ROBERT FISK SPEAKS UP OH SO THOUGHTFULLY AND COURAGEOUSLY
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ROBERT FISK SPEAKS UP OH SO THOUGHTFULLY AND COURAGEOUSLY

April 17, 2001

ROBERT FISK on the role of Journalists covering the Middle East

"Afflicting the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted"

The famous American Jewish iconoclastic journalist Izzy Stone (I.F.Stone) once told me over a long dinner in my apartment that the role of real and serious journalists in our day and age needed to be "to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted." In a sense what Stone commented in his usually profound way about his journalistic profession is one of the mottos for MID-EAST REALITIES. There were few such real and serious journalists like Izzy Stone in his day when he published I.F.Stone's Journal, and there are few so capable and courageous journalists like Robert Fisk in our day -- especially when it comes to writing about what is really happening in today's Middle East. Fisk has come under great attack from many quarters in recent years; but he has always maintained his integrity, spoken up truthfully and courageously, and most of all continued to do his superb job informing all of us at a frenetic pace and in a brilliant way about the events of our time in the Middle East region.

A few years ago I sat down with Fisk for an exclusive and very hard-hitting 2-hour TV interview about the realities of the "Peace Process", U.S. policies, the regimes in the Middle East, and what really happened at the Qana massacre (with exclusive video provided by Fisk proving the Israelis knew all along exactly the terrible death and destruction they were bringing about). The fifth anniversary of the Qana massacre is indeed tomorrow. To get the Fisk interview and exclusive Qana video clips on either VHS or CD - http://www.MiddleEast.Org/fisktv.htm

Mark Bruzonsky
MER Publisher

TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT ISRAEL

Robert Fisk

When journalists refuse to tell the truth about Israel 'Fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" means we are abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East'

17 April 2001 What if we had supported the apartheid regime of South Africa against the majority black population? What if we had lauded the South African white leadership as "hard-line warriors" rather than racists? What if we had explained the shooting of 56 black protesters at Sharpeville as an understandable "security crackdown" by the South African police. And described black children shot by the police as an act of "child sacrifice" by their parents? What if we had called upon the "terrorist" ANC leadership to "control their own people".

Almost every day that is exactly the way we are playing the Israeli-Palestinian war. No matter how many youths are shot dead by the Israelis, no matter how many murders - by either side - and no matter how bloody the reputation of the Israeli Prime Minister, we are reporting this terrible conflict as if we supported the South African whites against the blacks. No, Israel is not South Africa (though it happily supported the apartheid regime) and no, the Palestinians are not the blacks of the shanty towns. But there's not much difference between Gaza and the black slums of Johannesburg; and there's not much difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in the occupied territories and that of the South African police. The apartheid regime had death squads, just as Israel has today. Yet even they did not use helicopter gunships and missiles.

Rarely since the Second World War has a people been so vilified as the Palestinians. And rarely has a people been so frequently excused and placated as the Israelis. Israeli embassies are now buttonholing editors around the world, saying that it's not fair to call Israel's Prime Minister "hard-line". And the reporters are falling into line.

Sharon, we are told, may turn into a pragmatist, another De Gaulle; in truth he's more like the French putschist generals in Algeria. They also used torture and massacred their Arab opponents. It needed an Israeli writer - Nehemia Strasler, in Ha'aretz - to point out that Sharon's career spells anything but peace. He voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner of Israel's retreat from Lebanon in 2000. He is now building Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land - in total violation of international law at a faster rate than his predecessor.

Yet we are to believe that it is the corrupt, Parkinson's-haunted Yasser Arafat who is to blame for the war. He will not "control" his people. He is chastised by George Bush while his people are bestialised by the Israeli leadership. Rafael Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, used to talk of the Palestinians as "cockroaches in a glass jar". Menachem Begin called them "two-legged beasts". Rabbi Ovdia Yousef, the spiritual head of the Shas party, called them "serpents". In August last year, Ehud Barak called them "crocodiles". Last month, the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called Arafat a "scorpion". Even the South African regime never called the blacks by such vile names.

