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Thread: I’m as guilty as anyone of admiring Pity the Nation when it was the first book I’d read on #Lebanon and I knew nothing else about the place, and little else about its author Robert #Fisk, who has died at 74 (1)
The first thing to say is Lebanese readers themselves were never so easily impressed by the book, as @emile_hokayem reminds us, and as @aelghossain, @faysalitani, and many others will also remind you if you prompt them (2) https://twitter.com/emile_hokayem/status/1323014883777093633
Fisk died with his once-envied reputation largely in ruins, having spent the better part of the last decade peddling inexpiable untruths for this century’s leading mass murderer, Bashar al-Assad. See, e.g., @im_PULSE’s extensive documentation of this (3) https://pulsemedia.org/2016/12/03/robert-fisks-crimes-against-journalism/
Yet the idea Fisk was a model journalist before mysteriously and abruptly losing his way post-2011 is unserious. Looking back, the political fatuity, moral frivolity, and sheer dishonesty were strains running through his writing from the start (4)
That he committed outright fabrications, for example, is well-documented; see below for just one of many examples. It should go without saying this calls into question the veracity of everything else he asked readers to believe on his authority (5) https://twitter.com/DavidKenner/status/1323015329925181444
Then there were, of course, the famous embarrassments, such as his fawning Bin Laden profile from 1993, on which he was nonetheless to dine out for so long afterwards (6) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anti-soviet-warrior-puts-his-army-on-the-road-to-peace-the-saudi-businessman-who-recruited-mujahedin-1465715.html
As @HBaumannLiv says, Fisk did undoubtedly inspire a generation of younger writers to make their own forays into the Middle East; reporters and researchers who, fortunately, have tended to care more about truth and ethics than Fisk himself (7) https://twitter.com/HBaumannLiv/status/1323019758271430656
Speaking of falsehoods, and to end on a light note, the @guardian’s obituary tells readers Fisk was a ‘fluent Arabic speaker’, which will have sent coffee flying over a thousand laptop screens from Fes to Fujairah this morning (8) https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/01/robert-fisk-veteran-british-foreign-correspondent-dies-aged-74
