Robert Fisk has written a characteristically selective article in this morning’s Independent. Concern about civilian deaths in wartime would normally be admirable, but Fisk isn’t really concerned. Rather, he simply uses and twists incidents to continue his frenzied hatred of Israel and his love of all its enemies.

He lists examples of Palestinian civilians being killed by Israel but has no words of concern for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians. Heck, he doesn’t find time to express concern about the thousands of Palestinian civilians that have been slaughtered by Jordan and other Arab states. He mentions victims of Syria in passing but then trails off before the dead of Darfur can get a look-in on his roll-call of tragedies. Pressure of space, perhaps?

Though he does find space to return to his beloved 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre which was carried out, he says,  by “Israel’s allies”. Two decades on, and Menachem Begin’s words continue to ring true about that massacre: “Goyim kill goyim, and Jews get the blame.” Fisk also throws in a few more distorted examples of Israeli “massacres” for good measure.

No wonder he is stuck at the moribund Independent. He has been thoroughly discredited as a journalist, with ‘Fisking’ becoming a byword for distortion and prejudice. Not that he is entirely short of fans: he has been praised by Osama Bin Laden and Holocaust denier David Irving. The latter’s praise is little surprise, Fisk is the man who spoke of “the Perles and the Wolfowitzes and the Cohens…very sinister people hovering around Bush”. He has strongly opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If Fisk had his way the Taliban and Saddam Hussein would still be in power.

For a man who has staked – and among sane people lost – his reputation as a journalist on promoting the Palestinian’s cause, he has a fondness for describing them in animalistic terms. He has described them as everything from lions, eagles, donkeys and cockroaches. It’s almost as if he sees them as his pets, who should look up at him adoringly as he pats them and tosses them scraps of food. Well, not all Arabs want to be his pets. When he was reporting in Afghanistan, he was attacked by some Taliban thugs. Far from waking him up about the evil of Islamism, this vicious assault seemed to only increase his self-loathing admiration of that movement. “They had every reason to be angry,” he said. “If I had been them, I would have attacked me.”

What a guy! Perhaps it was nerves from that attack that led him to – as he never tired of telling us in his articles – pack 25 loo rolls when he set off to report from Iraq. Too much information, Robert. Way too much. Feel free to not share that – or any of your other crap – with us in the future.

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