And woe betide the diplomat or journalist who points this out. Earlier this year, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in Paris, accused the Swedish president of the European Union of "encouraging anti-Jewish violence". To condemn Israel for "eliminating terrorists", the centre wrote in a letter to the Swedish prime minister, "recalls the allied argument during the Second World War, according to which bombing the railways leading to Auschwitz would encourage anti-Semitism among the Germans". Sweden was making "a unilateral attack against the state of the survivors of the Holocaust". And the Swedish president's crime? She had dared to say that "the practice of eliminations constitutes an obstacle to peace and could provoke new violence". She did not even refer to death squads.

In February Newsweek propagated a virtual fraud on its cover by showing - under the headline "Terror Goes Global - Exclusive: Bin Laden's International Network" - a frightening photograph of a man (head and shoulders), his face covered in an Arab scarf, holding a rifle in his right hand. The reader would imagine this to be a member of Osama bin Laden's network of "global terror". But I traced the Finnish photographer who took this picture. He snapped it at a funeral on the West Bank. The man was an armed member of the Palestinian Tanzim militia -- and had nothing to do with Bin Laden. The Tanzim are violent enough. But the cover generically smeared the entire Palestinian people by associating them with the man supposedly responsible for bombing US embassies in Africa.

As that brave American writer Charley Reese said in his regular US column, the Israelis "have created their own unconquerable enemy". They have made the Palestinians so crushed, so desperate, so humiliated that they have nothing to lose. We, too, have done this. Our gutlessness, our refusal to tell the truth, our fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" - the most loathsome of libels against any journalist - means that we are aiding and abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East. Maybe we should look up those cuttings of the apartheid era and remember when men were not without honour. [Independent Digital (UK) Ltd, 2001].


April 2001


Magazine



ARAB-AMERICANS - PATHETIC STATE OF AFFAIRS
(April 30, 2001)
Regular readers of MER won't be all that surprised; though many others will be, especially those who misguidedly and in many cases sincerely give their money, support, and most of all their hopes to these pathetic groups.

THE DARK SIDE OF ISRAELI INDEPENDENCE Day
(April 30, 2001)
Leave it to the Arab Americans to screw things up all the time. As the iconoclastic Israel writer Israel Shamir said as he prematurely departed American shores a few days ago: "With such Palestinian activists, who needs the Israeli lobby?"

ABDULLAH AND THE CIA - LONG HISTORICAL CONSPIRACY AGAINST PALESTINIANS
(April 30, 2001)
The Israelis and the Americans are busy using the Mubarak Regime in Egypt and the Hashemite Regime in Jordan in an increasingly desperate attempt to quash Intifada II and create still more years for the Israelis to consolidate and make permanent their grip on the Palestinians.

WAR MACHINES ON THE MARCH - MER FLASHBACK
(April 29, 2001)
Before the Second Intifada began, before last year's aborted Camp David fiasco, before this year's sweeping victory of Ariel Sharon and the attempt to then position Ehud Barak as Defense Minister, MER was already writing about what was to come while most of the media was sidetracked with and seduced by "the peace process."

THE "APARTHEID PEACE" REMAINS THE GAME BEING PLAYED
(April 28, 2001)
They -- the same personalities representing the same countries that created this "Apartheid Peace" and its resultant intensified uprising against it -- are at it again.

THE SLAUGHTER IN ALGERIA
(April 28, 2001)
This book contains shocking testimony about what is happening inside a country where, according to reliable estimates, more than 150,000 of its citizens have been slaughtered during the past decade.

THE ARAB AMERICAN and JEWISH AMERICAN SCENES
(April 27, 2001)
You gotta love all these scams that so many so tragically so often fall for -- especially the confused and naive Arab Americans.

