book review

"The Great War For Civilisation The Conquest Of The Middle East," written by Robert Fisk, published year 2005 under the imprint Fourth Estate.

This book is an homage to Robert Fisk by himself.
It is also an homage to Muslim terrorism generally.
And it is an homage to Osama Bin Laden in particular.
Robert Fisk is wrong about everything.
His analysis is based on a broad application of old style Marxian conflict theory, the methodology of analysis which was devised by the Russian Communist Party to enable them to question out of existence all other civilisations and traditions, and to justify their sponsored revolutions and installation of Bolshevick government in every nation on earth.
It is a catchall theory.
Selectively applied nothing can stand against it.
Robert Fisk is of that generation of journalists whose world view was dysmorphically shaped by infiltrated left wing academia, abetted by 1960s pseudo intellectual posed radicalism and topped off with a nihilistic self loathing desire to see Western societies utterly destroyed by any convenient barbarian ideology that happened to be passing by at the time.
His influence has been significant.
Academia still treats him with reverence.
He receives awards.
Journalists want to be him.
Fiskisms pepper the contemporary political analysis of the more suggestible semi literates among us.
If I had a fiver for every time some half wit has pronounced triumphantly to me "The Sikes Picot line caused everything in the Middle East," I would have, well, I'd have twenty quid.
Four separate idiots have pulled that particular rabbit out of their hats on four separate occasions and thrust it into my face.
The Sikes Picot line is a typical piece of Robert Fisk mystification.
It's voodoo.
For most people, it's an historical reference that they're not instantly familiar with.
When some would be Robert Fisk unleashes the reference to the Sikes Picot line with the usual magician's flourish a la rabbit out of a hat, as if there is no possible answer to it, it is quite natural to find yourself momentarily stumped.
Often of course, Robert Fisk's disciples won't permit an answer anyway so at least in that sense, no answer is indeed possible.
They have emoted to his drivel for fifty years now and they can't imagine anyone might want to think for themselves and critically examine his theses.
There is method to this madness.
Robert Fisk uses tolerably well written trawlings and interpretations of history to justify what amounts to his advocacy of Muslim terrorism.
He moves the goalposts wherever necessary.
When Muslim dominated Turkey began to establish working relations with the State of Israel back in the 1990s, woops, hey presto, Robert Fisk suddenly discovered a deep concern for the Armenians massacred by Turks in 1915.
When elements of the Kurdish people became closely allied to the USA after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Robert Fisk began linking the Kurds to the Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915.
Ho hum.
You picks your massacre and you takes your chance.
In the world according to Robert Fisk at least.
The lynchpins of his various anti American, anti Israel arguments are inevitably based on such selective trawlings and tendentious attributions of historical and modern atrocities.
The whole is veiled in the mystification of Marxian Soviet era conflict theory.
But the handwringing claim to a monopoly on human compassion regarding atrocities is, I suppose, his albeit wearisome master stroke.
It works on an improbable amount of people.
He covers himself by evoking atrocities from all quarters of course.
He is not stupid.
But the trend of his orchestrations is always to justify the Muslim Brotherhood and its Al Qaeda and other franchises.
He manipulates the perception of the reader, overwhelms the reader's critical faculties as it were, through the repeated evocations of explicit human violations and suffering.
Unless you pause for careful thought in the midst of this 1300 page agit prop word heap, you might be forgiven for thinking that every victim in every war zone has signed an affidavit endorsing the Islamism of Robert Fisk.
They haven't.
And neither have I.
Before deciding to bestow his enlightenment in service to Arab terror circa the year 1976 when he moved to Lebanon, Robert Fisk was shedding his enlightenment justifying IRA atrocities in Northern Ireland, using the exact same pseudo intellectual Marxian conflict theory analytics as he has since used for the Muslims.
My testimony to you gentle readers is that he did neither the Muslims nor the Irish any favours by saddling us with this rubbish.
