare,
through what we have come to call “blowback” after
September 11th 2001, the path to power of
Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution and the
demise of that ‘friend’ of the West and guardian
of the oil wells, the peacock Shah of Iran.
If one considers, as I do, that
social justice and ecology must go hand-in-hand, this book has
strongly made the social justice case for the
oppressed of the Middle East. However, the ecological
case remains to be made for this region, both in its
own right but also as an important factor in
determining present day politics. Thus, as in the
pressure of increasing human populations and a
limited fertile land base. (Apparently, any Jew
anywhere in the world has the option of becoming
an Israeli citizen, with all the long term land use
pressures that this must entail, but there is no
“right of return” for dispossessed Palestinians and
their descendants to Israel.)
The shortage of water is another
important ecological issue and, as in the Palestinian situation,
its monopolization by the Israeli state: “More than
80% of water from the West Bank goes to Israel.
The Palestinians are allotted just 18% of the water
that is extracted from their own land.” (Guardian
Weekly, January 22-28, 2004.) Apart from this
human-centered focus, important as this is, deep
ecology has taught us that non-human life has its
own inherent value beyond human purpose: “The
value of non-human life forms is independent of the
usefulness of the non-human world for human
purposes.” (Point one of the Deep Ecology Platform.) Unfortunately,
there is no champion for non-
human life in The
Great War For Civilization.
Criticism
My major criticism of The Great War For Civilization is
that it is human-centered and
ecologically uninformed. Other criticisms are minor.
This should not undermine that all of us who
care about being informed politically and who see
ourselves on the side of social justice, should be
thankful that Robert Fisk wrote this book to open
our eyes to what is going on in the Middle East.
Let us hope that those who read this book will have
the courage to put its insights into their
personal political practice and bring about
fundamental change in Western foreign policies.
One criticism, and an irritant
for myself, both present in the text and in the public meeting which
Fisk addressed in Nova Scotia, is that Fisk
sometimes seems to make an obvious “over the top”
loyalty statement, to convey, I suppose, that he is
a “legitimate” voice, part of the loyal opposition,
and not attached to the “other side” against which
the West is contending in some way. I think this
is quite unnecessary, because his analysis shows
that he is a seeker of truth and will follow this trail
no matter who he ends up offending. The kind of
statement I am talking about can be given in the
context of a sharp and valid comment, as in the
quotation below, with its “venomous attacks”
language:
“Merely to suggest that Washington’s policies in the
Middle East, its unconditional support for Israel,
its support for Arab dictators, its approval of UN
sanctions that cost lives of so many Iraq children,
might lie behind the venomous attacks of September
11th was an act of evil.” (p. 1035)
A second minor criticism is
perhaps a conflict in this book between the roles of foreign
correspondent and that of historian. Although the
book is presented as a record of the work done by
Fisk in the Middle East as a reporter and foreign
correspondent, I see him more as an historian – that
is, someone who can analyze historical events from
the past and present perspectives and then, as a
bonus, add to this by grounding all of it in the
practical, which has been personally experienced by
Fisk in the many conflict situations in which he has
found himself. I feel sometimes the newspaper
reporter pushes out the analytical historian and we
have too much piling on of details of various
situations being looked into.
Conclusion
This review essay has looked at
the world of Robert Fisk, as exemplified in his book The Great
War For Civilization. The essay has as a
subtitle "An Examination of Prejudice." If we take the
common sense meaning of prejudice as a bias or
preconceived position for or against something
which impairs the validity of what someone is
telling us, then I do not believe, based on this book and
my reading of it, that Robert Fisk can be accused of
prejudice. Yet some who defend particular
interests in the Middle East, as I have shown in the
section of this essay entitled "The Personal Price
Of Dissension", have falsely accused Fisk of
prejudice because of his news stories and the analysis
coming out of them. Perhaps in the most expansive
use of the term prejudice, someone on the deep
ecology path could say Fisk has a prejudice in
favour of covering only the interests of humans. But,
unfortunately, most correspondents or historians
could be so categorized. Clive Ponting's A Green
History Of The World would be an exception.
What I had in mind by this
subtitle, after reading the book, was the prejudice of those who "frame"
the issues for the citizenry in the West –
governments and media and the professional newspaper and
TV ideologues – as these issues concern the Middle
East. For those who want to see, Fisk can, due
to his knowledge and lived experiences, take us
beyond self-serving platitudes and the black-and-
white absolutist distinctions of the post 9/11 Bush
world of "you are either with the terrorists or with
us." While this author is obviously "Western", by
living so long in the Middle East, his own cultural
assumptions are tempered by his lived experiences
and open-mindedness. Speaking Arabic also
helps.
Robert Fisk has written a book
that is invaluable for assisting us in understanding the Middle East
and to take an informed stand. It is also a book
which can force us to look very critically at
“Western” conduct. His is a remarkable contribution.
Fisk shows us that since September 11, 2001
the West, under US “leadership”, has lost whatever
moral compass it had.
I have also come to the position,
after reading this book that, from a social justice viewpoint, as a
left biocentrist one cannot be a supporter of Israel
or the current alliance between that country and the
United States. There is no justice for Palestinians
in the Middle East today.
This book concerns how humans
relate to each other, but we must also be concerned about how
humans relate to the natural world. The ecological
or deep ecology perspective must be a key
component of any adequate world view for today’s
world. This still waits to be addressed.
December 31,
2006
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Last updated: December 31, 2006