THE GAZA CONCENTRATION CAMP
(April 27, 2001)
Over the years the Israelis have essentially turned The Gaza Strip from a Ghetto to a kind of Concentration Camp. In this small area today live more than 1 million Palestinians, a large number of whom have never been able to leave and reenter.

ARAFAT'S ESCAPE PLAN - MER FLASHBACK
(April 26, 2001)
More than $100 million dollars in a secret bank account set up by the Israelis and designed to make it possible for Arafat and friends to flee a coup and set up a "government in exile"?

SHA'ATH and PERES DESERVE EACH OTHER -- BUT HOW TRAGIC FOR THE PALESTINIANS
(April 26, 2001)
Sharon is sending Peres to Cairo, and Sha'ath visiting Sweden says there is a "crack in the wall of darkensss."

BERKELEY STUDENTS TAKE THE LEAD
(April 25, 2001)
With the total failure of the Arab American organizations at the national level, and of course provoked now by an Intifada II that is half a year old and the election of Ariel Sharon as PM in Israel, the grassroots are finally stirring a little, students in the lead as at other times in history.

CASINO FIRST!
(April 25, 2001)
In the old days of Intifada I Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres were busy pursuing their "Gaza First" strategy. It was never presented, but always designed, as a kind of trap for the Palestinians; and it was continually rejected by the Palestinian negotiating team that went to Madrid and then Washington, headed by Dr. Haider Abdul-Shafi.

Washington Scene: THE TRAGIC STATE OF ARAB AMERICAN AFFAIRS
(April 25, 2001)
Three things this week underscored the pathetically tragic state of affairs for the Arab American community which remains, well, politically retarded and as a result miserably weak...not to mention oh so co-opted and manipulated.

ISRAEL & TURKEY - MAJOR MILITARY ALLIANCE
(April 25, 2001)
While the misnomered "peace process" continues to dominate the news, arms continue to flood into the Middle East region and possible war preparations are underway.

SHIMON PERES - NOW HOLOCAUST DENIER!
(April 23, 2001)
For the past few years we have mentioned the great importance of the new military axis in the Middle East that adds Turkey's size and power to the U.S.-Israeli alliance that dominates and controls the region.

ARAFAT'S TRAVEL NOW RESTRICTED - MAYBE ON PURPOSE?
(April 23, 2001)
The front-page Washington Post article over the weekend about what the Israelis are up to helps reveal what the new General in charge of the Israeli Army, Ariel Sharon, is attempting to accomplish.

BLOODY SUNDAY AS SIX BOMBS ROCK ISRAEL, GAZA
(April 22, 2001)
Two explosions hit Israel over the space of several hours, and four bombs were detonated in Gaza City which is under Palestinian control.

TERROR IN TEL AVIV TODAY AS US PREPARES FOR BIOLOGICAL ATTACK
(April 22, 2001)
Like so many things in life, terror is a two-edged sword. No doubt the Israelis will use today's bomb blast in Tel Aviv to still further clamp down on and try to choke the Palestinians into submission.

ISRAEL'S ETHNIC CLEANSING SECRETS
(April 21, 2001)
Israel's prime minister-elect, in the throes of forming a new government, is known to be a militant nationalist. Ariel Sharon's view of history is that the Zionists unequivocally have justice on their side in the conflict over what is known to Jews as the Land of Israel and to Palestinians as Palestine.

HISTORIC JEWISH STATEMENT SUPPORTING PALESTINIAN INTIFADA
(April 21, 2001)
Two months after the first Palestinian Intifada began in December 1987, a group of professionals, all American Jews including many professors and lawyers, joined together to publish as a full page ad in THE NATION Magazine of 13 February 1988 this historic statement: "Time To Dissociate From Israel"

ARAB AMERICANS STILL TERRIBLY WEAK
(April 20, 2001)
Three things this week underscored the pathetically tragic state of affairs for the Arab American community which remains, well, politically retarded and as a result miserably weak...not to mention oh so co-opted and manipulated.

