Is Robert Fisk suffering from the Bernard Lewis syndrome?
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
by Yassine Channouf
Twice I met him, and as many times he delighted me. I can credit Robert Fisk with getting me interested in Lebanon. I have always read his books and articles passionately, and those who know me grew weary of my continuous references to him. But no more. The Fisk I admired is no longer the Fisk that the world knows today. His last article in which he equates Hezbollah, the Lebanese Resistance, with a bunch of anti-Semites is the figurative drop. The reason for this outrageous accusation? Hezbollah’s opposition to the teaching of the Anne Frank diary in the schools in the south of Lebanon. Robert Fisk has lived in Lebanon for more than 30 years, and most importantly throughout the savage period of the civil war. It is, nor should it be a secret that Robert Fisk is one of the best western journalists dealing with the Middle East, but that should not impede us from criticizing him on certain critical issues.
I do have sympathy for Europeans who are feeling estranged in their countries by immigration. But they too must realize that World capitalism is to be blamed. If the world was a place of equal rights, opportunities and justice, no one needs to immigrate, and those who do will do that for a while and return home, except for those who really feel at home elsewhere than in their countries, but this last category will assimilate in any new country anyway and will never be experienced as foreign unless by racists and no one really cares about racists.Only under capitalism people will live in countries they don’t like just because of economical and social reasons, and their children will be born with a grudge for the system that brought their parents where they are and makes their countries of origin unlivable. If faced with discrimination and racism these children will even hate the country they live in.As long as capitalism exists people will go where the system distributes the most, and will escape from places where the system extracts the most. Today the system extracts the most from the south ( oil, natural resources, commodities, cheap labor etc..) and distributes the most in the north. Don’t fight the symptoms, fight the illness. It has a name, Capitalism and some people call it Imperialism, but it is one and the same, the sickness of this world.
