Robert Fisk: Smelly as Always but never so Slick
Dr. Joseph Hitti
March 16, 2008
In his March 15, 2008, opinion "Silenced by the Men in White Socks", Rober Fisk of the Independent proves himself, yet again, to be the true master of deception that he always was.
First, somehow in his "deep thoughts" about the Middle East, which he has intellectually plundered over the years with the Orientalist inanities of the bored English countryside "gentleman" (bad teeth, stinking bad breath, and all) that he is, he has noticed that "all the men of the Arab Mukhabaraat - Intelligence - Services wear white socks". What relevance does this have to do with human rights in Syria is beyond comprehension, unless perhaps Fisk wishes to add a smudge of nostalgic Orientalist poetry to his perpetually boring blatherings about the Middle East, which, after decades of his own intellectual Onanist jerkings, have yet to climax into anything worth remembering him for.
Second, this English British miscreant of a journalist has spent a lifetime shoving his nose into other peoples' behinds that he can no longer smell his own filth. In a not so subtle attack on France's legacy in the Lebanon-Syria area - still to drill the standard canard about how artificial Lebanon is as a country and how much victimized was "Syria" by the French- this English male organ states that:
"First came the one-armed General Henri Gouraud, who tore Lebanon off from Syria in 1920 and gave it to the pro-French Christians. Then Paris handed the Syrian coastal city of Alexandretta to the Turks in 1939 – sending survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide into exile for a second time – in the hope that Turkey would join the Allies against Hitler. (The Turks obliged – in 1945!) Then in the Six Day War, Syria lost the Golan Heights – subsequently annexed by Israel. Far from being expansionist, Syria seems to get robbed of land every two decades."
Why, I ask, is Fisk avoiding the stench coming from south of the Lebanese border? Perhaps out of shame for the atrocious and utterly hypocritical role played by his beloved Albion in the creation of the State of Israel, the partition of Palestine, the displacement of the Palestinian people, the dismantling of historic Palestine by the the British Mandate, the creation of the artificial states of Jordan, Israel and Iraq, the deprivation by the British Empire of the Kurdish people of a righteous place among the nations, in the hope of stuffing the British treasury with European Jewish funds, and building railroads through Turkey to the oil fields in the Gulf, maintaining British control over these oil fields and the route to India (not to mention the partition of India and the creation of the failure called Pakistan today, etc. All of this, in fact, much more recently than France's withdrawal from the region, since Kuwait and a bunch of the decadent and equally smelly pro-English Sunni Arab emirates south of the Peninsula were still British Protectorates well into the 1960s.
Third, you can hear Fisk's own yelps as he pleads with his Syrian victims of French colonialism to stop abusing and arresting human rights activists - "Why – oh why – must this be so? Why did the Syrian secret police have to arrest....", as if these arrests were merely incidental and superfluous mistakes by the Syrians brutes over an otherwise impeccable record - something akin to what one would say to an academically superior teenager who just went on a drinking binge the night before - But Fisk's yelps actually reveal that, in so doing, the Syrians have shattered all the lies on which Fisk has rested his entire career. These arrests, it seems, inflict greater harm on Fisk himself, in a psychotic version of the Stockholm Syndrome of which he suffers, than they cause their real victims, because they shatter the "nice" image of the Syrian regime which he spent his life painting, while bashing the many many victims of that regime, including the Lebanese as a people and Lebanon as a country. Listen to his yelps addressed to the Syrian regime:
"Instead, we've gone back to the midnight knock and the clanging of the cell door. Why – oh why – must this be so? Why did the Syrian secret police have to arrest Dr Ahmed Thoma, Dr Yasser el-Aiti, Jabr al-Shufi, Fayez Sara, Ali al-Abdulla and Rashed Sattouf in December, only days after they – along with 163 other brave Syrians – had attended a meeting of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change?"
