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ABC
Radio National Robert
Fisk on anti Semitism and his belief in gas chambers, six million
exterminated! Summary:
A return to the topic of anti-Semitism and the question, 'when
does legitimate criticism of
Transcript
Phillip
Adams: "... first tonight, we're returning to the topic of
antisemitism as promised a couple of weeks ago after my conversation with
Rachel Cohn and Ephraim Nemnik. Now in that discussion, having copped a
bit of flack myself, I posed the question, 'When does legitimate criticism
of Well,
tonight I'm going to ask someone who is both an outspoken critic of
"The
all-purpose slander of 'antisemitism' is now used with ever increasing
promiscuity against anyone, people who condemn the wickedness of the
Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Then
there is this from a recent Fisk column: "I was walking towards the
Robert
Fisk, as the Gladys well know is the Robert
Fisk: 'Thanks very much, Hi Phillip. PA:
Twenty years in RF:
No, 27 years in Beirut actually, and I can remember in 1977 when I'd
already been there a year going into Ontimes bookshop in Hamra
Street, a respectable bookshop which stocked , you know, French
literature, American history, and so on, and finding a white-covered
edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is of
course a Tsarist forgery of grotesque proportions, which talks of Jews
trying to take over the world, of child cannibalism, and so on, a
revolting text which is known throughout the world by every decent scholar
to be a total forgery and antisemitic tract, and there it was published in
Damascus, actually printed in Damascus, on sale in Beirut, and in fact
published by a printing house which was then run by the still extant and
present Minister of Defence in Syria, and this continued on sale for four
or five years , and then it disappeared. Following that I noticed a new
Arabic edition of Mein Kampf, Hitler's Mein Kampf, turned up
in some bookstalls in PA:
I've got to interrupt there Robert, when I was in Moscow during
Glasnost and Perestroika, when Gorbie was doing his humpty-dumpty
impersonation on the walls of the Kremlin, it was all over the city, and
it was an Australian edition. RF:
Again, yes. I don't know what was happening in PA:
Now, I don't want to dwell on this noxious document. It is on sale in
ultra-right bookshops and websites in this country. There are still
antisemitic organisations, quite a few, quite a few in our country, but I
am interested to know the extent to which its popularity on the Arab
streets is symptomatic of a bigger problem of a widespread
willingness to accept such a, a view of the Jew. RF:
Well, I think first of all you've got to, I'm not putting this toward as a
defence of Arabs but as an explanation of their, their views. They have
seen an overwhelming bias in the media and press in the west towards
Israel and against Arabs, not entirely without the Arabs fault by the way,
but the've seen this and they have tried to understand why this should be,
why the Arabs are always demeaned, why the Israelis are always held up as
the good guys in the Middle East story. They have seen themselves in
cartoons in "Well if you ask me, Hitler didn't finish the job", and my mouth dropped open and I said, "What did you say? Did you realize how evil that is? How can you say such a thing? Do you know what happened?" "Well", he said, "do you know it was six million Jews?" I
said, "Yes it was, because I have been to And
he listened to me and he clearly was unhappy, and I said it is simply
evil, wrong, immoral to say that, it is a total denial of the truth of
history, and it is a total denial of yourself as a human being,
you're a bloody doctor, I said . But there it was and I'd have to say in
fairness or in balance rather than fairness that I've heard some pretty
terrible things said about the Arabs by Israelis. PA:
Well you do in fact quote some extraordinary examples in one of your
recent columns of the more venomous expressions of hatred in the Israeli
press. However, look I had Tarik Ali on a little while ago and he's having
an experience which I guess you have too, where young Muslims come up to
him, wanting him to confirm the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind
the September 11? RF:
Well, I don't have them ask me to confirm it. I have them telling me don't
I realize it's true, and of course the same, there's a familiar lie which
we're all familiar with now which has been widely published that Jewish
Americans who're working, or Israeli citizens who were working in the
World Trade Centre were told not to go to work that day. I should add that
in a taxi I took the other day to La Guardia, I had a South Korean Taxi
man in New York who told me that in fact Arab taxi drivers had been told
to stay away from the World Trade Centre on September 11, though I managed
mercifully to reach La Guardia airport in New York before he told me
why the North Koreans were, gave me the proof, why the North Koreans were
also involved. Yea, look, there is a whole series of what I call 'slidy-slidy
explanations' from Muslims, not just the antisemitic one of well, you know
this was part of a Jewish plot. This is bound up, by the way, with a story
that unfortunately was correct, which is that some Israeli citizens were
arrested after September 11, two or three of them it seems were taking
pictures of the World Trade Centre and appeared to be expressing their
appreciation of what had happened though that might be a
misinterpretation. Certainly the FBI arrested some Israeli citizens and
some were later deported, but I think that this is a perversion of the
reality. We also find, for example, in one magazine in PA:
Well it goes wider than that, doesn't it. I was wondering what the
response in the Arabic press was to the outgoing Malaysian Prime Minister
and his utterances at the 10th Islamic Conference which were - RF:
I noticed that they said he was trying to tell "a truth". This
is the one where he said Jews rule the world, it was Mahatir Mohammed
we're talking about? - PA:
Of course - RF:
- a man who has always tried to stir up opinion by making such a
deliberately inflammatory comments and lying comments I might add. I think
he was playing to his audience, and I think he did so fairly successfully.
