Posted on 02/15/2008 7:10:03 AM PST by .cnI redruM
Bin Laden says: “And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998. You can observe it practically, if you wish, in Kenya and Tanzania and in Aden. And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan [of BBC radio], as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk. The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral.”- Osama Bin Ladin Monday November 1, 2004, 16:01 Mecca Time, 13:01 GMT
Robert Fisk apparently doesn’t heart US President George W. Bush any more than his compatriot Osama Bin Ladin. Given that our president hasn’t been above 50% in an approval poll since some time prior to the 2006 midterm elections, this is not unusual. Most people who disagree with George W. Bush can substantively disagree with the man. They don’t have to reduce themselves to the level of comparing him to Imad Mughniyeh.
Fisk wrote in The Independent about what a totally scary guy Imad Mughniyeh truly was. He describes the misdeeds, the lurking malevolence, and the ideological fanaticism. His ne plus ultra read as follows.
Mougnieh, Lebanese by birth, was a man of frightening self-confidence, of absolute self-belief, something he shared with Osama bin Laden and – let us speak frankly about this – with President George W Bush. Islamic Jihad, it was said, tortured its enemies. So does al-Qa'ida. And so, as we all now know, does Mr Bush's army.
He wrote this in an article where he described a meeting he conducted with Mughniyeh. He saw the terror leader as a negotiator and a supplicant, as he attempted to free Terry Anderson from Hezbollah.
The man who Fisk compared to our president, had the following resume at the time of his condign and long-overdue dirt-napping.
Among the crimes Mughniyeh masterminded:
The 1983 suicide bombings in Beirut that killed over 300 US marines and French troops.
The 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed.
A wave of Western hostage-taking in Lebanon in the 1980s.
The 1992 bombing of Israel’s embassy in Argentina in which 29 people were murdered.
The 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish center in which 95 people died, including Holocaust survivors. (In reporting Mughniyeh’s death this morning, the BBC refused to call the Buenos Aires bombing of elderly Jews “terrorism” and merely referring to it as “an act of violence.”)
Robert Fisk had displayed his journalistic moral equivalence by comparing George W. Bush to the man who bombed the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Perhaps Fisk needs to live in a country where men like Imad Mughniyeh are considered the standard prudent man. He needs to stop just interviewing men like Mughniyeh, and he and his family need to live under the dominion of one.
Perhaps this is what Rowen Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, really meant when he suggested that the British people should develop a much closer acquaintance with The Sharia. British common law clearly hadn’t provided Mr. Fisk with enough discipline to finely hone his sense of basic decency. Perhaps Fisk needs to truly experience Mughniyeh’s world to understand the gravaman of a comparison between the arch-villain terrorist and any modern US President.
It won’t happen. British Royal Marines, much like their American counterparts who were blown up in Lebanon, will defend Fisk right to Freedom of Obtuse and Deracinated Speech. One unpleasant side effect of the Magna Carta is that Robert Fisk indeed enjoys the right to behave like a [redacted]-hole. One pleasant aspect of the US Bill of Rights is that I get call him on it. There are days when my patriotic duty requires me to Fisk a Fisk.
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