Favouring Fantasy Over Dignity for the Palestinians - by Denis MacEoin

...Trapped by allegiance to a thoroughly outdated and discredited system of international law, unwilling to exchange fantasy for realism, the Palestinians have tried everything except for what might actually make them free and prosperous

Dr. Denis MacEoin..
Gatestone Institute..
27 July '18..

Anyone who cares for Israel, who aspires to peace, who has a good understanding of the historical, ethical, political, and legal facts that underpin the right of the Jewish people to a state of which they are the indigenous people, will be familiar with the name of Robert Fisk. But not in a good way.

For decades, Fisk has been one of the most unrelenting of Israel's many haters and one of the most uncritical supporters of the rights of the Palestinians and their unending calls and actions aimed at the total destruction of Israel and the expulsion or massacre of the Jewish people living there.

Fisk is a clever man. He took his PhD in 1983 from Trinity College, Dublin, an ancient and respected university. Although his doctorate was in political science on a topic related to Ireland and Britain, he has worked as the Middle East correspondent for the Times (1976-1988) and, since 1989, for the left-wing daily, The Independent.

Over the years, he has reported on many wars in many countries and has written and co-authored many books about them, all of them about their conflicts.

Given his Jack-of-all trades character, it is not surprising that Fisk does not always get his facts straight, and for this he has often been criticized by people with deeper knowledge...

(Continue to Full Article)

Dr. Denis MacEoin has studied, lectured on, and written extensively about the Middle East for some forty-six years. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Equating Terrorists With Himself - Meet Robert Fisk

Pesach Benson..
Honest Reporting Backspin..
17 June '13..

I’m not sure why Robert Fisk is firing his guns now at the Newseum. The Washington-based media museum sparked outrage with its decision to honor Palestinian terrorists among fallen journalists.

Newseum backed down and the program (held a month ago) went ahead without mentioning Hamas cameramen Mahmoud Al-Kumi and Hussam Salama. The two were killed in an Israeli airstrike during last year’s Gaza conflict.

That’s all a long time in blog years, but Fisk finally found his voice on the controversy. The Independent’s columnist writes:

Marquadt-Bigman - Robert Fisk and the Palestinian billionaire’s grandson

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
14 June '12..



Almost exactly a year ago, in late May 2011, veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk devoted his column in The Independent to “A tale from the frontline of Palestinian protest.” The “Palestinian protest” mentioned in this headline was a “Nakba” rally in Lebanon supported by Hezbollah; the organizers of the event bused protesters to the border with Israel, and the plan was to have them march towards the border in an attempt to breach it.

Fisk’s tall tale about one of the protesters who was among those wounded when both Israeli and Lebanese soldiers opened fire to prevent infiltration attempts was a rather skillful piece of propaganda presenting Israel as just another illegitimate – and US-supported – Middle Eastern regime that should be swept away by the Arab Spring uprisings.

When I analyzed Fisk’s piece in a blog post, I couldn’t help wondering about the name of the young man Fisk placed at the center of his sad story of Israeli callousness and brutality: Munib Masri.

To be sure, Masri is a fairly common name among Palestinians – indeed, as a Hamas leader recently explained:

“More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri ["Egyptian"]. Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

But there is one very famous Munib Masri: he is known as the richest Palestinian in the world, a billionaire who has built himself a replica of a 16th-century Italian palace surrounded by sumptuous gardens occupying some 70 acres of land on Mount Gerizim overlooking his hometown Nablus. Defending the extravagance of this estate, Masri has reportedly pointed out that he returned to his hometown even though he could live a life of luxury in “New York, Geneva or London.”

Surely Fisk wouldn’t keep it from his readers if the Munib Masri he was writing about with so much passion was a close relative of the billionaire known as the “Duke of Nablus?”

Plosker - Syria and Israel: All the Same For Fisk

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting/Backspin..
07 February '12..






In his latest commentary in The Independent, Robert Fisk is keen to lecture the West that not all Middle East revolutions or uprisings are the same:

The old saw has to be repeated and repeated: Egypt was not Tunisia; Bahrain was not Egypt; Yemen was not Bahrain; Libya was not Yemen. And Syria is very definitely not Libya.

But when it comes to Israel, Fisk is morally blinded to the difference between the brutal actions of Mideast regimes such as Syria, massacring its own civilians with lethal intent, and Israel, targeting terrorists and making every effort to avoid civilian casualties.

It’s not difficult to see how the opposite plays in the West. The barrage of horrifying Facebook images from Homs, and statements from the “Free Syrian Army”, and the huffing of La Clinton and the amazement that Russia can be so blind to the suffering of Syrians – as if America was anything but blind to the suffering of Palestinians when, say, more than 1,300 were killed in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza – doesn’t gel with reality on the ground.

So far, the immoral equivalence between Syrian brutality and Israeli self-defense hasn’t manifested itself in the media. That Robert Fisk should be one of the first to promote it, even in a throwaway comment, shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Link: http://honestreporting.com/syria-and-israel-all-the-same-for-fisk/


Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Demopaths and Dupes

CiF Watch
12 January '10

This is a cross-post from Augean Stables which provides a fascinating insight into the mindset of many of the anti-Israel commenters on CiF that engage in demopathic discourse

DEMOPATHS:
Demopaths are people who use democratic language and invoke human rights only when it serves their interests, and not when it calls for self-criticism or self-restraint. Demopaths demand stringent levels of human “rights” but do not apply these basic standards for the “other” to their own behavior. The most lethal demopaths use democratic rights to destroy democracy.

Demopaths differ from civil-society free-riders; the latter enjoy more rights than they grant to others simply out of selfishness or laziness. Demopaths are fundamentally hostile to granting others’ rights, and secretly despise the values of civil society (which demands that they tolerate and respect others). Instead of coming along for the ride, they want to sink the boat.

Demopaths use the jargon of civil society and human rights to convince their targets. Through this progressive discourse, demopaths exploit on people eager to believe that civic values can resolve the problem. Sometimes demopaths are completely hostile to the cultures in which they live, and manipulate human rights as a Trojan horse to enter the city and sack it.

Demopathy is a zero-sum to negative-sum game. It pursues the destruction of the system (demopaths win and reestablish plunder-or-be-plundered aristocracy); in the process, it destroys the system’s very capacity to produce what made it attractive to plunder in the first place. Demopaths do not view opponents as members of a positive-sum collective, but as enemies to be destroyed. In its most virulent stages, demopathy is violently paranoid.

CHARACTERISTICS:

- Radical imbalance between their insistence on asserting their own rights, and their lack of interest in defending the rights of others.
- Moral rhetoric expressing great indignation when appealing for personal rights.
- Tendency to tell demonizing tales of the enemies (of “human rights”)
- Tendency to think in conspiratorial terms (they are conspirators themselves), and to project ill will onto opponents/enemies.
- Do minimal (required) work protecting the rights of others, especially opponents/enemies.

A demopathic organization would protest the media portraying its ethnic/religious affiliates as “terrorists” (inadmissible negative stereotyping), but would not protest the terrorist acts perpetrated by members of their ethnic/religious group (permissible wanton murder of civilians).

(Read full post)
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