Dispatches From a Front-Line Warrior
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
If journalism is the unacknowledged front in the war against Islamic extremism, Robert Fisk, who has been granted repeated interviews by Osama bin Laden, is a front-line warrior. The chief foreign correspondent for the left-wing London Independent, Mr. Fisk can never be accused of hotel journalism. While other correspondents reported on each other’s comments at the hotel bar, he has been at the front during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and the Balkan wars of the 1990s, as well as the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr. Fisk’s new book, “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1,071 pages, $40), is based on 30 years of passionate war reporting, and the book’s strength is in the detailed descriptions of what he saw. Its weakness is understood by noting that Mr. Fisk’s very name has been turned into a verb that refers to wooly-minded reporting. The term was coined by bloggers, who referred to “fisking” an article when they took apart a Fisk account misstatement by misstatement until they had reduced it to its ideological or emotional core. The word has now passed into general use as a description of deciphering tendentious reporting.
A recent “fisking” came in response to Mr. Fisk’s reportage on the July 7 London transit bombing. What we have here, Mr. Fisk wrote, “is a specific, direct, centralized attack on London as a result of a ‘war on terror’ that Blair has locked us into.””Just before the U.S. Presidential elections,” he went on, “bin Laden asked: ‘Why do we not attack Sweden?’ Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.” But as it turns out, Mohammad Sadique Khan, the London schoolteacher who led the terror attack, had been training with the Indonesian terror group Jemaah Islamiah since well before the September 11 attack and the beginning of the war on Islamic terror.
This is but one of many egregious errors Mr. Fisk’s critics point to. While other eyewitnesses reported that Baghdad’s defenses were skimpy at best as the U.S. Army approached in 2003, Mr. Fisk saw a formidable army that would put up a fierce resistance. It’s pointless to try to make logical sense of Mr. Fisk’s arguments. He can, within a matter of pages, attack the United States for coddling Arab dictators and then, with even greater fury, decry the country for bringing them down. The book is less an argument than an emotional discharge.
Clues to Mr. Fisk’s motivations are scattered throughout the book’s 1,071 windy pages. (Mr. Fisk evidently dislikes being edited even more than he despises Americans and Israelis.) He acknowledges some of the murderous activities by Arab dictators, Palestinian terrorists, and Islamist killers but he always explains them away. He notes that the founder of the Palestinian movement, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, was an ally of Hitler, but argues that the mufti had no choice, given the deep humiliations inflicted by the West on the Arab and Islamic worlds.
In other words, for Mr. Fisk it’s not that Palestinian thugs or bin Ladenists don’t engage in evil actions, it’s just that treacherous Western colonialists have forced them to do it.Westerners, Mr. Fisk insists, are as bad if not worse than their enemies and hypocrites to boot.
In the preface to “The Great War,” Mr. Fisk talks movingly of touring the battlefields of World War I with his father, who had been a soldier in the war. “My father, the old soldier of 1918,” Mr. Fisk wrote, “would not live to see this book. Yet he would always look into the past to understand the present. If only the world had not gone to war in 1914; if only we had not been so selfish in concluding the peace. We victors promised independence to the Arabs and support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Promises are meant to be kept. And so those promises – the Jews naturally thought that their homeland would be in all of Palestine.”
What’s notable here is not only Mr. Fisk’s obsession with the cunning Jews who are supposedly pulling the strings of American policy.As he does so often in the book, he gets the facts wrong. Most of the Jewish leadership didn’t expect all of Palestine, and it was the Jews in 1948 who accepted partition.
But, then, Mr. Fisk depends for his “history” on the mythologies of George Antonius, the pro-fascist admirer of the grand mufti whose book “The Arab Awakening” has convinced generations of Arabs that they were cheated out of their just desserts after World War I.Antonius was long ago refuted by historians, but no matter, he feeds Mr. Fisk’s fantasies – not of noble savages, but rather, as historian Keith Windschuttle has noted of bin Laden and his cohorts, of “savage nobles.”
Mr. Fisk despises American nationalism, which he sees as the bastard offspring of a European civilization that proved itself a failure with World War I. But he himself is an inverted nationalist. He identifies with Britain’s enemies just as Whig radicals empathized with Napoleon, and Philby et al. made the Soviet Union their adopted homeland.
Let me give the last word on Mr. Fisk to Osama bin Laden. In a tape played on Al-Jazeera, the “savage noble” said of Mr. Fisk, “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?”
Mr. Siegel is the author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life” (Encounter Books).