Instead he facilitated the worst amongst us by rationalising their barbarities.
To this day Ireland groans under the feudal oppression of the drug dealing, people trafficking, child abusing,IRA mafia, the same Russian Communist sponsored proxy army which in Robert Fisk's misguided youth was trying to hand Ireland over lock, stock and two smoking barrels to those lovable goons of the Soviet Communist Party Of Russia.
You gorra larf.
But I digress.
If I had a fiver for ever time someone has banged my kitchen table and frothed with rage when I suggested they were doing a Robert Fisk in cherry picking atrocities to serve their anti American, anti Israel thesis, I'd have, well, I'd have another fiver anyway.
But he was my best friend from school days, now a successful in worldly terms, adult, thinker.
The table banger not Robert Fisk.
So I felt the disappointment keenly.
How dare I presume that I could be correct and Robert Fisk could be wrong!
If I had a fiver for every time someone said to me "Robert Fisk has been to Lebanon, he knows what's going on by experience, you just live in our town," I'd have, well, I'd have yet another fiver anyway.
But she'd illustrated a book for me.
We'd plucked the gowans fine, publshing wise, tilting at the windmills of fame.
So again I felt the sting keenly.
Ah the old argomento ad who the hell are you to quibble with the great Robert Fisk when he tells you what to think and when the rest of us have already bowed to his compassionate genius.
Be assured gentle readers, that argument really annoys me.
How do I dare to oppose such a superbly constructed thesis, ie America bad, Israel bad, written by a man of undoubted courage, deep experience, and sublime intelligence?
Because.
Because.
Okay because.
Robert Fisk's analytic excludes certain dynamics which are relevant to the reality of Muslim terrorism.
Robert Fisk excludes all causality for Arab terror arising from the attempt by the Russian Communist Party to foster revolutions in every country on earth from 1917 to 1991, and from similar proxy attempts to destabilise the Middle East by the Russians again in our lifetimes now that Vladimir Putin is once more attempting to resovietise Russia.
Robert Fisk excludes all causalities for Arab terror stemming from the cultural psychopathologies of the peace loving religion of Islam itself.
Rober Fisk excludes all causalities for Arab terror arising from the adventurism of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its various franchises. (Presently including Al Qaeda, Isis et al. Particlarly Al, I hate him.)
In more recent times Robert Fisk's analysis explicitly excludes the subversive power projection meddling of the Iranian Ayatollahs using proxies to attack the US presence in Iraq. While ignoring the Iranian creation of an Iraq pseudo resistance, Robert Fisk champions the utterly incorrect notion, that the Iraqi people (not the Iranians) launched the resistance to America in Iraq, and that it was the Iraqi people (not the Iranians) who did not want the Americans to stay in their country after the removal of Saddam Hussein. and that it was the Iraqi people (not the Iranians) who rebelled against the American presence after what I call the liberation of their country from Saddam Hussein's murderocracy.
So to justify his reading of this particular phase of history. Robert Fisk has to again exclude salient political dynamics, to wit the fact that the Iranian Ayatollahs and their vassal Syria's Assad regime, could not afford their peoples to see a free, pro Western country taking shape on their borders and set out to sabotage it from the start.
Their own captive peoples would have insisted on an American intervention for themselves if the Iranians and the Syrians had sat back and let Iraq grow free.
The Ayatollahs and Bashar Assad know it.
I know it.
Is it really possible that Robert Fisk doesn't know it?
If he does know it, why doesn't he mention it?
Still in spite of all evidence and testimony to the contrary, Robert Fisk delusionally maintains that the Iraqi uprisings, as he calls them, were native born and indigenous organic events stemming from the Iraqi people themselves.
I cannot but conclude that he is concealing by omission the direct sponsorship by the Ayatollahs and the Assads of the mayhem that has engulfed Iraq after the American liberation of that country from Saddam.
