Monday, November 18, 2013

Have you seen Robert Fisk's marbles

From comrade Asa:  "Look at this absolute trash from Fisk:

Where to start really? So many mistakes, so many problems. It seems to me that for whatever reason (probably his status) his articles no longer see anything resembling a fact check. I mean really. Has he even seen Clayton Swisher's documentaries? Has he read the Swiss toxicologists' report? Considered ANY of the evidence? I doubt it. he claims: "French medical authorities made extensive tests to see if Arafat had been poisoned, before and after his death. They found no trace of poison" -- in fact it is now well established that they never tested for Polonium (why would they when the Litvinyenko assassination did not occur till 2006?) But Fisk just ignores that, and the mountain of expert evidence
 Arafat was poisoned by polonium.

And what is with his gossipy personal references about Arafat's bear and about "how the lavatories smelled" (everyone who even vaguely followed the news at the time will recall that the Israelis cut the mains water supply during the Muqata siege).
Obviously, there are valid criticisms of Arafat to be made, but there is no sight of them in this crappy, gossipy piece, based on unnamed and second-hand sources:

"I happened to hear second-hand from a French military nurse ..." "One Scandinavian diplomat..." "Edward Said told me [something totally irrelevant to the evidence of
poisoning]"

This is part of the phenomenon that I am calling the "Conspiracy theory conspiracy theory" -- deny and ignore all evidence and insist it is just an "Arab conspiracy theory"."

I wrote this about it, in which I did a strange thing ans actually
considered evidence, rather than gossip and unsupported conspiracy
theories:
http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/inquiry/8338-enough-conspiracy-theories-about-yasser-arafats-assassination