If Robert Fisk were Rameez Farooq…

Every Muslim must love Robert Fisk. There are no ifs and buts, right? He is the intellectual Karbela before which they pay obeisance. He lives amongst Muslims, his friends are Muslims with a few Jews thrown in to balance the equation, he writes about the Middle East. No, wait, he is an expert on Middle East affairs, which is like saying he is an expert on what he assumes is incest, and he thinks Muslims are not all that bad.

Jolly good, ole chap. He is using Muslims and those dolts are throwing stones at a devil and making asses of themselves while he says it is okay.

My problem is with this: His saying it is okey-dokey.

Robert Fisk is standing on the podium at Stanford University. By the time we had reached the hall, he was telling us about how during the time when the world discovered that Arabs had graduated from riding camels to flying planes (these were not his words, though), he was on an aircraft and his colleague and he started counting suspicious-looking characters. With amazing telepathy, both came up with the same list of Muslims. This, he said, was separating the innocents from the innocents.

Surprisingly, Muslims love this. They do not seem to comprehend there is a world between sadism and masochism. The man is patronising. I, in my spiffy western clothes, suddenly found myself cringing. In my mental Everyland, he had drawn a thick border with droplets from his bleeding heart. By telling us how ashamed he was for stereotyping, he was in fact drawing attention to the chasm. In that one moment, a valley separated us. His fluttering conscience made him slightly superior, so instead of turning his head left-right at a 90-degree angle to view the usual suspects, he was settling for 45 degrees. You know, just a slight movement to make sure that the dubious were the innocents. Or the innocents were more innocent.

And he is applauded for this? Every word that spews forth with his pork-and ale breath is considered a surah to be repeated as the final word from a contemporary holy book. Muslims cannot update the One Book, so they are looking for constant validation from other sources.

Western mouthpiece

They talk about Bushisms, which are at best humorous and at worst disgusting. Take a look at some Fiskisms and you will know just where the true concerns lie.

He has his favourite stances and they clearly reveal that Robert Fisk is speaking not from a position of authority as we understand it, but from an authoritative position.

- If he compares the 1917 invasion of Mesopotamia (quoting British Lt. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude who said, “We have come here not as conquerors but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny”) with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then Fisk’s sympathies are with the conquerors. It is the loss of “hundreds of men every year in the guerilla war” then and now that worry him. While he predicts, “I think a war of liberation will begin quite soon”, he exposes himself when he states, “And our dreams that we can liberate these people will not be fulfilled in this scenario.”

- If he is disgusted by Saddam’s acts of ruthlessness (the videos of which he had access to), then it is not because of merely what the suffering Iraqis went through. There is almost a plaintive note when he rues, “If only we could have got rid of this man 15 years ago -- 20 years ago -- how warm would be our welcome in Iraq today. But we didn’t. And that is why his capture will not save U.S. soldiers. He lives on. Just as Hitler lives on today in the memories and fears of millions. It is in the nature of such terrible regimes to replicate themselves in the mind.”

Have you ever heard him talk about the nightmare of the Blair and Bush regimes? He calls them mistakes, historical mistakes.

- Saddam of the early years had gone up in the Fiskian sovereignty when he encountered him again: “He had even learned how to smoke a Havana -- between two fingers rather than four fingers and thumb.” How very posh.

- His three interviews with Osama bin Laden have given him cult status. He hammers home the point about the Islamic world’s hero worship of this man; very sharply, though, he uses quotes of others to describe him as “majestic”. His comeback is a typically condescending one: “But who can blame Muslims for being obsessed with Mr. bin Laden when the West has been equally obsessed with him for years?”

Ah, so this is it. Why can the Muslims not be obsessed with something without having to piggyback on Western obsessions? On what grounds does Fisk use terms like “Muslims” and “the West” as two very disparate but individually congealed wholes in themselves?

Why do we accept without any reservations the fact that just before the 2004 US elections Osama had commended his reporting, adding that he considered Fisk to be “neutral”?

Did Mr. Fisk shy away from the accolade or feel awkward about it? Why then does he get an ovation when he takes potshots at a Thomas Friedman for being an Establishment man and making 60,000 bucks per lecture?

Both these gentlemen are merely speaking from two sides of the same mouth.

Valhalla?

A man who has spent 30 years in Beirut, weathered many dust-storms and bullets and wars, becomes the new messiah. He does not tell his besotted subjects, the Muslims, what they want to hear, mind you. He is telling them what the West wants to hear – that the war against terror is real. Fisk isn’t the Islamic world’s poster child. He is the West’s toy boy. He teases them to please them. It is a tantalising game of continual foreplay where the climax will be entirely enacted by his partners in crime.

While one cannot reduce his contribution to reportage, one must perforce question what he assumes to be his role. At the lecture he mentioned how he used to believe that journalism was about being there while history was happening. An Israeli journalist who he admired said that it was about questioning authority. Primarily, they were talking about bringing about change. Where is the change?

The romance of Fisk’s old-world discomfort with the internet and emails and his sitting over telex machines is immensely charming. He can now open the old rattlers apart and get them to start, but when his computer says, ‘Disk failure’ he has to just give up. A story is lost. History is killed. How many journalistic accounts are considered history, anyway?

Filing eyewitness accounts and writing about his being beaten up by Afghan refugees in Pakistan add to his repertoire and his unfailing enthusiasm. However, to assume that he is in complete sync with the happenings around would not be entirely true. Fisk learned Arabic. Good. A new tool can help you recognise trees, but not the soil beneath. Do we get any deeper insight into Saddam’s or bin Laden’s mind by reading what Fisk writes?

He has been critical of what he calls “hotel journalism”, but who are Fisk’s sources? If you are questioning the stand of the West, then you have got to have an opinion that stems from a studied position you hold. No taxi driver, fruit-seller, corpse or carcass is likely to make you alter that.

If a journalist has to play a pro-active role, then why is Beirut still burning? When Fisk gets all sardonic about how the West has transformed “occupied territories” into “neighbourhoods” and says that neighbours don’t throw stones at each other, he is not doing much for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict except for reducing it to the level of semantics and scepticism.

He remains an observer. He has merely challenged the writing on the wall, not the wall itself. In that he is in fact upholding its unwavering status as circumscriber of space.

His words have the tinge of the White Man’s burden. The reality is that it is a medal of honour. He is now an absolved creature. He is saying what the Islamic world has been saying for years: That not all of them are terrorists. That they do not want to be liberated by the West. That they are not a conglomerate of pan-Islamism. That they can handle their own conflicts.

But how many Muslim reporters will be considered “neutral” even by Ladenesque standards? How many Muslims who voice these sentiments are looked at with respect? The few who do have to show how much Left they can swing and how comfortable they are in smoky pubs and Western garbs. The rest will be dubbed jihadis if they speak about the “19 men who boarded the planes”. We aren’t kidding anyone if we believe otherwise.

Mr. Fisk, try your act after darkening your skin and calling yourself Rameez Farooq and be at the receiving end of suspicious 45-angle left-right looks directed at you. Then we shall see if you will be celebrated if you “Pity the Nation”. Any nation. Then we shall see who the real innocent is.