{"id":748,"date":"2020-12-01T19:37:04","date_gmt":"2020-12-01T19:37:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=130317"},"modified":"2020-12-01T19:37:04","modified_gmt":"2020-12-01T19:37:04","slug":"establishment-journalists-are-piling-on-to-smear-robert-fisk-now-he-cannot-answer-back-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/01\/establishment-journalists-are-piling-on-to-smear-robert-fisk-now-he-cannot-answer-back-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Establishment Journalists Are Piling on To Smear Robert Fisk Now He Cannot Answer Back"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly a fraud, a fabulist, a fantasist, a liar.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is most ironic is that the journalists doing this are some of the biggest frauds themselves, journalists who have made a career out of deceiving their readers. In fact, many of the crowd attacking Fisk when he can no longer defend himself are precisely the journalists who have the worst record of journalistic malpractice and on some of the biggest issues of our times.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Set aside the fact these corporate blue ticks are citing Oz Katerji – a conman on Syria \u2013 for their assessment of Robert Fisk. These very journalists helped carry out the biggest fraud in recent journalistic history, selling you the Iraq WMD lies. They have zero credibility https:\/\/t.co\/VZq8MgOQ22<\/a>\u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 29, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At least I have the courage to criticise them while they are alive. They know dead men can\u2019t sue. It is complete and utter cowardice to attack Fisk when they could have made their comments earlier, to his face. In fact, if they truly believed any of the things they are so keen to tell us now, they had an absolute duty to say them when Fisk was alive rather than allowing the public to be deceived by someone they regarded as a liar and fantasist. They didn\u2019t make public these serious allegations \u2013 they didn\u2019t air their concerns about the supposedly fabricated facts in Fisk\u2019s stories \u2013 when he was alive because they know he would have made mincemeat of them.<\/p>\n

Most preposterous of all is the fact that the actual trigger for this sudden, very belated outpouring of concern about Fisk is a hit-piece<\/a> <\/span>written by Oz Katerji. I\u2019m not sure whether I can find the generosity to call Katerji a journalist. Like Elliot Higgins of the US government-funded Bellingcat, he\u2019s more like an attack dog beloved by establishment blue-ticks: he is there to enforce accepted western imperial narratives, disguising his lock-step support for the establishment line as edgy, power-to-the-people radicalism.<\/p>\n

Anyone who challenges Katerji\u2019s establishment-serving agenda gets called names \u2013 sometimes very rude ones. Fisk is just the latest target of a Katerji hatchet job against any journalist (myself, of course, included) who dares to step outside of the Overton Window. That these \u201cserious\u201d journalists think they can hang their defamation of Fisk on to anything said by Katerji, most especially the thin gruel he produces in his latest article, is truly shameful. If their concerns really relate to journalistic integrity and reliability, Katerji would be the very last person to cite.<\/p>\n

\n

Great piece by @OzKaterji<\/a>, hard to read even having heard all similar stories about Fisk. Like so many, he was inspiring to me as student & so depressing the evidence that he fabricated so much and how he was so badly on wrong side of history on Syria https:\/\/t.co\/aZjQMoNmJ0<\/a>\u2014 Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) November 28, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Katerji\u2019s prime area of western narrative enforcement is the Middle East \u2013 perhaps not surprisingly, as it is the place where there is an awful lot of oil that western states and corporations are desperate to control. But one should not ignore his wide-ranging efforts to boot-lick wherever he is needed on behalf of western establishment narratives.<\/p>\n

Here he is desperately trying to breathe life into two fairytales: that the election of the leftwing Evo Morales as Bolivia\u2019s president was fraudulent, and that Morales was forced to resign last year rather than that he was ousted in a CIA-backed military coup. Notably, Katerji was clinging to these discredited story lines as late as last month, long after even the liberal corporate media had abandoned them<\/a> as no longer tenable.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Congratulations to the people of Bolivia for exercising their democratic rights, hopefully the new administration won\u2019t cuddle up to as many tyrants as the last one did. Remember kids, vote.\u2014 Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) October 19, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Katerji was also, of course, an enthusiastic recruit to evidence-free establishment smears<\/a> that Labour was overrun with antisemitism under the leadership of the leftwing Jeremy Corbyn, the very same anecdotal claims promoted by the entire corporate media.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not only that, but he even had the gall to argue that he was speaking on behalf of Palestinians in smearing Corbyn, the only leader of a major European party ever to champion their cause. Labour\u2019s new leader Keir Starmer, like most other politicians in the wake of the Corbyn episode, has all but disappeared the Palestinians from the political agenda. Katerji must be delighted \u2013 on behalf of Palestinians, of course.<\/p>\n

\n

I wish you would stop using Arabs to whitewash your own bigotry and lies Jonathan. You speak for yourself, not my community, when you publish filth like this.\u2014 Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) May 10, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But Katerji\u2019s beef with Fisk derives chiefly from the fact that the Independent\u2019s foreign correspondent broke ranks with the rest of the western press corps over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.<\/p>\n