FROM THE FRONT
(April 19, 2001)
Attempts by Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, to crush Palestinian violence by adopting still harsher military tactics came to nought last night, after guerrillas in the Gaza Strip fired more mortars into Israel, and one of the worst battles for months erupted on the edge of Bethlehem.

MUBARAK - MORE FRIGHTENED THAN ANGRY OR CREDIBLE
(April 19, 2001)
They use to call him the "laughing cow". Anwar Sadat made him Vice-President thinking he'd never really have to worry much about him. And he himself has never made anyone Vice-President fearing any and everyone.

QANA MASSACRE - 5TH ANNIVERSARY
(April 18, 2001)
It was only four years ago; but already it has been mostly forgotten -- the terrible Qana Massacre in southern Lebanon, and the atrocious cover-up by Israel, the U.S. and the U.N. that followed.

QANA REMEMBERED
(April 18, 2001)
It was five years ago today that hundreds of civilians under U.N. protection in southern Lebanon were brutally killed or maimed by the Israeli Army. With Shimon Peres then Prime Minister after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israelis desperately tried to cover it all up and pretend it was just a mistake of war.

LATEST NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
(April 17, 2001)
With a heavy rocket barrage, Israel seized nearly a square mile of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, retaking Palestinian-controlled territory for the first time since 1994 in retaliation for a mortar attack on a small Israeli desert town.

ROBERT FISK SPEAKS UP OH SO THOUGHTFULLY AND COURAGEOUSLY
(April 17, 2001)
The famous American Jewish iconoclastic journalist Izzy Stone (I.F.Stone) once told me over a long dinner in my apartment that the role of real and serious journalists in our day and age needed to be "to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted."

ISRAEL STRIKES STILL HARDER, IMPOTENT ARAB "CLIENT REGIMES" COWER
(April 17, 2001)
We shouldn't be surprised what the Israelis are doing. Ehud Barak may have hesitated, but after all in the end both he and Shimon Peres publicly gave their endorsements to Ariel Sharon and Sharon has been warning and threatening to do just such things for a very long time.

HASHEMITES CONTINUE TO COLLABORATE
(April 16, 2001)
Today the Jordanian Foreign Minister goes to Israel even as Israeli bombs kill Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians and the whole region is being humbled and shaken by the Israeli Generals, accused war criminal Ariel Sharon now in charge.

CIA BUGS ARAFAT AND ALL P.A. LEADERSHIP
(April 14, 2001)
Arafat has been paid a very great amount of money for the deals he signed in Washington, Cairo, Sharm, Hebron, et. al. He, his family (the Tawils), and top cronies like Nabil Shaath, Abu Mazen, et. al., now have hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts as a result.

EPILOGUE TO A DECADE - A SERIOUS ISRAELI ANALYSIS
(April 14, 2001)
From what would usually be called the far far left in Israel and whose voice is rarely heard these days beyond their own circles -- but which we would term the serious, sophisticated, highly committed and principled Israeli intelligentsia -- there is a magazine published every other month called "Challenge".

EASTER IN THE "HOLY LAND"
(April 13, 2001)
Two thousand years ago on the ancient streets of Jerusalem it was the Roman army in control, the Jewish people under occupation, and Jesus, a heretical Jewish rabbi, heading to his crucifixation as a result of "official" Jewish and Roman cooperation.

DEATH MY REMOTE CONTROL AS HIT SQUADES RETURN
(April 13, 2001)
Israel's strategy has always been to overwhelm and suffocate the Palestinians. At various times different tactics have been used ranging from diplomacy to brutality, from talk of "Statehood" to the imposition of neo-Apartheid.

ISRAELI ARMY ON THE RAMPAGE
(April 12, 2001)
A seven-year-old Palestinian girl was shot in the face by an Israeli rubber bullet while at school in the West Bank village of al-Khader when clashes broke out nearby, medical sources said.

