[brraverishhh]

A rather interesting interview with the infamous Robert Fisk, Osama's favorite reporter reveals the true degree of his- and his ilk's- willingness to actually understand.

For a start, Fisk is asked about the Bali bombing. The interviewer mentions that Osama bin Laden personally named the Australian peacekeeping operation in East Timor as the motivation behind the first Bali bombing... but of course Fisk known better:

TONY JONES: Let me pull you up there and we'll take the first Bali bombing, for example.

ROBERT FISK: Yes.

TONY JONES: They were in 2002. More than 200 Western tourists and Balinese were killed in those, but they were long before the invasion of Iraq.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, but they were after Afghanistan, weren't they?

TONY JONES: So there's a problem with the invasion of Afghanistan? The problem is, the problem is that 88 Australians died in the Bali bombings. In one of his rambling justifications for these kind of terrorist acts, Osama bin Laden pointed the finger and said Australians were targeted in Bali because they intervened in East Timor.

ROBERT FISK: Yes. I think the East Timor thing is a lie by Osama bin Laden - I don't think that's what it is about. But, you see, we can go on trying to distance the wickedness done to us from the events on the ground by saying like Tony Blair does, "Oh, it's nothing to do with Iraq. It is evil ideology. They are against our society. They are against our democracy. They are against our freedoms."


Next, Fisk is asked about the recent declaration by the spiritual leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, the very organization that carried out the Bali bombings, about the true motives of his struggle. He said, literally, that "If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam." But yet again, Fisk knows better:

TONY JONES: But Robert, how do you protect Australians against someone like Abu Bakar Bashir -

ROBERT FISK: You keep quoting this guy like he's some kind of philosopher king. He's not.

TONY JONES: But he is to the people who are blowing themselves up, that's the point.

ROBERT FISK: No, he's not. That's the whole point. He's not.

Flat out baseless denial of the bloody obvious. The guy is the "spiritual leader" of the group that carried out the bombings, their chief ideologist- but Fisk is determined to ignore it. It's all about Iraq. It has to be.

And finally, the depth of his denial is laid out in terms most clear:

TONY JONES: He says, "The prophet Mohammed has decreed that Islam must win and the Westerners will be destroyed. If they want to have peace, they will have to accept to be governed by Islam." Now, this man has been teaching large numbers of Indonesian students to think like this.

ROBERT FISK: Yes, but look, if you're going to take and quote so seriously people who have no serious backing [which one of them has no backing? The leader of Al-Qaeda or the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiya?] or philosophical understanding of Islam themselves, and then put them, as you do, quote them now to me and I can quote them back to you.I've met bin Laden three times, I've listened to the real thing. And believe me, it's even more boring than what you're reading now. The fact of the matter is - get rid of these people out of your mind for the moment. They're the guys who are bad, they're the guys who are calling for suicide bombings, yes. But we have to deal with real facts on the ground, and most of them are in the Middle East and we will not do so.

A fascinating logic, isn't it? To deal with the problem of terrorism, we should at all costs forget and ignore the openly declared ideological agenda of those setting off the bombs. Bombs aren't "real facts on the ground", after all. Declarations of religious war on the West aren't "real" either. The real root causes are not the ones the terrorists name, because it's impossible, it doesn't agree with the "progressive" Fisky logic.

The funny thing is that Fisk himself opens his interview with a seemingly desperate desire to know the "why" behind terrorism. But he obviously doesn't want his question answered.