Mr. Robert Fisk: We Are Tired of Your Orientalism

Boston, Massachusetts

April 14, 2005

One more time, Robert Fisk (April 11, 2005; http://www.tayyar.org/tayyar/articles.php?article_id=2846&type=opinions), of the British leftist daily “The Independent”, propagates the lies and deceptions that the European and American left used for much of the past thirty years to justify the death of Lebanon at the hands of the foreign intervention.

It does not seem to matter to Mr. Fisk that the consensus, as well as the preliminary results of an international investigation, point to a foreign responsibility in Prime Minister Hariri's assassination, like the assassination of all the other Lebanese leaders who preceded him to their death during the Lebanese War. Mr. Fisk is unable to disengage his otherwise ossified mind from the left-wing inanities of the 1960s and 1970s that have all but evaporated with the demonstration by the Lebanese people, now free of occupation, that the demons he speaks about are actually packing their bags and taking a ride down the Road to Damascus.

In addition to his sneaky promotion of his book, banned by no other than the foreign Syrians' heavy handed rule of Lebanon, Mr. Fisk promotes calcified ideas about the War that every Lebanese tried to denounce for decades, only to be silenced by the powerful left-wing media of Europe and the US as hallucinating right-wingers and fascists who are bent of killing each other in the name of religion.

·       The original April 13, 1975 – and I was there, Mr. Fisk, literally one hundred yards away – started with the assassination attempt against Pierre Gemayel, yet another Lebanese leader on the Syrian hit list, who was dedicating a church on that Sunday morning. Why do you not mention that 3 of his bodyguards were killed in the attempt and he was injured? In reaction to this, and to the previous ten years of mayhem that Syrians, Iraelis and the Palestinian movements – all foreigners – visited on Lebanon, the Lebanese people, in this case a few men from the neighborhood, took their shotguns and attacked the bus of Palestinian gunmen driving through the streets of Beirut with their Kalashnikovs pointed in defiance at their children, their government, and their country?

·       To say that “the militias kept multiplying the figures” is to exclusively impugne a native Lebanese Resistance against the Syro-Palestinian assault on Lebanon for the descent into war. That is irresponsible, at a time when you are advocating that the Lebanese look their demons in the eye. The demon is, and will always be, foreign intervention. The proof is in unfolding events. You make a long list of all those foreigners who came and went and achieved nothing, but you do not include the Syrians in the list. The Israelis invaded twice and left. The Syrians, on the other hand, invaded once and stayed – thirty long years.

·       Read your history, Mr. Fisk. The Palestinian movements were the direct cause and primary players of the War. They were not, as you claim “slowly drawn into the war”. Yes, they “suffered massacre after massacre at the hands of their enemies (who often turned out to be just about everybody)”, and that is precisely the point. They were the enemies of all the Lebanese to the extent that they violated every agreement they made with the Lebanese government to regulate their presence on Lebanese soil. Read your history, Mr. Fisk. Go back the Lebanese newspapers of the late 1960s and early 1970s to see what the PLO, the Saika, the Yarmuk Brigades, the Palestine Liberation Army – all under Syrian control - did to the Lebanese people and the Lebanese government before April 13, 1975.  The massacres that took place in isolated towns and villages, like the car bombs of late, were destined to destabilize Lebanon, and they did then. The difference today is that the Lebanese finally understood that foreign intervention is the problem, and that is why it will not happen this time around.

·       If, as you say, everyone was the enemy of the Palestinians, how can you say a sentence later say that “the conflict was really between Christian Maronites and the rest”? If you really do not know what you are talking about, it is perhaps better for you to promote your book in a more honorable way than over the destruction of my country and the suffering of an entire people.

·       Then you describe “the last day” of the war: “The Syrians had bombed General Michel Aoun out of his palace at Baabda – in those days, the Americans were keen on Syrian domination of Lebanon because they wanted the soldiers of Damascus to face off Saddam’s army of occupation in Kuwait”. If that is not foreign intervention, then what is?

The Lebanese people intend to dissect their war and try to understand their share of responsibility in it. Time and reflection is required. Thorough investigations by historians and the criminal courts will assist the Lebanese people in understanding their past and their responsibilities to it. Unfortunately, your brand of journalism lacks the required due diligence. It is dishonest on your part to disperse accusations and irresponsible statements around, impugning entire groups of people for responsibility in actions always committed by individuals.

Perhaps, you should turn your attention to the United Kingdom for a change and analyze through your prism the realities of English foreign intervention in Ireland and its abhorrent domination of the Scots and the Welsh, the racist underpinnings of British society against its Moslem and dark-skinned immigrants, or perhaps the antiquated British Caste system under which you grew up, or even the racist majesty of colonial Britain that ruled so many countries in the past only to leave behind it shattered and divided countries (Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, and the list is long) whose problems have yet to be resolved.

As Edward Said so eloquently told us, yours is an Orientalist view of the Third World, and it has become sickening for us to have to read, yet again, your stale blatherings on the War of Lebanon. Please leave us to our demons and confront your own.