Katerji is part of what \u2013 if we were being more brutally honest about these things \u2013 would be called the west\u2019s al-Qaeda lobby. These are a motley crew of journalists and academics using their self-publicised \u201cArabhood\u201d to justify the intimidation and silencing of anyone not entirely convinced that ordinary Syrians might prefer, however reluctantly, their standard-issue dictator, Bashar al-Assad, over the head-chopping, women-stoning, Saudi-financed jihadists of Islamic State and al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria; or who question whether the western powers ought to be covertly funding and backing these extremists.<\/p>\n

Exercise any doubt at all on either of these points and Katerji will lose no time in calling you an \u201cAssadist\u201d, \u201cwar crimes denier\u201d, \u201cantisemite\u201d, \u201c9\/11 truther\u201d and worse. Then in yet more evidence of a circle jerk, those establishment blue ticks, even ones beloved by much of the left, will cite<\/a> his smears as proof that you are indeed an Assadist, war crimes denier, and so on.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Here’s Oz Katerji completely owning a typical Assad apologist. This thread provides a powerful lesson in how to confront the falsehoods generated by the Russian and Syrian governments, and spread by their useful idiots in the UK. https:\/\/t.co\/CdzeOSURnP<\/a>\u2014 George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) February 13, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here are just a few examples of Katerji engaging with those critical of the imperial western narrative on Syria, so you get the idea:<\/p>\n

\n

LOL. Abby Martin is an Assadist and a 9\/11 truther who LITERALLY works for the Venezuelan government.\u2014 Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) October 1, 2017<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Electronic Intifada is a pro-Assad war crimes denial blog run by antisemites. Ali Abunimah is a war crimes revisionist who denies Assad’s crimes and parrots sectarian lies about the civilians Assad is murdering. Nobody interested in human rights would ever share their work.\u2014 Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) May 23, 2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Why should I no-platform you as an Assadist? Your own boss did that, clown.\u2014 Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) October 2, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Back in 2011 and 2012, in what looked like the possible eruption of an Arab Spring in Syria, the arguments of Katerji and co at least had an air of plausibility. But their real agenda \u2013 one that accorded with western imperialism rather than an Arab awakening \u2013 became much clearer once local protests against Assad were subsumed by an influx of jihadi fighters of the very kind that had been labelled \u201cterrorists\u201d by the western media everywhere else they appeared in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, anyone like Fisk who adopted a position of caution or scepticism about whether the majority of Syrians actually wanted a return to some kind of Islamic Dark Age incurred the wrath of Katerji and his cohorts.<\/p>\n

But Fisk infuriated these western al-Nusra lobbyists even further when he visited the town of Douma in 2018 and raised serious questions about claims made by the jihadists who had been ruling the town that, just before Assad\u2019s forces drove them out, the Syrian military had bombed it with chemical gas, killing many civilians. The story, which at that stage was based exclusively on the claims of these head-chopping jihadists, was instantly reported as verified fact by the credulous western media.<\/p>\n

\n

My latest: How did liberal media like the Guardian deal with the first on-the-ground reporting in Douma from veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk? They managed the difficult task of denigrating his account while ignoring the fact that he was ever there https:\/\/t.co\/PemzQTFw9u<\/a>\u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 18, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Based solely on claims made by the al-Qaeda franchise in Douma, President Donald Trump hurriedly fired off missiles at Syria, in flagrant violation of international law and to cheers from the western media.<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Fisk, of course, knew that in discrediting the evidence-free narrative being promoted by the western press corps (who had never been in Douma) he was doing himself no favours at all. They would resent him all the more. Most of his peers preferred to ignore his revelations, even though they were earth-shattering in their implications. But once the official watchdog body the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued its report into Douma many months later, implicitly backing the jihadists\u2019 version of events, Fisk\u2019s earlier coverage was snidely dismissed by fellow journalists.<\/p>\n

Sadly for them, however, the story did not end there. Following publication of the OPCW\u2019s Douma report, a number of its senior experts started coming forward as whistleblowers to say that, under pressure from the US, the OPCW bureaucracy tampered with their research and misrepresented their findings in the final report. The evidence they had found indicated that Assad had not carried out a chemical attack in Douma. More likely the jihadists, who were about to be expelled by Assad\u2019s forces, had staged the scene to make it look like a chemical attack and draw the US deeper into Syria.<\/p>\n

\n

Important overview of the leaks that exposed political corruption at the main chemical weapons watchdog, the OPCW, in relation to Syria https:\/\/t.co\/bWTEA7JIRP<\/a>\u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 25, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, just as the corporate media ignored Fisk\u2019s original reporting from Douma that would have made their own accounts sound like journalistic malpractice, they resolutely ignored the whistleblowers too. You can scour the corporate media and you will be lucky to find even an allusion to the months-long row over the OPCW report, which gained enough real-world prominence to erupt into a major row<\/a> at the United Nations, including denunciations of the OPCW\u2019s behaviour from the organisation\u2019s former head, Jose Bustani.<\/p>\n

\n