Robert Fisk, who writes for the British paper, The Independent, is the kind of journalist we used to know but who has almost disappeared from mainstream media: tough, courageous, honest, articulate - and beholden to no one and nothing except his own conscience. Here is another article, dated December 29, 2000, that tells it like it is.
FORGET THE PEACE PROCESS: THIS IS A MURDEROUS CIVIL WAR
BYLINE: Robert Fisk
Independent:
IT WAS the year the lies ran out; the year the words "peace process" and the phrase "back on track", the word "disputed" and the phrase a "sort of sovereignty" proved to be as meretricious as their overuse by State Department diplomats and journalists. Against the injustice of the Oslo "peace" agreement, the continued occupation of Arab land, the refusal of Israel to give east Jerusalem back to the Arabs, and the ferocious extension of Jewish settlement building on Arab land, the Palestinians rose up. And Israel's brutal response - the live-firing at child stone-throwers, the Israeli snipers picking off protesters from rooftops - provoked the Palestinians to abandon stones for guns.
Zundelsite:
Robert Fisk should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his unrelenting, courageous reporting on the Middle East over a quarter century.
Independent:
And despite the grudging talks between Palestinian and Israeli officials in Washington at the year's end, despite a forthcoming Israeli election between the man who built more Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land in the face of international law (Ehud Barak) and the man who, in 1982, sent the Phalangist murderers into the Palestinian camps of Beirut (Ariel Sharon), there is a wholesale rebellion under way in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians murder Jewish settlers on Arab land. Israelis murder Palestinian militia leaders. In the real world, this is called civil war.
Zundelsite:
Fisk once again calls a spade a spade - and murderers, murderers!
Independent:
It may have "lulls" between "clashes", "peace hopes" interrupting "violence", but the clichés cannot hide the nature of an insurrection that was slowly eroding the credibility not only of the Americans but of their client regimes in the Middle East. And the credibility of Yasser Arafat, the man who signed the Oslo accord in the first place and set in train his people's continued tragedy. At Camp David, he realised at last what this meant: no end to Jewish settlements, no return of refugees, no real Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem, no real Palestinian state and - at most - the return of not 92 per cent but a mere 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of the old Palestine. President Bill Clinton then blamed Arafat for not signing up to Camp David.
Zundelsite:
Arafat, whatever his failings may be, has managed to expose Israeli and Jewish Diaspora duplicity and unconscionable tactics by trying to compromise and compromise, emboldening the Israelis until they finally revealed themselves as the hypocrites and liars that they are - with no intentions to play fair.
Independent:
It was a year of illusions. In May, the Israelis retreated pell-mell out of southern Lebanon as their casualties mounted and their own client militia crumbled around them. The most galling military defeat in Israeli history was presented as Israel's compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 425, albeit 22 years late. The Lebanese Hizbollah were then represented as Israel's new threat, ready to swarm over the border and head for Jerusalem; just as Israel later presented itself as the victim of the Palestinian uprising, as if Israel was under siege and occupied by Palestinians.
Zundelsite:
Yes, even for the Israeli establishment and the generals the lies ran out. Now they will have to face some truths they will not like to have to deal with. Even Palestinians can only be pushed so far for so long. There are limits. These limits have now been reached in Palestine.
Independent:
But let us not be romantic about the Muslim world, where primogeniture was proved again, this time in Damascus. In 1999, King Abdullah had succeeded King Hussein and King Mohamed had succeeded King Hassan. So this year, President Dr Bachar al-Assad succeeded President Hafez Assad. And soon, no doubt, when the incumbents die, President Moubarak and Colonel Gaddafi will be succeeded by their sons. In the Arab world, only in Lebanon - where a billionaire prime minister returned to power and finally broke the old "zaim" - was there any kind of comprehensible elective process, albeit under Syria's "sisterly" hand.
Zundelsite:
The East will remain the East. In America the Kennedys thought they could establish a dynasty and succeed one another. The Rockefellers tried and practiced it. The Bush family seems to be succeeding, as is Hillary Clinton who will run for President in 2004 to carry on the "Clinton Legacy."
Is anyone romantic about Western style "democracy?" - especially after the last election?
Independent:
Elsewhere, the Arab regimes continued their usual practice of populist, fraudulent elections, awe-inspiring corruption and equally awesome secret police rule (torture obligatory). The Saudis chopped off 123 more heads, three of them belonging to women. In non-Arab Iran, the one titan of the Middle East - the inspiring democrat President Mohamed Khatami - found that Ayatollah Khomeini had bequeathed a system so locked in theocracy and necrocracy that the old man's religious descendants could destroy the country's free press while their agents forced good men from power and assassinated others.
Zundelsite:
The Mexicans, the Germans, and all of Eastern Europe have had fraudulent elections for half a century. The Allies grafted upon the German body politic a system - an oligarchy, by the way, that is as resistant to change as that of the Ayatollah Khomeini - which has imprisoned or tried in court more than 16,000 people in less than 10 years, destroying their publications, their reputations etc.
Who are we in the Western world to criticize the Arabs or the Iranians?
Independent:
And in 2001, we will no doubt be enjoined to support a new Israeli-American- Western struggle against "international Islamic terror"; the first blow - a double whammy from Washington and Moscow to further impoverish the penniless Afghan population for hiding Ossama bin Laden - came with increased sanctions this month. Bin Laden has already been turned into a Super-Beast, although his demand for an American withdrawal from the Gulf makes increasing sense to a disenfranchised, humiliated Arab public. The attempted sinking of the USS Cole in Aden harbour - presented, of course, as another act of "terror" against American democracy - falls into this category. And we shall surely see more such murderous acts in 2001.
Zundelsite:
Finally a few honest thoughts by a Western journalist in the artificially created, Orwellian model "ENEMY". By their dishonesty and corruption of language the opposition will assure violence - because to silence will breed violence.
Independent:
If around 300 Palestinian deaths (at least 97 under 18 years old) in the second "intifada" - against a comparative though equally tragic handful of Israeli deaths (around 40) - occupies our headlines this New Year, historians will look further east for the real harvest of death that has beset the Middle East: to the tens of thousands - nay, millions - of Iraqi children who continue to die under UN sanctions, sanctions whose very UN co-ordinators have resigned because of their belief that civilians rather than Saddam Hussein are the victims. And still this year, the Anglo -American bombardment of Iraq went on. Still, in 2000, the children of southern Iraq were dying of strange leukaemias caused, according to a growing body of scientific opinion, by our use of depleted uranium bullets and shells during the 1991 Gulf War.
Zundelsite:
Where are the war crimes trials for the perpetrators of these war crimes and deliberately planned and executed atrocities against civilians in Israel, in Palestine and in Iraq?
Independent:
As always in the Middle East, the malign power of history casts its shadow far into the future. Bomb today. Die tomorrow.
Zundelsite:
One could play with words here and say: "As always, when it comes to matters Israeli or Jewish, the malign power of history casts its shadow far into the future.
Lie today. Suffer the consequences tomorrow.
Thought for the Day:
GRAPHIC captions for the above article: Images that shocked the world: left, a Palestinian, Jamal Aldura, tries to protect his 12-year-old son from crossfire in Gaza City; right, moments later, the boy is dead, his father unconscious.