ShilohCat, you do have to give Fisk credit for a certain intellectual consistency. He is so sure that everything is the fault of the US and the West (and oh yes, the Zionist Conspiracy) that when a bunch of Afghans beat him and robbed him in December 2001, he naturally blamed himself as a westerner and absolved the Afghans of all blame:
My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war
Report by Robert Fisk in Kila Abdullah after Afghan border ordeal
news.independent.co.uk
Mark Steyn then christened this an example of an entirely new category of crime, "Hate-Me Crimes," and wrote the following scathing column about it, which I cannot resist reproducing in full:
Hate-Me Crimes
A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due.
BY MARK STEYN
Wall Street Journal
Saturday, December 15, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
Having successfully introduced the novel legal concept of
the "hate crime," progressive opinion has now taken it to
dizzying new heights: the hate-me crime. In a traditional
hate crime, you beat someone up not just for his fake Rolex
but because you hate him on the basis of his race, creed or
color. With the new hate-me crime, you beat someone up
because you hate him on the basis of his race, creed or
color--and hey, that's cool, he's OK with it, so feel free
to take another swing.
The other day, Robert Fisk, of the British newspaper The
Independent, was set upon by a gang of Afghans. Mr. Fisk has
had decades of experience in the Muslim world and is a
widely acknowledged expert on the subject. That's to say,
since Sept. 11, he's got pretty much everything wrong.
(Sample Fisk headlines: "Bush Is Walking Into a Trap," "It
Could Become More Costly Than Vietnam," "How Can The U.S.
Bomb This Tragic People?")
You can understand why Mr. Fisk has been in low spirits of
late: The much-feared "Arab street" is as seething and
turbulent as a leafy cul-de-sac in Westchester County; and
poor old Afghanistan's reputation as the humbler of empires
has gone south since Mullah Omar contracted out homeland
defense to a bunch of Saudi, Paki, Brit and Californian
losers.
But last weekend the people finally roused themselves--and
beat up Fisky! His car broke down just a stone's throw (as
it turned out) from the Pakistani border and a crowd
gathered. To the evident surprise of the man known to his
readers as "the champion of the oppressed," the oppressed
decided to take on the champ. They lunged for his wallet and
began lobbing rocks. Yet even as the rubble bounced off his
skull, Mr. Fisk was shrewd enough to look for the "root
causes":
"Young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my
face and head. I couldn't see for the blood pouring down my
forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood.
I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if
I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the
Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to
Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."
It's not their fault, he insisted, their "brutality is
entirely the product of others"<--i.e>., George Bush, Tony
Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, you. And in a flash, the gloom of
recent weeks lifted and Mr. Fisk turned in the heady,
exhilarating columnar equivalent of a Sally Field acceptance
speech: you hate me, you really hate me!
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with
laughter. Even as a mob is trying to kill him, he absolves
them of all responsibility. It's "entirely" America's fault.
Noam Chomsky, eat your heart out. Any old Ivy League
professor can give droning speeches about America's "silent
genocide"; any European Union minister can swan off to U.N.
gabfests in Durban to apologize to Robert Mugabe for Western
civilization. But, at a stroke, Mr. Fisk has dramatically
raised the bar for standards of Western self-loathing.
By way of contrast, consider another Afghan story his paper
carried: a call by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch
and others for "a full inquiry" into whether or not U.S.
forces in Afghanistan are guilty of torture. Torture? My
God, what are our boys up to? Well, it seems "very
disturbing" "threats" were made to a member of the Taliban
and captured on videotape. The offending party was the CIA
team of Mike Spann and his comrade, known only as "Dave."
They were at the Qala-i-Jangai prison, interrogating the
celebrated Marin County Taliban, born John Yoko Ashram Fonda
Country Joe And The Fish Walker Lindh but now going under
the name Mustapha Jihad.
Mike and Dave seem to have been doing a good cop/bad cop
routine on the "poor fellow," with Mike quietly pointing out
that "there were several hundred other Muslims killed" at
the World Trade Center and Dave stomping around in the
background using the f-word a lot and muttering that Little
Johnny must "decide if he wants to live or die."
