Robert Fisk, Middle East 'expert', writes for The IndependentA Jewish couple was driven out of a Lebanese village. Their son, an Israeli pilot, is said to have wreaked his revenge by bombing the village during the 1982 Lebanon war. And bingo! An anti-Israel lie is born.
Commenter Avi deconstructs the lie on Harry's Place:
"Robert Fisk wrote (in The Independent) about the lynching of an Egyptian in a Lebanese village. However you can’t have a story about the Middle East without a dig at the “root cause of all evil (in the world)” can you?
” The story in Ketermaya, a mixed Druze-Sunni village, is that way back in 1975, a Jewish couple who lived here – there was a tiny Jewish community in Lebanon at the time – were driven from their homes and that their son, an Israeli pilot, bombed the village in revenge during the Israeli invasion of 1982.
By extraordinary chance, I was sitting on the hillside above Ketermaya in 1982 and saw the lone plane attack, repeatedly bombing the village on the morning of 7th June.
There were no Palestinian fighters there – just civilians, of whom at least 50 were hiding in their homes – and they were all in their graves within 24 hours.”
"The story smells from a number aspects. Firstly, how did the omniscient Fisk know who the pilot was in the plane? He was sitting on the ground.
"Secondly, warplanes do not work like that. This was not the First or Second World War with private aircraft bombing backwards and forwards where they like.
"Thirdly, no one whose parents were living in Lebanon would have got a security clearance to get onto the IDF pilots course while their parents were still living there. There was not enough time from 1975 to 1982 for someone to emigrate to Israel, qualify for the pilots course and then be able to go off and have his own private war.
"If his defense is that it was a story current in the village, it had no bearing on the main story and should have been cut out. Unless the role of the Independent is to continue to spread more stories warning the British of the “evil that must be uprooted”.
It is a truism that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has has a chance to put its trousers on. When the propagator of that lie is the 'celebrated' journalist and Middle East 'expert' Robert Fisk, it's much harder to disprove.
Celebrated? That's one way to put it, I guess.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking
Ridiculed is another.
Heather
Robert Fisk is a well-known liar. He has zero credibility with normal people. That is not to say, he does not try hard to make trouble. He is a psychological disaster, in the mould of the new ambassador to Lebanon who praised the dead hezbollah Fadlallah.
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