Tuesday, October 04, 2005
OSAMA LIES
He’s been given a few answers over the years—some from Osama bin Laden himself—but when it comes to Islamist terrorism, Robert Fisk (here interviewed by the ABC’s Tony Jones) still thinks we need to ask why:
TONY JONES: Jihadist extremism has spawned countless suicide terrorists from New York to London, from Baghdad to Bali. How do you stop them without generating a general conflict between Islam and the West?
ROBERT FISK: I mean, after the crimes against humanity of September 11th, 2001, we were discouraged from saying, “Why? Why did this happen?” We knew who did it—in this case, 19 Arabs flying aeroplanes. How did they do it? Planes, box-cutters, tall buildings. But the moment you asked why—in other words, the motive for the crime, which is something any ordinary policeman asks of any crime—you were told merely to ask the question why it was to be pro-terrorist to support the enemies of democracy, etc. But I think we do have to ask the question why, and we have to say, “What has happened in the Middle East to produce an environment from which these people can come?” We are not condoning what they do, the wickedness of bombing innocent people, but we do need to ask, “What’s wrong in the Middle East?” and that means dealing with injustices that exist there—injustices which the Australian Government, the British Government, the American Government could deal with or try to deal with if they wish. But I think we’re spending far too much time on, you know, mainframe computers, listening to telephones, legislation, than we should be in dealing with actual human problems that exist on the ground. You’ve just brought up the British. Let’s look at the British in Iraq in 1917. We invaded. We announced in a document, which I have hanging on my library wall, “We come here,” we said to the Iraqi people in 1917, “not as conquerors, but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny.” Sound familiar? We then had an insurrection in 1920, we bombarded Fallujah, similar to the Americans. We surrounded Najaf, we demanded the surrender of Shi’ite clerics, we said there would be civil war if the British Army left and, indeed, British intelligence in 1920 said that terrorists were crossing the border from Syria. Now, we can go on repeating history endlessly, just as we are now. This is fingerprint parallel history. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to say, “Hang on a second. There are problems here. How do we deal with them?” And unless we deal with them, we are not going to be safe. By “we”, I mean the West, us.
Er, OK. It’s all about injustices dating back to 1917. But watch Fisk twitch when Jones—as he has done before, to his eternal credit—raises the matter of a more recent conflict:
TONY JONES: In one of his rambling justifications for these kind of terrorist acts, Osama bin Laden pointed the finger and said Australians were targeted in Bali because they intervened in East Timor.
ROBERT FISK: Yes. I think the East Timor thing is a lie by Osama bin Laden—I don’t think that’s what it is about.
Read the whole interview, in which Fisk is cranked up to maximum babble mode.
UPDATE. James Paterson: “The almighty Fisk thinks Osama is misrepresenting the aims of his own terrorist organisation in its bombing attacks? Where is the incentive?”