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robert fisk
Establishment Journalists Are Piling on To Smear Robert Fisk Now He Cannot Answer Back
Fisk was the constant reminder of just how much they had sold out. His very existence shamed them for what they were too cowardly to do themselves. And now in death, when he cannot answer back, they are feasting on his corpse like the vultures that they are.
Nov 30, 2020
Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly a fraud, a fabulist, a fantasist, a liar.
What is most ironic is that the journalists doing this are some of the biggest frauds themselves, journalists who have made a career out of deceiving their readers. In fact, many of the crowd attacking Fisk when he can no longer defend himself are precisely the journalists who have the worst record of journalistic malpractice and on some of the biggest issues of our times.
\u201cSet aside the fact these corporate blue ticks are citing Oz Katerji - a conman on Syria \u2013 for their assessment of Robert Fisk. These very journalists helped carry out the biggest fraud in recent journalistic history, selling you the Iraq WMD lies. They have zero credibility\u201d— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan Cook) 1606672306
At least I have the courage to criticise them while they are alive. They know dead men can't sue. It is complete and utter cowardice to attack Fisk when they could have made their comments earlier, to his face. In fact, if they truly believed any of the things they are so keen to tell us now, they had an absolute duty to say them when Fisk was alive rather than allowing the public to be deceived by someone they regarded as a liar and fantasist. They didn't make public these serious allegations - they didn't air their concerns about the supposedly fabricated facts in Fisk's stories - when he was alive because they know he would have made mincemeat of them.
Most preposterous of all is the fact that the actual trigger for this sudden, very belated outpouring of concern about Fisk is a hit-piecewritten by Oz Katerji. I'm not sure whether I can find the generosity to call Katerji a journalist. Like Elliot Higgins of the US government-funded Bellingcat, he's more like an attack dog beloved by establishment blue-ticks: he is there to enforce accepted western imperial narratives, disguising his lock-step support for the establishment line as edgy, power-to-the-people radicalism.
Anyone who challenges Katerji's establishment-serving agenda gets called names - sometimes very rude ones. Fisk is just the latest target of a Katerji hatchet job against any journalist (myself, of course, included) who dares to step outside of the Overton Window. That these "serious" journalists think they can hang their defamation of Fisk on to anything said by Katerji, most especially the thin gruel he produces in his latest article, is truly shameful. If their concerns really relate to journalistic integrity and reliability, Katerji would be the very last person to cite.
Katerji's prime area of western narrative enforcement is the Middle East - perhaps not surprisingly, as it is the place where there is an awful lot of oil that western states and corporations are desperate to control. But one should not ignore his wide-ranging efforts to boot-lick wherever he is needed on behalf of western establishment narratives.
Here he is desperately trying to breathe life into two fairytales: that the election of the leftwing Evo Morales as Bolivia's president was fraudulent, and that Morales was forced to resign last year rather than that he was ousted in a CIA-backed military coup. Notably, Katerji was clinging to these discredited story lines as late as last month, long after even the liberal corporate media had abandoned them as no longer tenable.
\u201cCongratulations to the people of Bolivia for exercising their democratic rights, hopefully the new administration won\u2019t cuddle up to as many tyrants as the last one did. Remember kids, vote \ud83d\uddf3.\u201d— Oz Katerji (@Oz Katerji) 1603104325
Katerji was also, of course, an enthusiastic recruit to evidence-free establishment smears that Labour was overrun with antisemitism under the leadership of the leftwing Jeremy Corbyn, the very same anecdotal claims promoted by the entire corporate media.
Not only that, but he even had the gall to argue that he was speaking on behalf of Palestinians in smearing Corbyn, the only leader of a major European party ever to champion their cause. Labour's new leader Keir Starmer, like most other politicians in the wake of the Corbyn episode, has all but disappeared the Palestinians from the political agenda. Katerji must be delighted - on behalf of Palestinians, of course.
\u201c@Jonathan_K_Cook I wish you would stop using Arabs to whitewash your own bigotry and lies Jonathan. You speak for yourself, not my community, when you publish filth like this.\u201d— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan Cook) 1525763837
But Katerji's beef with Fisk derives chiefly from the fact that the Independent's foreign correspondent broke ranks with the rest of the western press corps over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.
