Robert Fisk: So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza...

[balantz]

Robert Fisk: So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza...

Thursday, 22 January 2009



It would have helped if Obama had the courage to talk about what everyone in the Middle East was talking about. No, it wasn't the US withdrawal from Iraq. They knew about that. They expected the beginning of the end of Guantanamo and the probable appointment of George Mitchell as a Middle East envoy was the least that was expected. Of course, Obama did refer to "slaughtered innocents", but these were not quite the "slaughtered innocents" the Arabs had in mind.

There was the phone call yesterday to Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe Obama thinks he's the leader of the Palestinians, but as every Arab knows, except perhaps Mr Abbas, he is the leader of a ghost government, a near-corpse only kept alive with the blood transfusion of international support and the "full partnership" Obama has apparently offered him, whatever "full" means. And it was no surprise to anyone that Obama also made the obligatory call to the Israelis.

But for the people of the Middle East, the absence of the word "Gaza" – indeed, the word "Israel" as well – was the dark shadow over Obama's inaugural address. Didn't he care? Was he frightened? Did Obama's young speech-writer not realise that talking about black rights – why a black man's father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people? It wasn't a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop.

- clip -

The friendly message to Muslims, "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect", simply did not address the pictures of the Gaza bloodbath at which the world has been staring in outrage. Yes, the Arabs and many other Muslim nations, and, of course, most of the world, can rejoice that the awful Bush has gone. So, too, Guantanamo. But will Bush's torturers and Rumsfeld's torturers be punished? Or quietly promoted to a job where they don't have to use water and cloths, and listen to men screaming?

Sure, give the man a chance. Maybe George Mitchell will talk to Hamas – he's just the man to try – but what will the old failures such as Denis Ross have to say, and Rahm Emanuel and, indeed, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton? More a sermon than an Obama inaugural, even the Palestinians in Damascus spotted the absence of those two words: Palestine and Israel. So hot to touch they were, and on a freezing Washington day, Obama wasn't even wearing gloves.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-so-far-obamas-missed-the-point-on-gaza-1488632.html

[Captain Hilts]

1. Denis Ross, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, "old failures?"

Huh?

What'd they "fail" at?

[balantz]

2. They certainly haven't stood up and spoken out like Kucinich has over the years.

And it appears they are willing to give Israel a pass on the current actions in Gaza.

[supernova]

3. Um, our entire reason for being isn't Israell/Palestine

Failing to mention them specifically, by name, in an inaugural address isn't a policy failure.

What's painful is Fisk probably got paid very well for this balderdash.

[Jim Sagle]

4. Fisk is a Hamas mouthpiece hardly pretending to be a journalist. Fuck'm.

[balantz]

5. Robert Fisk is a distinguished journalist.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fisk

Career
Fisk has been described in the New York Times as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain." <2> He covered the Northern Ireland Troubles in the 1970s, the Portuguese Revolution in 1974, the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the 1980-88 Iran–Iraq War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He has received numerous awards, including the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year award seven times. Fisk speaks vernacular Arabic, and is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden – three times between 1994 and 1997.<3> <4>

Fisk has said that journalism must "challenge authority — all authority — especially so when governments and politicians take us to war." He has quoted with approval the Israeli journalist Amira Hass: "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective ... What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power." <5>

- clip -

Early career
Fisk received a BA in English Literature at Lancaster University in 1968<7> and a PhD in Political Science, from Trinity College, Dublin in 1985.<8> The title of his doctoral thesis was "A condition of limited warfare: Eire’s neutrality and the relationship between Dublin, Belfast and London, 1939–1945" <8>. He first worked on the Sunday Express diary column before a disagreement with the editor, John Junor, prompted a move to The Times.<9> From 1972-75 Fisk served as Belfast correspondent for The Times, before becoming its correspondent in Portugal covering the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution. He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976-1988). When a story of his was spiked after Rupert Murdoch's takeover, he moved to The Independent, with his first report published there on 28 April 1989.

- clip -

Awards
In 1991, Fisk won a Jacob's Award for his RTÉ Radio coverage of the first Gulf War.<21> He received Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and again in 2000 for his articles on the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. He received the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year seven times, and twice won its "Reporter of the Year" award.<22> In 2001, he was awarded the David Watt Prize for "outstanding contributions towards the clarification of political issues and the promotion of their greater understanding" for his investigation into the Armenian Genocide by the Turks in 1915.<23> In 2002 he was the fourth recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. More recently, Fisk was awarded the 2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize along with $350,000.<24>

He was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of St Andrews on June 24, 2004. The Political and Social Sciences department of Ghent University (Belgium) awarded Fisk an honorary doctorate on March 24, 2006. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the American University of Beirut in June 2006. Trinity College Dublin awarded him a second, honorary, Doctorate in July 2008.<25>

- clip -

[Jim Sagle]

6. Reads like something he wrote.