In reply to Robert Fisk:

Don’t speak for Iraqi or Lebanese Shiites

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

March 2005

Dear Robert Fisk,

For the sake of your own journalistic credibility, please spare everyone your generalizations.

In American-occupied Iraq, democracy is decided in ballot boxes despite unstable security. In Syrian-occupied Lebanon, democracy is being decided in the streets and through the killing of people like Hariri and the creation of unstable security. While a majority decides the course of events in Iraq, Syria and its cronies in Lebanon say that things can go one way only, that of consensus (which doesn't confirm with democracy).

A month ago, the Syrian FM was on CNN saying that Syria is staying for a couple more years in Lebanon. Thanks to America, France and 1559, Assad announced that Syria was abiding by 1559. So what was Nasrallah thanking Syria for? Was it for abandoning him while he confronts the world on 1559 and leaving him (and leaving Lebanon like always) face the world's pressure and doing Syria's dirty job?

Mr. Fisk,

I realize that you've always seen the Arab-Israeli/American conflict through the Arab prism, as you honestly believed that the weak Arabs were right and should be heard. But I fear that after all those years of championing Arab rights you've lost your compass and fallen for whatever is Arab, whether right or wrong.

Your shift from reporting to analysis has let you down, I believe. You've been subscribing to a lot of conspiracy theories. When Elie Hobeika was killed some years ago, you mistakenly reported that a guy was shooting in the air. When Jihad Ahmad Jibril was killed after that, you narrated to journalists at the site a weird version of a conspiracy theory of how Israel killed the guy (who, by the way, failed to go by Syria's resistance rules and regulations in Lebanon).

Today, as I read your lines while you sit at the comfort of your apartment next to the American University of Beirut and analyze what Shiites think, please either survey some of the Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite opinion or stop generalizing and putting words in their mouths, for inasmuch as the opposition in Martyr's Square don't represent all of Lebanon, Nasrallah and Hizbullah do not represent all of the Shiites. He certainly doesn't represent Iraqi Shiites, who still haven't forgotten how, prior to the war in Iraq, Nasrallah called for a dialogue between Saddam and the opposition (or at least the part of it that had escaped Saddam's wrath). Back then, Nasrallah called for an "Iraqi Taef" between the Iraqis and the Iraqi dictator. A couple of days ago, he called for the original Lebanese Taef but this time between the Lebanese and their Syrian dictator. And by the way, if Nasrallah wants to go by Taef, let him disarm his militia as Taef clearly stipulates.

This said, if you are still wondering why Afghanis or Pakistanis assaulted you during your trip there, maybe they were your readers who were fed up with your constant defense of tyrant oppressors claiming to champion peoples' rights against imperial America.  

Don't get me wrong Robert, as this email indicates, I'm a regular reader of yours, but this time, allow me to say that you're letting me down, since there is a fine line between defending the rights of the oppressed, and defending their oppressors who hide behind them.