Katerji is part of what - if we were being more brutally honest about these things - would be called the west's al-Qaeda lobby. These are a motley crew of journalists and academics using their self-publicised "Arabhood" to justify the intimidation and silencing of anyone not entirely convinced that ordinary Syrians might prefer, however reluctantly, their standard-issue dictator, Bashar al-Assad, over the head-chopping, women-stoning, Saudi-financed jihadists of Islamic State and al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria; or who question whether the western powers ought to be covertly funding and backing these extremists.
Exercise any doubt at all on either of these points and Katerji will lose no time in calling you an "Assadist", "war crimes denier", "antisemite", "9/11 truther" and worse. Then in yet more evidence of a circle jerk, those establishment blue ticks, even ones beloved by much of the left, will cite his smears as proof that you are indeed an Assadist, war crimes denier, and so on.
Here are just a few examples of Katerji engaging with those critical of the imperial western narrative on Syria, so you get the idea:
\u201cElectronic Intifada is a pro-Assad war crimes denial blog run by antisemites. Ali Abunimah is a war crimes revisionist who denies Assad's crimes and parrots sectarian lies about the civilians Assad is murdering. Nobody interested in human rights would ever share their work.\u201d— Oz Katerji (@Oz Katerji) 1558570090
\u201cWhy should I no-platform you as an Assadist? Your own boss did that, clown.\u201d— Oz Katerji (@Oz Katerji) 1601648762
Back in 2011 and 2012, in what looked like the possible eruption of an Arab Spring in Syria, the arguments of Katerji and co at least had an air of plausibility. But their real agenda - one that accorded with western imperialism rather than an Arab awakening - became much clearer once local protests against Assad were subsumed by an influx of jihadi fighters of the very kind that had been labelled "terrorists" by the western media everywhere else they appeared in the Middle East.
Inevitably, anyone like Fisk who adopted a position of caution or scepticism about whether the majority of Syrians actually wanted a return to some kind of Islamic Dark Age incurred the wrath of Katerji and his cohorts.
But Fisk infuriated these western al-Nusra lobbyists even further when he visited the town of Douma in 2018 and raised serious questions about claims made by the jihadists who had been ruling the town that, just before Assad's forces drove them out, the Syrian military had bombed it with chemical gas, killing many civilians. The story, which at that stage was based exclusively on the claims of these head-chopping jihadists, was instantly reported as verified fact by the credulous western media.
Based solely on claims made by the al-Qaeda franchise in Douma, President Donald Trump hurriedly fired off missiles at Syria, in flagrant violation of international law and to cheers from the western media.
Fisk, of course, knew that in discrediting the evidence-free narrative being promoted by the western press corps (who had never been in Douma) he was doing himself no favours at all. They would resent him all the more. Most of his peers preferred to ignore his revelations, even though they were earth-shattering in their implications. But once the official watchdog body the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued its report into Douma many months later, implicitly backing the jihadists' version of events, Fisk's earlier coverage was snidely dismissed by fellow journalists.
Sadly for them, however, the story did not end there. Following publication of the OPCW's Douma report, a number of its senior experts started coming forward as whistleblowers to say that, under pressure from the US, the OPCW bureaucracy tampered with their research and misrepresented their findings in the final report. The evidence they had found indicated that Assad had not carried out a chemical attack in Douma. More likely the jihadists, who were about to be expelled by Assad's forces, had staged the scene to make it look like a chemical attack and draw the US deeper into Syria.
\u201cImportant overview of the leaks that exposed political corruption at the main chemical weapons watchdog, the OPCW, in relation to Syria https://t.co/bWTEA7JIRP\u201d— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan Cook) 1595681948
Of course, just as the corporate media ignored Fisk's original reporting from Douma that would have made their own accounts sound like journalistic malpractice, they resolutely ignored the whistleblowers too. You can scour the corporate media and you will be lucky to find even an allusion to the months-long row over the OPCW report, which gained enough real-world prominence to erupt into a major row at the United Nations, including denunciations of the OPCW's behaviour from the organisation's former head, Jose Bustani.
This is the way frauds like Katerji are able to ply their own misinformation. They sound credible only because the counter-evidence that would show they are writing nonsense is entirely absent from the mainstream. Only those active on social media and open-minded enough to listen to voices not employed by a major corporate platform (with, in this case, the notable exception of Peter Hitchens of the Daily Mail) are able to find any of this counter-information. It is as if we are living in parallel universes.