The problem, you see, is that once the whether we call it a germ or a
cancer of believing that a whole race of people are deep down evil
or wrong, you need a very strong medicine to erase that cancer from the
society or the groups of people that believe it. I'll give you an example
of the sort of thing that happens. I made a series called 'Beirut to
Bosnia' about why Muslims were coming to hate the west for television, for
Channel 4 in Britain and Discovery in the States, about ten years ago, and
in this sequence I took a Palestinian family in Beirut, found out where
their home was, from which of course they were ejected by the Israelis in
1948, then I went and knocked on the front door of their home and found an
elderly Israeli Jew living there, and he told me how he had been ejected
from his home in southern Poland by the Nazis in 1939, and then we took
our camera crew to his home and found it in a southern Polish village and
knocked on the front door where the woman said, "Are they coming
back?" You see, we took the history back into the Nazi period
and it gave me an opportunity over twenty minutes to tell the story of the
Jewish Holocaust in the setting of the PA:
I'm talking to Robert Fisk on LateNightLive on Radio National,
Radio RF:
I have. I can remember very well attending the Taif(?) conference more
than a decade ago, and a Saudi professor approaching me to say he'd just
written a new book called Jews under the microscope, and I said
WHAT?, and sure enough it was a racist tract. there is no doubt that
it's there. How you get rid of it, I don't know. As long as the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute/conflict/atrocities occur I don't think it's
going to be possible to erase this racist slur which continues in the Arab
press, particularly the Egyptian press where cartoonist routinely depict
Israelis as hook-nosed Jews, just as they were depicted by the Hitler's
press. PA:
Yes, and where incidentally The Protocols of the Elders of Zion get
incorporated into a documentary on RF:
Not just PA:
There's something of a cottage industry built around attacking your
coverage of the Middle East, isn't there? RF:
Well, it's not much of an industry, it doesn't work very well, but I have
a very strict rule. When people write me letters saying I'm an, or write
letters to the editor saying I'm antisemitic, I threaten them with legal
action. In Britain that is, to call a person a racist when they are not is
a libel, it is a slander, it is actionable, and I've very often found that
when the people are brave enough to put their address on, and they're
often not, they write back very politely and say that perhaps they became
a little bit overawed in their anger at something I'd written and they
didn't really mean it, and so on, and I normally find that if a person
puts an address on an accusation of racism its possible that, I write back
to all letter writers, it's possible to explain to them why it actually
helps racism and antisemitism to falsely accuse innocent people of that. I
had a big debate actually at a conference, Le mud(?) Conference as it was
called, on December 20th last year in Nottingham, which was a very large
group of the Jewish community of Great Britain about five to six hundred,
and we had a debate, lots of time to attack Bob, of course, which they
did, not all but some others came up and said well done, keep it up, of my
coverage of the Middle East, again one needs to point out we're not
talking about solely Israeli supporters when we talk about the Jewish
community in Britain, America, or anywhere else, but it was very
interesting to see the way in which some of those present could see this
danger and realize that if you were going to call a real racist an
antisemite, and they are, and they're out there, and they're dangerous,
and they're my enemies too, then we must be very careful that that word is
not loosely employed by every lobbyist for Israel against anyone who dares
to say that Arial Sharon, for example, should be on a charge of war crimes
for the Sabre Shatilla Massacre of 1982 for which I happen to think he
should because the Kahn Commission of Israel described him personally
responsible. So I think that, but in the anger generated in the Middle
East, anger generated by suicide bombers, for example, in Israel, by the
killing of innocent Palestinians and the occupation of Arab land and the
building of settlements on Arab lands by the Israelis, the, it's, it's
almost like a whirlwind, you cannot switch it off, you cannot calm the
storm down, the degree of racist libel that extends both ways in the
Middle East is such that the likes of you and me could only describe it
and point out the evils of it. That's all we can do. We can't do much
more. PA:
Rob, Robert, one of the key criticisms from Israel and the friends of
Israel in Australia is that western liberal press, western liberal
intellectuals, are obsessed with what Israel is doing, obsessed perhaps
with Sharon, and they say there is very little coverage of what Yasser
Arafat is or isn't doing, a lack of appraisal of the Palestinian
Authority, the corruption of Arafat, money squirreled away, the lack of
development, what do you think of this argument? RF:
Look, this is trotted out every time criticism of PA:
Hmm. RF:
Only a year later, when Arafat was beginning to cause some doubts among
the Israelis, a bit late in the day, the Israelis started talking to a
religious group called Hamas and had some talks with them between the
Israeli army and Hamas leadership. Indeed, while Arafat had been their
enemy the Israelis were encouraging Hamas to build mosques in PA:
When I'm reeling from nasty letters and emails I take comfort in the fact
like you that I get letters from individual Jews and Jewish organisations
in support, who want to have this quality of discussion. Is there a
parallel within the Muslim world? Are there Muslims who are just as
worried about this vortex of slander against the Jews? RF:
That's a very good question. there are some, yes. Just as you find Turks
who will tell you that the Turkish forces did commit holocaust and
genocide against the Armenians in 1915, another issue we don't have time
to raise, but it's a good point. There are individual Muslims who will say
that but collectively you don't find as you do among Jewish Americans for
example, the sort of powerful individual lobby group that says, stop,
enough, this is wrong. You do find, I mean people like Hanan Ashrawi,
here's a name that's going to come very close to home for you at the
moment, they have stepped up and said who gave anyone the right to carry
out suicide bombings in our name? They have maintained links with
Israeli liberals whatever the provocation to break them off. But they're
individuals, you see, and that is one of the big problems there. I've
actually sort of talked about this in vaguer terms because it was never a
main subject with some of the Jewish American groups. I go through PA:
Robert, we got to wrap it. I thank you very much for your time. Robert
Fisk, good to have you back. Robert is, of course, the |
