#robert fisk

Sort of, yes.

"Fisking" refers to a detailed, line-by-line critique of a work, named after Robert Fisk due to frequent, sharp, detailed rebuttals of his reporting by journalists and bloggers in the 2000s.

fisking: n. [blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment.

[Source]

Calling Fisk a journalist, though, is problematic in itself. In the early 2000s, journalism wasn't dead yet - but Fisk did his best to kill it. He was an anti-Israel ideologue and polemicist who was rightly excoriated for his chronic dishonesty, driven by ego and ideology. He was no journalist.

But it was worse than the Independent admitted:

Here's a bit of Fisk being fisked:

On the front page of the Independent, he nakedly lied about Israel dropping a uranium bomb.

Even after this was disproven...there was no retraction and no apology...because Fisk didn't have a single fuck give about truth:

He dabbled in blood libels, like saying the US congress was "in thrall to Israel."

He was also fond of the dual loyalty trope.

It has been a long time since I last posted one of those lists of recent reads -- probably about six months, so I'm not going to list everything I've read since then. And I don't remember exactly what I included last time, so hopefully I don't double-dip.

•Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician [2024] by James M. Bradley (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) If you want to make me happy, just publish a new book about one of America's more obscure Presidents. And in December 2024, we got a new biography of Martin Van Buren with fresh research from sources not previously available to earlier biographers, resulting in an updated, comprehensive book about Van Buren that now becomes one of the definitive biographies of our eighth President.

•Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents [2024] by Nigel Hamilton (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) I'm also an easy mark for books about Jefferson Davis -- not out of any sort of affinity for him or the Confederacy, of course -- but just because of his unique place in history as an American President who also wasn't really an American President (although, technically, he was.) Throw Lincoln into the mix and you don't have to sell me very hard on this book.

•Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East [2024] by Robert Fisk (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) I wish Fisk had lived to write about the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it doesn't require much imagination to know what he would have thought about it: he wrote honestly, critically, and with deep understanding about the subject for 40+ years while reporting from the heart of the struggle in the Middle East.

•The Garfield Orbit [1978] by Margaret Leech and Harry J. Brown (BOOK)

•The World and Richard Nixon [1987] by C.L. Sulzberger (BOOK)

•John Lewis: A Life [2024] by David Greenberg [2024] (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq [2024] by Bartle Bull (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare On How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall [2023] by Eliot A. Cohen (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•A Very Personal Presidency: Lyndon Johnson in the White House [1968] by Hugh Sidey (BOOK)

•The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis [2024] by Michael W. Higgins (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The President: A Minute-by-Minute Account of a Week in the Life of Gerald Ford [1975] by John Hersey (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally [1989] by James Reston Jr. (BOOK)

•The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky [2024] by Simon Shuster (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great [2024] by Rachel Kousser (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•American Gothic: The Story of America's Legendary Theatrical Family -- Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth [1992] by Gene Smith (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire [2002] by Tom Chaffin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps [2024] by Jonn Elledge (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Eisenhower For Our Time [2024] by Steven Wagner (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy [1996] by Robert D. Kaplan (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat [1983] by Ryszard Kapuściński [Translated by William R. Brand & Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand] (BOOK)

•A Heartbeat Away: The Investigation and Resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew [1974] by Richard M. Cohen and Jules Witcover (BOOK)

•American Roulette: The History and Dilemma of the Vice Presidency [Revised & Updated, 1972] by Donald Young (BOOK)

•Centers of Power in the Arab Gulf States [2024] by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Formation of the UAE: State-Building and Arab Nationalism in the Middle East [2024] by Kristi Barnwell (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Iranian-Saudi Rivalry Since 1979: In the Words of Kings and Clerics [2023] by Talal Mohammad (BOOK | KINDLE)

One of Fisk’s favorite gripes was against what he called “the language of power.” Sometimes he acted less like a journalist than a curmudgeonly old English teacher, scolding his pupils for abusing threadbare phrases like “peace process” and “road map.” These habits are bad enough in regular writing, but in wartime they serve to sanitize atrocities and provide cover for those who commit them. We no longer have to read about “collateral damage” or “surgical” attacks, but how many times have you read bloodless descriptions of “targeted killings” or “precision defensive strikes”?  And why are Arab murderers referred to as “terrorists” while white ones are “loners” or “mentally ill?”

Sometime during the Bush administration, the State Department began borrowing milquetoast terminology from the Israeli government, and most media outlets followed suit. The high-tech barriers around Palestinian territory became “fences” in the American press. The colonies of armed, aggressive Israeli settlers became “neighborhoods” and the bulldozed Palestinian homes on which they were built became “disputed land.”

We are now being told (and I assure you I am not making this up) that if the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons doesn’t find evidence that the Syrian government conducted a chemical weapons attack in Douma last week, it’s because Russia hid the evidence.

“It is our understanding the Russians may have visited the attack site,” reportsU.S. Ambassador Kenneth Ward. “It is our concern that they may have tampered with it with the intent of thwarting the efforts of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission to conduct an effective investigation.”

I guess the idea is that this international top-level investigative team on which tremendous credibility has been placed by the western world can be thwarted by Russians showing up with a Hoover and spraying some Febreze in the air like a teenage stoner when mom comes home? I’m not sure, but given the immense dearth of evidence we’ve been seeing in support of the establishment Douma narrative and the mounting pile of evidencecontradicting it, it sure does sound fishy.

Now that the jihadist-occupied suburb of Douma has been retaken by the Syrian government, western journalists have been allowed in to poke around and start asking questions, and so far it isn’t looking great for the propaganda machine.