\u201cEverything about this appalling war crimes revisionist screed is a sick, sad, desperate lie.\u201d— Oz Katerji (@Oz Katerji) 1574592335
The reason why Fisk was so cherished by readers, and why there was a real sense of loss when he died a month ago, was that he was one of the very few journalists who belonged to the mainstream but reported as though he were not beholden to the agenda of his corporate platform.
There were specific reasons for that. Like a handful of others - John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Chris Hedges among them - Fisk made his name in the corporate media at a time when it reluctantly indulged the odd maverick foreign correspondent because they had a habit of exposing war crimes everyone else missed, exclusives that then garnered their publications prestigious journalism awards. Ownership of the media was then far less concentrated, so there was a greater commercial incentive for risk-taking and breaking stories. And these journalists emerged in a period when power was briefly more contested, with the labour movement trying to assert its muscle in the post-war decades, and before western societies were forced by the corporate elite to submit to neoliberal orthodoxy on all matters.
Notably, Pilger, Hersh and Hedges all found themselves struggling to keep a place in the corporate media. Fisk alone managed to cling on. That was more by luck. After being forced out of Rupert Murdoch's Times newspaper for breaking a disturbing story in 1989 on the US shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane, he found a new home at Britain's Independent newspaper, which had been recently founded. As a late-comer to the British media scene, the paper struggled not only to make money but to create a distinctive identity or gain any real visibility. Fisk survived, it seems, because he quickly established himself as one of the very few reasons to buy the paper. He was a rare example of a journalist who was bigger than the outlet he served.
Readers trusted him because he not only refused to submit to his peers' herd-think but endlessly called them out as journalistically and intellectually lazy.
Those now trying to tarnish his good name are actually inverting the truth. They want to suggest that support for Fisk was cultish and he was hero-worshipped by those incapable of thinking critically. They will say as much about this piece. So let me point out that I am not without my own criticisms of Fisk. I wrote, for example, an article criticising some unsubstantiated claims he made during Israel's massive bombardment of Lebanon in 2006.
But my criticism was precisely the opposite of the blue-tick crowd now traducing him. I questioned Fisk for striving to find an implausible middle ground with those establishment blue ticks (before we knew what blue ticks were) by hedging his bets about who was responsible for the destruction of Lebanon. It was a rare, if understandable, example of journalistic timidity from Fisk - a desire to maintain credibility with his peers, and a reluctance to follow through on where the evidence appeared to lead. Maybe this was a run-in with the pro-Israel crowd and the corporate journalists who echo them that, on this occasion, he did not think worth fighting
The discomfort Fisk aroused in his peers was all too obvious to anyone working in the corporate media, even in its liberal outlets, as I was during the 1990s. I never heard a good word said about Fisk at the Guardian or the Observer. His death has allowed an outpouring of resentment towards him that built up over decades from journalists jealous of the fact that no readers will mourn or remember their own passing.
Fisk's journalism spoke up for the downtrodden and spoke directly to the reader rather than, as with his colleagues, pandering to editors in the hope of career advancement. In the immediate wake of his death, his colleagues' disdain for Fisk was veiled in weaselly language. As Media Lens have noted, the favourite term used to describe him in obituaries, even in his own newspaper, was "controversial".
"It turns out that the term 'controversial' is only applied in corporate media to political writers and leaders deemed 'controversial' by elite interests
"This was unwittingly made clear by the big brains at the BBC who noted that Fisk 'drew controversy for his sharp criticism of the US and Israel, and of Western foreign policy'. If Fisk had drawn 'controversy' from China, Iran or North Korea, the 'weasel word' would not have appeared in the Beeb's analysis...
"In corporate media newspeak, 'controversial' can actually be translated as 'offensive to power'. The term is intended as a scare word to warn readers that the labelled person is 'dodgy', 'suspect': 'Handle with care!' The journalist is also signalling to his or her editors and other colleagues: 'I'm not one of "them"!'"
The journalists who now claim Fisk was a fraud and fantasist are many of those who happily worked for papers that readily promoted the gravest lies imaginable to rationalise an illegal attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. Those publications eagerly supported lies supplied by the US and British governments that Iraq had WMD and that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was colluding with al-Qaeda - claims that were easily disprovable at the time.