IT'S WAR, MURDER, ASSASSINATIONS AND BEATINGS
(April 12, 2001)
With Robert Fisk, based out of Beirut and the longest serving Western journalist in the region, and Phil Reeves among the Palestinians and the Israelis, The Independent is usually heads above the English rest in both its coverage and analysis.

ISRAELIS ATTACK EVEN MORE BOLDLY
(April 11, 2001)
The Israelis won't be returning to "Zone A"; why should they? After all one of the major goals of the Madrid-Oslo "Peace Process" was to get the Palestinians into isolated and controlled "autonomous population centers" and let them fend for themselves.

ISRAEL BEGINS MINI INVASION STRATEGY
(April 11, 2001)
The Israelis have changed Generals, and the new master General Ariel Sharon is doing things his way. But then nearly everyone else among the Israeli elite has lined up right behind him.

ABDULLAH - KING OF JORDAN, AGENT OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS
(April 11, 2001)
Abdullah II, ruler of Jordan, once called TransJordan, once called the East Bank of Palestine, is once again in Washington. The pattern is all too familiar.

ISRAELIS START USING GROUND TO GROUND MISSILES TO ATTACK PALESTINIANS
(April 10, 2001)
Starting yesterday, and for the first time in the occupied territories against the Palestinians, the Israelies have begun to use surface to surface missiles. In doing so the Israelis are once again throwing down the gauntlet to the entire Arab and Muslim world.

RACISM, MILITARISM, NEO-NAZISM IN THE "JEWISH STATE"
(April 10, 2001)
Racism, militarism, and a peculiar form of Israeli neo-Nazism thrives in today "Jewish State". Harsh conclusions, true; but buttressed by considerable evidence, both factual and ideological.

"VOICE OF AMERICA" EXPANDING TOWARDS CRUCIAL MIDDLE EAST
(April 9, 2001)
Just a few years ago, after the original Camp David agreement in 1978, the joke around Cairo was that the "Voice of America" was really all those loud muffler-broken U.S-supplied buses helping choke, or unchoke depending on your perspective, Cairo's teeming streets.

BARAK AND SHARON PLAN NEXT WAR
(April 9, 2001)
Long before anyone even thought Ariel Sharon might become Israeli Prime Minister... Long before anyone even thought Shimon Peres would serve as Sharon's Foreign Minister... While the "Peace Process" and plans for "Camp David II" were riding high... MER was writing about the coming war being planned by Generals Barak and Sharon in tandem.

DEIR YASSIN REMEMBERED AND "THE QUILT"
(April 8, 2001)
"It's so unfair... After 50 years the Israelis have nuclear weapons, the Mossad, Hollywood, a kosher White House, and their own Assistant Secretary of State; while the Arabs have corruption, secret-police, pathetic Arab- American organizations, Arafat, and the 50th anniversary quilt!"

THE PATHETIC ARAFAT - GIVER AND BEGGAR
(April 8, 2001)
This guy Arafat, and those who advise him, are truly getting ore pathetic all the time. We now learn that while his people suffer even worse than before as a result of what he and his cronies have done, and not done, Arafat has been busy giving expensive jewelry gifts to the former American President, First Lady, and Secretary of State (and no doubt there is a larger list!).

PASSOVER IN THE TIME OF THE INTIFADA
(April 8, 2001)
"I have been invited to a neighbor's Seder this year, and in my fantasy I have thought that I would rather sit on a box at home by myself in the dark with my face to the wall for the length of time the Seder lasts, out of a mixture of shame and protest against Israel's denial of freedom to her Palestinian neighbors."

THE LAST PASSOVER
(April 7, 2001)
"Is this the last Passover that I will celebrate? My heart is not in the celebration this year. And it can never be again until freedom for Jews is also freedom for Palestinians."