Robert Fisk's omission of the above mentioned four dynamics from his analysis (Russian Communist actions, Cultural Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Ayatollahs) are the reason I dare to say that he is wrong about everything.
The book did humanise him for me though.
I can no longer simply look on him as the Soviet apologist bogeyman of my and his youth.
I recognise the magnificence of his journalistic achievement.
He is pre eminent among modern war correspondents and commentators.
He has lived his art.
I am fascinated by his knowledge of Arab culture, people and language.
The references in the book to his family are beautiful and fit perfectly somehow with the more political evocations in the narrative.
He is a master of prose styles.
He is for better or worse a part of the history of the Middle East
He has become synonymous with the story he tells.
I am aware of one other Western commentator who achieved great fame and plaudits among Muslims and who herself, however briefly, became the story.
That is the Italian commentator Oriana Fallaci.
In her youth, like Robert Fisk, she advocated Marxian conflict theory and the export from Russia of goonish soviet revolutionary dictatorships world wide.
She became inadvertently, a hero to the Iranian Ayatollahs, through her repeated deriding of the Shah of Iran in her published work.
She herself was stunned to arrive in Iran to interview the Ayatollah Khomeini after the ouster of the Shah only to find herself feted as a heroine.
She had to live with what she had done in helping bring the Ayatollahs to power in Iran, for the rest of her life.
I place no less a stress on Robert Fisk's influence in the broader Arab Muslim world.
My assessment is that he has fuelled Al Qaeda intellectually among Arabs as no other has done.
He has given a veneer of sociological intellectual respectability to the hard men Jihadis.
He has, to borrow a phrase from PJ O'Connor, turned the Palestinians into the most journalised people on earth.
And he has become a hero to them.
The difference between Robert Fisk and Oriana Fallaci, is that in the final decades before her death Oriana Fallaci shouted loud and long about what Muslim Jihadis were doing to Europe and would continue to do if allowed to mass migrate here.
She also learned to place a value on the specific freedoms which, flowing from Christianity, have shaped Europe in all its positive aspects.
For her trouble she was labelled racist and subjected to opprobrium by the European pseudo elites who had once lauded her.
They slandered her into the grave.
Robert Fisk has never recanted.
He still champions Arab terror.
For his troubles, trahesions I would call them, I fully expect he will be sent to the grave laden with honours.
Is Robert Fisk a Muslim?
Who am I to ask.
Again how dare I.
Cards on the table.
I am someone who believes that the Jews are in the Middle East not because of any Sikes Picot line, or Great Power games by the West in 1915, but because God wants them there.
That's me.
That's what I think.
That's my critical assessment at the profoundest level.
That's what underlies my mind set.
Who is Robert Fisk?
What is his profoundest conviction which underlies everything he says?
Do you not think he has one!
If I dare to think he's wrong, I am left wondering why is he wrong.
I've offered my answer on what I think are intellectual grounds, that is to say I've claimed he's wrong on several key points which orient his analysis, omitting several key political dynamics which are inconvenient to it, and that these omissions makes him frequently wrong in the conclusions he draws.
But why did Robert Fisk choose in the first place what I am deeming the pro Islamist revolutionary analytic that persuades him and leads him to all his other conclusions?
I am asking who he is really.
I can only speculate.
The book raises more questions about his own inner life than it answers.
Here's my best guess.
Perhaps when the Russians tried to discarId communism in 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union meant a terrible personal defeat also for the conflict theorist Robert Fisk.
The end of his greatest hope which I suggest was to see Western society overthrown by Communist Russia's backing of  the IRA, the Baader Meinhof gang, the Basque Separatists, the Red Brigades.and all those other glamorous heroic murderers beloved of dilettante 1960s coffee shop radicals and the journalists who shaped them.
Since the Russian Marxists and their sponsored revolutions had clearly failed, who was to bring the West down now?
Perhaps Robert Fisk changed horses at that stage.
Perhaps after years living among the Arabs of Lebanon, he switched to the closest horse at hand.