Journalists now attacking Fisk include ones, like the Guardian's Jessica Elgot, who have been at the forefront of advancing the evidence-free antisemitism smears against Corbyn. Or, like the Guardian's Hannah Jane Parkinson, have engaged in another favourite corporate journalist pastime, ridiculing the plight of Julian Assange, a fellow journalist who puts their craven stenography to shame and who is facing a lifetime in a US super-max jail for revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
\u201cIt really upsets me that he has been detained for so long. Imagine being trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for years, no proper exercise, no sunlight, no good company\u2026please join me in hatching an escape plan for Julian Assange's cat\u201d— Hannah Jane Parkinson (@Hannah Jane Parkinson) 1517942790
Even the Guardian's Jason Burke, who claims to have experienced Fisk's lying first-hand while working for the Observer newspaper in 2001 (as was I at that time), has been unable to come up with the goods when challenged, as the pitiable Twitter thread retweeted here confirms:
\u201cTalking of 'imagining things', here's my recollection. I left the Guardian/Obs in Sept 2001. I remember Burke and Peter Beaumont being derisive of Fisk well before I left. So Burke's claim of 'admiration' for Fisk (and later disappointment) rings entirely false\u201d— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan Cook) 1606662763
Noticeably, there is a pattern to the claims of those now maligning Fisk: they hurry to tell us that he was an inspiration in their student days. They presumably think that mentioning this will suggest their disillusionment was hard-earned and therefore make it sound more plausible. But actually it suggests something different.
It indicates instead that in their youthful idealism they aspired to become a journalist who would dig out the truth, who would monitor centres of power, who would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. To do, in fact, exactly what Fisk did.
But once they got a footing on the corporate career ladder, they slowly learnt that they would need to adopt a more "nuanced" approach to journalism - certainly if they hoped to progress up that ladder, earning the right to their blue tick, and gaining a big enough salary to cover the mortgage in London or New York.
In other words, they became everything they despised in their student days. Fisk was the constant reminder of just how much they had sold out. His very existence shamed them for what they were too cowardly to do themselves. And now in death, when he cannot answer back, they are feasting on his corpse like the vultures that they are, until there is nothing left to remind us that, unlike them, Robert Fisk told uncomfortable truths to the very end.
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'Greatest Journalist of His Generation': Robert Fisk, Veteran War Reporter and Fierce Critic of US Imperialism, Dead at 74
The managing editor at The Independent—where Fisk worked for 30 years —called him "fearless, uncompromising, determined, and utterly committed to uncovering the truth and reality at all costs."
Nov 01, 2020
Robert Fisk, longtime Middle East reporter for The Independent whose work--often reported from deep inside dangerous war zones and fiercely critical of both U.S. and British foreign policy--earned him a worldwide reputation for courageous reporting, died Friday in Dublin of a suspected stroke at age 74.
The Independent remembered Fisk, whose articles often appeared here on Common Dreams, as "the most celebrated journalist of his era" and someone who was "renowned for his courage in questioning official narratives from governments and publishing what he uncovered in frequently brilliant prose." Christian Broughton, the paper's managing editor, lauded Fisk as "fearless, uncompromising, determined, and utterly committed to uncovering the truth and reality at all costs."
"Robert Fisk was the greatest journalist of his generation," Broughton said. "The fire he lit at The Independent will burn on."
\u201cRest in Power Robert Fisk\n\nhttps://t.co/5oTubZV5Kj\u201d— WikiLeaks (@WikiLeaks) 1604318844
Accolades poured in from around the world from around the world as journalists, human rights defenders, and politicians learned of Fisk's death. Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin praised him as "fearless and independent in his reporting," adding that "he helped many people understand" the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.
\u201cSaddened tonight to hear of the death of journalist Robert Fisk. He was fearless & independent in his reporting, with a deeply researched understanding of the complexities of Middle Eastern history and politics. He helped many people understand those complexities better. RIP.\u201d— Miche\u00e1l Martin (@Miche\u00e1l Martin) 1604266668
U.K.-based Australian investigative journalist John Pilger called Fisk "one of the last great reporters."
