Poisonous Comment

I found this opinion piece by Robert Fisk in The Independent quite poisonous, I have to say, lazy journalism of the worst kind, underpinned by a personal political outlook, as opposed to a sensible argument supported by facts and evidence.

Because limited military action was proposed against Syria recently, and vigorously opposed by Robert Fisk if I recall correctly, and while these air strikes did not go ahead their purpose was to prevent President Assad from using chemical weapons against his own civilian population.

Likewise in Libya where the western countries intervened again to prevent the mass killing of civilians, and others, in Benghazi who were surrounded and outgunned by the murderous army of President Muammar Gaddafi - or previously in Iraq where the west imposed a no 'fly zone' to protect the Shia Muslims in the south and the Kurds in the north from Saddam Hussein after the war that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

So yet again the charge of discrimination against Muslims bears little scrutiny and while hypocrisy abounds in the Middle East the western countries are far from being the only ones with a case to answer.

Another example, which a journalist of Robert Fisk's experience must remember is the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in which Serbia attacked its neighbours and the majority Muslim populations in Bosnia and Kosovo, in particular.  

And the ethnic cleansing instigated by the Serbs was finally stopped by NATO and the western countries, initially by the use of air strikes and latterly by the threat of putting 'boots on the ground' so I've no doubt that Robert Fisk remembers these events very well since both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were key players. 

In which case why does he write such nonsense?      

Bombs away! US to the rescue – but only of certain minorities, not Muslims

By ROBERT FISK - The Independent

Obama’s air strikes on Isis in northern Iraq are hypocritical, and a sense of déjà vu is understandable

He wouldn’t bomb Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s bloody caliphate when it was butchering the majority Shia Muslims of Iraq. But Barak Obama is riding to the rescue of the Christian refugees – and the Yazidis – because of “a potential act of genocide”. Bombs away. And thank heavens that the refugees in question are not Palestinian.

This hypocrisy almost takes the breath away, not least because the US President is still too frightened – in case he upsets the Turks – to use the “G” word about the 1915 Turkish genocide of a million and a half Armenian Christians, a mass slaughter on a scale which even Abu Bakr’s thugs have not yet attempted. We’ll have to wait another year to see how Obama wriggles out of the 100th anniversary commemorations of that particular Muslim massacre of Christians.

But for now, “America is coming to help” in Iraq with air strikes on “convoys” of Isis fighters. But isn’t that what the Americans staged against the Taliban in Afghanistan, often mistaking innocent wedding parties for Islamist “convoys”? Dropping food parcels to minority refugees in fear of their lives on the bare mountainsides of northern Iraq – also under way – is exactly the same operation US forces performed for the Kurds almost a quarter of a century ago; and in the end, they had to put American and British soldiers on the ground to create a “safe haven” for the Kurds.

Nor has Obama said anything about his friendly ally Saudi Arabia, whose Salafists are the inspiration and fund-raisers for the Sunni militias of Iraq and Syria, just as they were for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The wall between the Saudis and the monsters they create – and which America now bombs – must be kept as high as it must be invisible. That is the measure of American dissimulation in this latest act of duplicity. Obama is bombing the friends of his Saudi allies – and the enemies of the Assad regime in Syria, by the way – but won’t say so. And just for good measure, he believes that America must act in defence of its consulate in Erbil and embassy in Baghdad.

That’s the same excuse the US used when it fired its naval guns into the Chouf mountains of Lebanon 30 years ago: that Lebanon’s pro-Syrian warlords were endangering the US embassy in Beirut. That the Islamists are as unlikely to seize Irbil as they are to capture Baghdad is neither here nor there. Obama says he has a “mandate” to bomb from the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, the elected but dictatorial Shia who now runs Iraq as a broken and sectarian state. How we Westerners love “mandates”, ever since the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which drew the borders of the Middle East for our “mandates” – the very frontiers which Abu Bakr’s caliphate has now sworn to destroy. There is not much doubt about the awfulness of the equally sectarian Isis which Abu Bakr is creating.

His threat to the Christians of Iraq – convert, pay tax or die – has now been turned against the Yazidis, the harmless and tiny sect whose Persian-Assyrian roots, Christian-Islamo rituals and forgiving God have doomed them as assuredly as the Christians. Ethnic Kurds, the poor old Yazidis believe that God, whose seven angels supposedly govern the Earth, pardoned Satan: so inevitably, this ancient people came to be regarded as devil-worshippers. Hence their 130,000 refugees – at least 40,000 of them living on mountain rocks in at least nine locations around Mount Sinjar – tell stories of rape, murder and child-killing at the hands of Abu Bakr’s men. Alas, they may all be true.

The Yazidis are probably descended from supporters of the second Umayyad Caliph, Yazid the First; his suppression of Hussein, the son of Ali – whose followers are now the Shia of the Middle East – might theoretically have commended the Yazidis to Abu Bakr’s Sunni Muslim army. But their mixed rituals and their denial of evil were never going to find favour with a group which – like Saudi Arabia and the Taliban – believes in “the suppression of vice and the propagation of virtue”. In the fault lines that lie across ancient Kurdistan, Armenia and what was Mesopotamia, history has dealt the Yazidis a bad hand.

But for them and the Nestorians and other Christian groups, Obama has gone to war. The French, their old Crusader spirits reawakened, called the Security Council to reflect upon this Christian pogrom. But the question remains: would America have done the same if the wretched minority refugees of northern Iraq had been Palestinians? Or will Obama’s latest bombing campaign merely provide a welcome distraction from the killing fields of Gaza?