not surprisingly, most everyone has had their whack at the Robert Fisk Story (sub-heading: "left-wing journalist suffers for the sins of his Imperialist fathers-- and is glad to do it.") Ken Layne is the funniest so far.
There's a serious point, however, and Andrew Sullivan, I think, has managed to get closest to the heart of the matter, with a sharp exegesis of Fisk's own account of the story, clearly and eloquently expressing what I think I was fumbling for in my previous post. He quotes Fisks's statement that, were he an Afghan, he "would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find." Then he asks:
What does this mean? What it means is that someone - anyone - is guilty by racial or cultural association. An average Westerner is to be taken as an emblem of an entire culture and treated as such. Individual notions of responsibility or morality are banished. There's a word for this: it's racism. And like many other members of the left, Fisk is himself a racist, someone who believes that the color of a person's skin condemns him automatically and justifies violence against him.
Well said.
Posted by Dr. Frank at December 9, 2001 09:14 PM | TrackBack