\u201cRobert Fisk has died. I pay warmest tribute to one of the last great reporters. The weasel word 'controversial' appears in even his own paper, The Independent, whose pages he honoured. He went against the grain and told the truth, spectacularly. Journalism has lost the bravest.\u201d— John Pilger (@John Pilger) 1604313822
\u201cSo sad to hear of the death of Robert Fisk.\n\nA huge loss of brilliant man with unparalleled knowledge of history, politics and people of Middle East.\u201d— Jeremy Corbyn (@Jeremy Corbyn) 1604315295
Fisk--who held both British and Irish citizenship--had already established a more than 15-year reputation by the time he joined The Independent in 1989. He is most known in the U.S. for having interviewed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden three times. Both a self-described pacifist and one of the most prolific war reporters of modern times, Fisk covered conflicts on three continents over an illustrious and award-winning career spanning five decades. He reported from the front lines of The Troubles in Northern Ireland; the Iran-Iraq War; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the Islamic Revolution in Iran; the wars in the former Yugoslavia; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; both U.S.-led invasions of Iraq; the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan; the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria and Syria; and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
\u201cSad to hear about the death of Robert Fisk. His book on Lebanon was an intimate insight into the civil war he lived through. \n\nI visited Fisk in Beirut and was in complete awe of him and what he had witnessed. Fisk had profound influence as a journalist. RIP\u201d— Elaine Byrne (@Elaine Byrne) 1604263206
\u201cWith Robert Fisk's passing we have lost a journalistic eye without which we shall be partially blind, a pen without which our capacity to express the truth is diminished, a soul without which our own empathy for victims of imperialism will be lacking https://t.co/3IXXyVmSSY\u201d— Yanis Varoufakis (@Yanis Varoufakis) 1604295305
It was dangerous work that often placed Fisk in harm's way, such as when he was attacked by a group of Afghan refugees fleeing heavy aerial bombardment by U.S. war planes in December 2001.
Always mindful of the bigger picture and ever cognizant of the root causes of conflicts, Fisk did not blame his attackers, rather he understood that their "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 and then armed and paid them again... and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them 'collateral damage.'"
\u201cRobert Fisk was a giant in journalism. Whilst others were spoon-fed lies, he challenged the narrative of the powerful. Fearless & unflinching, he was 'controversial' for all the right reasons. His death leaves a huge void in foreign reportage.\u201d— Suzanne Breen (@Suzanne Breen) 1604266164
\u201cRIP Robert Fisk\u201d— Massive Attack (@Massive Attack) 1604307331
In 2003 when the U.S. led its second invasion of Iraq in as many decades, Fisk was there again, often at the front lines of the fighting, and eschewing the "hotel journalism" he accused other correspondents of practicing. Fisk was ever the merciless critic of Western imperialism and interventionism, firmly believing that the job of a good journalist is to "challenge authority, all authority, especially so when governments and politicians take us to war."
Appearing on Democracy Now! in 2008, seven years into the so-called War on Terror, he told host Amy Goodman that:
We start talking, using phrases like 'victory.' We should be talking about phrases like 'justice for the people of the Middle East.' If you have justice, you can build democracy on it, and then we can withdraw all these soldiers. We're always... promising people in the Middle East democracy and packages of human rights off our supermarket shelves, and we're always arriving with... our Humvees and... our Apache helicopters and our M1A1 tanks. The only future in the Middle East is to withdraw all our military forces and have serious political, social, religious, cultural relations with these people. It's not our land.
Fisk was a vocal opponent of Israeli policies and actions in Palestine, Lebanon, and elsewhere. He also wrote and spoke extensively about the 1914-1923 Armenian genocide.
Fluent in Arabic, Fisk first interviewed bin Laden in 1993, becoming the first Western journalist to do so. The Saudi jihadist denied that the U.S.-backed mujahideen warriors he led in Afghanistan were preparing to wage war throughout the Middle East and North Africa, being only partially honest when he asserted that "I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist; If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn't possibly do this job."
Three years later, Fisk interviewed bin Laden again after he was expelled from Sudan and based back in Afghanistan again. By this time he was a declared--if little-known--enemy of the United States. The interview took place just 10 days after al-Qaeda's bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. troops.
"This doesn't mean declaring war against the West and Western people, but against the American regime which is against every American," the terrorist explained. "The explosion in al-Khobar did not come as a direct reaction to the American occupation, but as a result of American behavior against Muslims."
Fisk's final interview of bin Laden came in March 1997; the terror leader expressed his desire "to turn America into a shadow of itself."
Over the course of his career, Fisk won numerous journalism awards, including the prestigious British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year--seven times. He was also twice awarded BPA's Reporter of the Year, as well as an Amnesty International U.K. Media Award, and the Orwell Prize. He is the subject of the 2019 Yung Chang documentary This Is Not a Movie.
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