November 22, 2005

The New York Times has it in for Robert Fisk, the London Independent’s Middle East correspondent. Ethan Bronner, the paper’s deputy foreign editor, on November 19 did a hatchet job on Fisk’s new book, “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East.”

Bronner acknowledges all the acclaim that Fisk has gotten over the years. But he adds dismissively, “Yet for all the awards he has garnered, and despite his rare combination of scholarly knowledge, experience, and drive, Mr. Fisk has become something of a caricature of himself, railing against Israel and the United States, dismissing the work of most of his colleagues as cowering and dishonest, and seeking to expose the West's self-satisfied hypocrisy nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism.”

I’m not sure what the problem is here. I have the book in front of me, and the book is very harsh on the adversaries of the United States, too, including the Soviets, Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. In fact, when Fisk gave a lecture here in Madison a few years ago, he made it a point to show harrowing actual film footage of torture of prisoners in Saddam’s Iraq so as to dispel any possible illusions about the nature of the regime. What Bronner seems to have an issue with is Fisk’s criticism of Israel and the United States, criticism that he seems to dismiss a priori as illegitimate if it crosses a certain line. Maybe this isn’t too surprising. Bronner was dubbed by the vehemently pro-Israel Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) as “one of the most fair and informed foreign reporters ever to cover Israel” back when he was with the Boston Globe.

Bronner also chides Fisk for castigating Western reporting on the Middle East. But Bronner should know how awful it has been. He works at the New York Times, where Judith Miller was busy legitimizing the Iraq War by repeating Ahmad Chalabi’s lies on the front page.

Additionally, it was the Times’ uncritical acceptance of the notion of “objectivity,” a notion that Bronner faults Fisk for questioning, that helped the Bush Administration lead the United States into the Iraq mess, since it hindered the paper from reporting the truth. The Times didn’t even do “objectivity” well, since it failed to balance critics of the war with its proponents. And even though it was clear that the Bush Administration was trying to pull one over on the American people in the lead-up to the war, that fact got lost in the “objectivity” shuffle.

Bronner also takes Fisk to task for calling the Israeli occupation of Palestinian areas as the “last colonial war.” The United Nations has, however, in multiple resolutions recognized that Israel is sitting on occupied territory, which was one of the hallmarks of colonialism.

But wait. Bronner told the Times’ Public Editor Daniel Okrent earlier this year that the paper is “unbound” by U.N. resolutions. “We cite them, but we do not live by them," he said. Bronner cited the 1975 U.N. “Zionism is Racism” resolution as an example, as if one dubious resolution means that the Times should ignore everything the United Nations says or does.

Bronner makes one criticism I agree with. He cites a story that Fisk wrote about being assaulted by Afghans at a refugee camp, in which Fisk stated, “If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdulla, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find." This is carrying Western self-criticism and empathy for the oppressed to an extreme, and I would hope that Fisk, in their shoes, would not have resorted to violence. But this article certainly doesn’t render invalid the good work that Fisk has done through the decades.

Bronner cheapens the Times by engaging in gratuitous attacks on a reporter whose major sin seems to be that he doesn’t toe the official line on the Middle East.