THE NEXT EXPULSION OF THE PALESTINIANS?
(April 7, 2001)
The effect of the four-month-old al-Aqsa intifada has been to radicalize and polarize all sides and thus the current situation poses a great danger to the Palestinian people.

ISRAELIS AND U.S. CONGRESS POUND PALESTINIANS
(April 6, 2001)
What is happening now is the result of all the past years of ineptitude, corruption, stupidities, and mistakes by the the various Arab "client regimes", Yasser Arafat's included of course, as well as from the various "client organizations" allied with them, especially in the US.

ISRAELIS BUILD, AMERICANS DECEIVE, ARABS WINK AND HIDE
(April 6, 2001)
This little game has gone on quite literally for decades now. The Israelis twist and turn, delay and obfuscate, but all the while push forward. The Americans say one thing and do another, and when the going gets hot they provide a little criticism of Israel for the Arab media but reserve the important things that really matter for ongoing and escalating cooperation with the Israelis.

"RIGHT OF RETURN" AMERICAN STYLE - PART 4
(April 5, 2001)
This time they are going to march down a largely weekend deserted street in New York City, after gathering at a closed Israeli Consulate, to listen to a group of largely unknown speakers familiar only to themselves, with no strategy other than to gather among themselves to listen to themselves and to be able to say for themselves that they are doing something important...

ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AGAINST TOP THREE ARAFAT PEOPLE?
(April 5, 2001)
Believing the official Israelis is all but impossible at this point; so one has to do the best one can to put together the pieces in ways that make sense. What happened yesterday was probably not an actual assassination attempt -- if that's what the Israelis wanted to do to these three they have the capabilities to do so and not to miss.

THE JORDANIAN POLICE STATE
(April 4, 2001)
About five days before the convening of the Arab Summit in Amman, dozens of masked security men armed to the teeth, along with officers of the Intelligence service (mukhabarat), stormed the house of Siajj Said Daraghmeh near Jabri on the Gardens Street in Amman.

"RIGHT OF RETURN" AMERICAN STYLE - PART 3
(April 4, 2001)
Saturday a few thousand Arab Americans are planning to make it to Washington "demanding" the "Right of Return" for Palestinian refugees. What should one think about this?

"RIGHT OF RETURN" CONF A "DISASTER" - PART 2
(April 3, 2001)
The region itself has corrupt and incompetent "client regimes", now including that of Yasser Arafat. And that explains a great deal why such an important and rich part of the world with over 200 million people is so regularly humbled and bleeding.

"RIGHT OF RETURN" AMERICAN STYLE - PART 1
(April 3, 2001)
This year the selected slogan for Arab Americans is "the Right of Return". A couple of years ago at the time of the 50th anniversary of the 1948 war -- the "nakba", the "disaster" -- the slogan was "the Quilt".

"INVASION" PREPARATIONS AS MUBARAK COMES COLLECTING
(April 2, 2001)
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has come to Washington once again. His visits have become customary to in a sense collect his allowance and meet with his new American keepers, which are in fact really the old Bush crowd he is very familiar with.

PERES 'MORE AGGRESSIVE' THAN SHARON
(April 2, 2001)
"Peres is more aggressive than I am, (said Sharon). "Peres responded (to the Cabinet), "Yes, he had to restrain me this time."

PLOT TO KILL ARAFAT'S TOP PEOPLE
(April 1, 2001)
Yesterday the Senior U.S. Senator from New York, Chuck Shumer, went before the Washington cameras to denounce Yasser Arafat as a "terrorist" and demand he comply with U.S./Israeli dictate or else.

ANOTHER ARAB SUMMIT COMES AND GOES
(April 1, 2001)
If the demonstrators going to the Palestinian Rally in New York next weekend had any guts, and any smarts, after they gather at the Israeli Consulate they would move on and conduct their serious shouting where the Arab Ambassadors and the Arab League hang their sorry hats.




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