Had the Marinated Muslim spent less time in the madrassa
mastering the ways of his adopted people (how to brandish
your AK-47 without getting it snagged in your floor-length
beard) and more time watching American pop culture, he would
have recognized the Mike/Dave scene from "There's Something
About Mary." But Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch thinks
Dave's "threat" would, under international law, be
considered torture. Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but words are illegal and constitute cruel and unusual
punishment.
We can't bring Mike Spann before a war crimes tribunal
because unfortunately Tali-Boy's fellow prisoners rose up
and beat, kicked and bit the CIA man to death before
booby-trapping his body with grenades. But British SAS
commandos managed to rescue Dave and he could certainly be
prosecuted by an international court. If the U.S. refused to
extradite, Dave could be tried in absentia. Perhaps he could
even be bitten to death in absentia.
These two stories usefully clarify the peculiar pathology of
the antiwar left. On the one hand, we need international
investigations if Americans are insufficiently decorous in
their questioning. On the other, it's perfectly justifiable
for disaffected Muslims to target Western civilians purely
on the basis of their ethnic identity. On the one hand, we
can't do anything right. On the other, they can't do
anything wrong. The Fisk Doctrine, taken to its logical
conclusion, absolves of responsibility not just the
perpetrators of Sept. 11 but also Taliban supporters who
attacked several of Mr. Fisk's fellow journalists in
Afghanistan, all of whom, alas, died before being able to
file a final column explaining why their murderers are
blameless.
In recent weeks, some of us have found it hard to suppress
the occasional titter at President Bush's attempts at
Islamic outreach. But it testifies, if nothing else, to Mr.
Bush's humanity: He believes the third-graders at the Sword
of the Infidel-Slayer Elementary School in Kandahar are at
heart no different from those in Crawford, Texas. He may be
naive about this: It could be that, even if he sat down to
read " 'Twas The Night Before Ramadan" to a bunch of
six-year-olds in Yasser's toxic classrooms in Ramallah, the
little tykes would think it sucked compared to Suicide
Bombing 101. But at least, whenever he talks about anyone,
Texans or Tajiks, Afghans or Australians, the old right-wing
Big Oil stooge accords them fundamental dignity as human
individuals.
By comparison, every argument the enlightened antiwar
progressives make has at its core the proposition that these
people are primitives: They are no more culpable for tearing
you apart than a pack of hyenas would be. As Mr. Fisk sees
it, the mob who mugged him and robbed him were "truly
innocent of any crime except being the victim of the world."
Not true. They had a choice, and to deny that they had a
choice is to dehumanize them far more than Pentagon
euphemisms about "collateral damage" do.
Before the scenes of shaven Afghans cheering their
liberation disheartened the peaceniks, you could go to most
any college town and see signs saying "Stop your racist
war!" As they no longer seem to need the placards, I was
wondering if we warmongers could borrow them. Because the
intellectual assault being waged by the extreme left is
explicitly racist. To old-school imperialists, these
excitable Pashtun types were the "lesser breeds without the
law" (Kipling). To self-loathing multiculturalists, they
still are.
Or, rather, they're still "without the law" but now they're
the "superior breeds"--their moral integrity confirmed by
their resistance to such concepts as individual
responsibility. Rousseau's "noble savage" was savage because
of his isolation from the West; the Chomsky-Fisk-Said "noble
savage" is savage precisely because of the West, which
you've got to admit is a dandy improvement, if only in terms
of heightening the delicious masochistic frisson.
If I were, say, Abdullah Abdullah, the new Afghan foreign
minister, I'd be getting a bit sick of the exquisite
condescension of Western liberals. From 1886 to 1973,
Afghanistan was one of the more peaceful corners of the
planet--at least when compared to, oh, Germany, Italy,
France, Poland, Russia, Japan and China. There's no reason
why it can't be again. The Bonn talks went well. The new
cabinet includes a woman. The interim government starts next
week. And the only Yankee war crime to get steamed up about
is the robust vocabulary of one agent: "Hey, hey, CIA/How
many naughty words did you use today?"
It must all be very disheartening for the massed ranks of
Western doom-mongers. But, c'mon, don't beat yourself up
over it. As Robert Fisk well knows, there's plenty of
Afghans who'll do it for you.
Mr. Steyn is a columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph and
Canada's National Post. |