Perhaps he simply transferred his shattered faith in the glorious world wide Soviet revolution over to the Muslim Jihadis, who he now hoped to see erase what for him was the detested Judaeo Christian tradition from the history of man.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Is it so hard to believe?
He'd lived among the Arabs, suffered with them, loved with them, bled with them.
Is it such a stretcher to suggest that he eventually threw in his lot with them?
He hints at it.
The changing horse business.
In the middle of this book at one of his meetings with Osama Bin Laden, he recalls Osama Bin Laden telling him that one of the brothers (members of Bin Laden's Muslim terror group) had a dream where Robert Fisk had grown a beard, was riding a horse and had become Muslim.
Robert Fisk claims he told Osama Bin Laden that he was not a Muslim but that he was someone who wanted to tell the truth.
He says Osama Bin Laden told him that if he told the truth he was Muslim.
On the page opposite the inside back cover of the book, hidden away from the unwary reader who mightn't have purchased it if he saw what was there, (athough the galoot who gave it to me would probably have purchased two of them) where one doesn't expect to find a sensation photograph at all, Robert Fisk has hidden his truth, a full colour splendidly executed beautifully lit photograph of Osama Bin Laden.
Ah.
In an age of mainstreaming depravities this is the last love that dare not speak its name.
The love of a bored disenchanted doubting Soviet era conflict theorist atheistic Marxian for the action packed blood letting certainties of Islamic terrorism.
Forgive me if I seem to be jeering nay wallowing in my usual cheap shots.
On such paradoxes civilisations and their leading advocates rise and fall.
Robert Fisk is not wrong about everything.
When at the outset I said he was wrong about everything, I was wrong.
Worse, I was plagiarising the commentator Mark Steyn who usually plagiarises me.
As to the wrongness of Fisk...
Robert Fisk is indeed wrong to claim that Israel is built on someone else's land.
And he's wrong to habitually vilify any President Bushes that happen to be passing. (Both of em.)
And he was horribly wrong in his fantasistic Marxian justifications for the IRA mafia fifty years ago when it was trying to hand Ireland over lock, stock and two smoking barrels (of heroin) to Soviet Russia.
Since losing both Robert Fisk as their chief intellectual advocate and Communist Russia as their armourer, the Rah have had to content themselves with turning Ireland into a Narco Mafia State, the gangland Port Royal of the North Atlantic.
But I digress.
There are things Robert Fisk is corret about.
He is in my view substantially correct in his critiques of the international arms industry.
He may also be sincere and correct in his recognition of the humanity of all who suffer in wars.
He is even correct, I think, at the microscopic level in his analysis of President Bill Clinton's motives for using American power in Serbia in the late 1990s, labelling those interventions along with other Bill Clinton interventions of that time, as arising more from Mr Clinton's need to distract public attention from his affair with Monica Lewinski, than from any deeply felt principle of moral necessity.
On the other hand does anyone seriously doubt that if Bill Clinton hadn't bombed the Serbs, even now Robert Fisk would be accusing him of having betrayed the gallant Muslims of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania?
Still I'm left wondering.
Have I hit the nail on the head?
Have I answered his arguments?
More importantly have I explained him?
The Fisk enigma.
Did Robert Fisk abandon his former oblique advocacies of Russian communist suzerainty over the human race with the seeming death of Soviet Man, and segoo Nietzhily to embrace the new Superman proffered so tantalisingly by the Darwinian master race rigours of radical Islam?
Did he pronounce his own version of the Muslim act of faith, the Shahada?
Osama Bin Laden is God and Robert Fisk is his prophet.
I think he did.
For Arabs and Muslims who wish to move beyond the psychopathologies and victim culture which have characterised their contribution to humanity for 1400 years, the problem is not so much the State of Israel but the state of western journalism which has inflicted the self loathing pseudo radicalism of Robert Fisk upon all of us.
Read this book to get a glimpse.