Robert Fisk On Obama’s Inaugural Speech: Gaza — Not The Elephant In The Room — The Pile Of Corpses In The Room

I’ve recently discovered Robert Fisk, reporter for the UK Independent. In his most recent column Fisk says, “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.

Excerpts:

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

In a previous column Fisk notes: Wherever I go, I hear the same tired Middle East comparisons

Robert Fisk -- photo from Wikipedia

Robert Fisk -- photo from Wikipedia

Excerpts:

  • I ended the week in one of those BBC World Service discussions in which a guy from The Jerusalem Post, a man from al-Jazeera, a British academic and Fisk danced the usual steps around the catastrophe in Gaza. The moment I mentioned that 600 Palestinian dead for 20 Israeli dead around Gaza in 10 years was grotesque, pro-Israeli listeners condemned me for suggesting (which I did not) that only 20 Israelis had been killed in all of Israel in 10 years. Of course, hundreds of Israelis outside Gaza have died in that time – but so have thousands of Palestinians.
  • My favourite moment came when I pointed out that journalists should be on the side of those who suffer. If we were reporting the 18th-century slave trade, I said, we wouldn’t give equal time to the slave ship captain in our dispatches. If we were reporting the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, we wouldn’t give equal time to the SS spokesman. At which point a journalist from the Jewish Telegraph in Prague responded that “the IDF are not Hitler”. Of course not. But who said they were?

I looked up Fisk in Wikipedia. It says:

Robert Fisk (born 12 July 1946 in Maidstone, Kent) is an English journalist and author. He is the Middle East correspondent of the UK newspaper The Independent, has spent more than 30 years living in and reporting from the region, and won awards for his work. [1]

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]

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