Yalla, we say in Lebanese, what's another British or English male gonad going to do more than his own "empire" did for centuries? They'll always come and go, though never as persistently as this genuine specimen called Rober Fisk, and yet he, unlike all of them, has yet to "finish" and go home.
First, somehow in his "deep thoughts" about the Middle East, which he has intellectually plundered over the years with the Orientalist inanities of the bored English countryside "gentleman" (bad teeth, stinking bad breath, and all) that he is, he has noticed that "all the men of the Arab Mukhabaraat - Intelligence - Services wear white socks". What relevance does this have to do with human rights in Syria is beyond comprehension, unless perhaps Fisk wishes to add a smudge of nostalgic Orientalist poetry to his perpetually boring blatherings about the Middle East, which, after decades of his own intellectual Onanist jerkings, have yet to climax into anything worth remembering him for.
Second, this English British miscreant of a journalist has spent a lifetime shoving his nose into other peoples' behinds that he can no longer smell his own filth. In a not so subtle attack on France's legacy in the Lebanon-Syria area - still to drill the standard canard about how artificial Lebanon is as a country and how much victimized was "Syria" by the French- this English male organ states that:
"First came the one-armed General Henri Gouraud, who tore Lebanon off from Syria in 1920 and gave it to the pro-French Christians. Then Paris handed the Syrian coastal city of Alexandretta to the Turks in 1939 – sending survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide into exile for a second time – in the hope that Turkey would join the Allies against Hitler. (The Turks obliged – in 1945!) Then in the Six Day War, Syria lost the Golan Heights – subsequently annexed by Israel. Far from being expansionist, Syria seems to get robbed of land every two decades."
Why, I ask, is Fisk avoiding the stench coming from south of the Lebanese border? Perhaps out of shame for the atrocious and utterly hypocritical role played by his beloved Albion in the creation of the State of Israel, the partition of Palestine, the displacement of the Palestinian people, the dismantling of historic Palestine by the the British Mandate, the creation of the artificial states of Jordan, Israel and Iraq, the deprivation by the British Empire of the Kurdish people of a righteous place among the nations, in the hope of stuffing the British treasury with European Jewish funds, and building railroads through Turkey to the oil fields in the Gulf, maintaining British control over these oil fields and the route to India (not to mention the partition of India and the creation of the failure called Pakistan today, etc. All of this, in fact, much more recently than France's withdrawal from the region, since Kuwait and a bunch of the decadent and equally smelly pro-English Sunni Arab emirates south of the Peninsula were still British Protectorates well into the 1960s.
Third, you can hear Fisk's own yelps as he pleads with his Syrian victims of French colonialism to stop abusing and arresting human rights activists - "Why – oh why – must this be so? Why did the Syrian secret police have to arrest....", as if these arrests were merely incidental and superfluous mistakes by the Syrians brutes over an otherwise impeccable record - something akin to what one would say to an academically superior teenager who just went on a drinking binge the night before - But Fisk's yelps actually reveal that, in so doing, the Syrians have shattered all the lies on which Fisk has rested his entire career. These arrests, it seems, inflict greater harm on Fisk himself, in a psychotic version of the Stockholm Syndrome of which he suffers, than they cause their real victims, because they shatter the "nice" image of the Syrian regime which he spent his life painting, while bashing the many many victims of that regime, including the Lebanese as a people and Lebanon as a country. Listen to his yelps addressed to the Syrian regime:
"Instead, we've gone back to the midnight knock and the clanging of the cell door. Why – oh why – must this be so? Why did the Syrian secret police have to arrest Dr Ahmed Thoma, Dr Yasser el-Aiti, Jabr al-Shufi, Fayez Sara, Ali al-Abdulla and Rashed Sattouf in December, only days after they – along with 163 other brave Syrians – had attended a meeting of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change?"
Yalla, we say in Lebanese, what's another British or English male gonad going to do more than his own "empire" did for centuries? They'll always come and go, though never as persistently as this genuine specimen called Rober Fisk, and yet he, unlike all of them, has yet to "finish" and go home.